My Technology Addictions

Two tasks in one

I have been tagged by Sue Hickton for the meme 7 things you don’t need to know about me and thought I would kill two birds with one stone and make this also my 1st task for the 7 Days to Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove Challenge – Write a list. So here goes

1. I love books and reading but didn’t discover this real joy until after I finished high school.
2. I have days when I make a concerted effort to not turn my computer on, computer free days.
3. I went to several different schools including Rottnest Island (off the coast of Western Australia), Derby (North-Western Australia), South Hedland(North Western Australia) and an all girls school in Perth.
4. I passed the Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award while at high school.
5. I was a qualified swimming instructor before I was seventeen and also an aerobics and exercise instructor in my 20’s.
6. I still have a soft spot for David Cassidy( my teenage crush) and a recent (past 3 yrs) love of Robbie Williams music.
7. I have am not afraid of cockroaches or spiders, but don’t particularly like mice.

That was not as hard as I thought it would be and could have easily done 25 things but will spare us all. I am supposed to tag more people to do the same thing but most people I know have already completed this. So if you are reading this and haven’t done your 7 things then consider yourself tagged.

Clean out and Organise Blog

Last night I started playing around with the available themes for my blog, this is fun but also a big time waster. While in the dashboard I thought I would add a tag cloud to the site but as I soon discovered none of my posts had tags. All my posts had multiple categories but no tags, so today the long task started to add tags and change the categories that I had added to each of the posts.

Well this was a very slow process. If anyone knows how I can assign one tag to a group of posts after they have been published please let me know. I had to open each one, add the tags and then save. Then of course after I had done this I realised that I should probably have taken some of the selected categories off the posts, it would have been easier if I had thought of this as I was adding tags as I could have done it all at the same time.

There seems to be much confusing about Tags and Categories. My limited understanding on Tags vs Categories is that Categories should be thought of as the chapters in a book and tags are keywords like a book index. Tags can be displayed on a blog as a Tag cloud, the more posts that have the same tag the bigger the word appears in the cloud. A post will often only be under one category but have multiple tags. There are a lot more specifics about being able to search tags etc that I wont go into but it gets quiet complicated and everyone seems to have an opinion about how to use them properly, just Google tags vs categories and you will see.

At the end of all this I still do not have all my tags and categories sorted out yet, I need to spend some more time defining my category list as this is large and was originally used like a tag system. So once I have this sorted I can start my next challenge I have set myself to complete the 7 Days to Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove and I still have to do my 7 Things You Don’t Need to Know About Me as I was tagged by Sue Hickton that also means I need to find 7 other people to tag so be warned.

Running out of Time – 1 weeks tasks – Done

Unexpected work commitments has propelled my into a state of feeling like I am chasing my tail and defiantly running out of time to get my blog tasks completed.

A run down of the tasks for days 8 – 14 include a few things that I have already done.

Day 8 – Comment on a Blog You’ve Never Commented On Before just being part of this challenge has seen me visit lots of different blogs and leave comments. – Done
Day 9 – Run an Advertising Audit On Your Blog Not relevant to this blog – Done

Day 10 – Declutter Your Sidebar As I have worked through the different tasks in this challenge I have been constantly changing the look and functionality of my blog. I made a lot of changes after the First Time Reader Audit and have removed several widgets from my sidebar since then. I like the clean lines of this template, what do you think? should I add more sidebar functions? – Done and continuing.

Day 11 – Dig into Your Blog’s Statistics This has been a fun thing to look at – my statistics. If it wasn’t for you coming to read my blog there wouldn’t be any statistics to look at. As the saying goes a picture paints a thousand words. Unlike Sue I added Google Analytics a few weeks ago and use this along with Sitemeter and Statcounter. They all seem to give a different view of visits and when I get more time will probably cut these down to just two. AS you can see from the image of my stats below, from being involved in the 31 Days to a better blog project I have gone from 0, 1 visits a day to a whopping 95 visits and 200+ page views. This was very exciting, especially with a blog that has only been going for 5 months. So thanks for visiting – Done

Day 12 – Introduce Yourself to another Blogger Over the past 12 days I have introduced myself to many other bloggers. Both through people involved in the 31 day challenge and also twitter and my del.icio.us links. – Done

Day 13 – Search for an Affiliate Program that Fits Your Blog – Doesn’t fit with my blog type – Done

Day 14 – Analyze Your Blog’s Competition – I looked at this task as a way of finding other blogs that cover a similar field to me. This is an on going process and one of my biggest “Competitors” would have to be Sue – friendly competitors. The wealth of information on Sue’s blog is testament to her dedication in seeking information and passing it onto others. I like using Digg Google Blog Search but most of the time I wander from one article to another on different blogs. I would be interested to hear how you find articles and blog that you are interested in? – Done

Even though some of these task are not relevant to the way that I am using my blog I have added them to this article and provided a link to Darren’s original post in the hope that it may help some visitors and you never know maybe one day I will need this information also.