I’ve been a enormous fan of Shakespeare since I was 11 years old. His writing was like a puzzle to me and cracking the code was part of the enjoyment I got from reading his work. Yes, the engineer geek in me has been there since birth.
My favorite plays were Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and the absolute best, Much Ado About Nothing. As a young girl, I didn’t entirely understand why I loved these particular stories, but as an adult I can only conclude it’s because of the strong female roles Shakespeare wrote. I mean, Beatrice was probably the first female character I can remember who matched, if not exceeded, her male counterpart’s witty quips and jabbing retorts, line for line. Take even Juliet, some may think her just a silly love sick puppy. But I saw her another way. I saw her a young girl that was brave enough to be open with her heart and to trust in her love and sacrifice for that love, which I find Juliet very courageous.
So you can only image my pleasure when I found out that one of Shakespeare’s most notable plays, Romeo and Juliet, is being acted out on, of all things, Twitter. (The sweet voices of angels and gentle trumpets rejoice). Just like ice cream cake, the world has joined together two wonderful things to create one mega amazing thing!
So here’s the run down. There are five characters (Juliet, the friar, the nurse, Tybalt, Mercrutio) and you follow them on Twitter. Their tweets ‘act’ out the play in modern English over the course of 5 weeks. You can check out their website, Such Tweet Sorrow, to get more information.
I’ve only been following the tweets for a short period of time, but I’m hoping that modern day tweeting Juliet doesn’t play into the angsty, whiney teen role but rather is true to the young, strong, and determined young woman I have in my mind.
Thank you internet for being so awesome and thank you England for introducing me to my new favorite word, “nob”.
Loveth,
Jes
After running in my first half marathon, I suffered several injuries. My knee wasn’t tracking in the joint properly and was causing a lot of pain. So I went through several painful but effective months of rehab to fix the issue. When I tried to get back to running last month, my arch collapsed and had to be popped back in the right place. So for the past two weeks I’ve been slowly getting back to running.
Last night I went for a four mile run with another woman who I had just met that evening. We decided to take a shorter route than the other runners (who were going 6 miles). My reason for taking the shorter run was because I wanted to take it slow and not aggravate any of my healing injuries. As we got 3 minutes into our run, the woman tells me her reason for selecting the shorter route. She said, “I decided to take the shorter route cause I just found out I’m PREGNANT”.
Awesome.
I can’t get away from infertility even when I’m engaging in an activity that is supposed to relieve me of said stress.
The woman was perfectly nice about it, but I didn’t want to spend one of my first runs back listening to her talk about here pregnancy while I’m silently screaming and wanting to shove pine cones in my ears. The poor woman had no idea what she stepped into when she asked the socially polite question, “do you have kids”. I let the flood gates open. I gave her the whole run down. My entire fertility story, front to back in 15 minutes. It felt good to no longer keep my mouth shut when someone asks if I have children. It felt really good to be honest about who I am and what I am going through. It felt awesome to not let infertility have control over my life.
Her response was pretty prefect. She said “Wow, that’s an awesome story. I wish you the best of luck”. How great! No advice, no my sister’s, aunt’s cousin stories, no uncomfortable replies. A run that I thought at mile one was doomed for disaster turned out to be one of the best runs in a long time. That run really signifies the way I’m feeling right now. I have hope in every aspect of my life and it feels great.
I’ve been sadly neglected my little piece of the Internet and feel horrible about it. But I’ve been really busy with graduate school, work, and other stuff. I have 9 more weeks of grad school until I will force myself to take a break. I was loving grad school until these nine weeks. I loved going to class at night and challenging my mind. Most of all, I loved keeping busy. But for some reason I’m done with being busy right now.
This may have something to do with the fact that I can’t say “no”. I’m always agreeing to participate with this group, help with that activity, or volunteer my time for a good cause. And nine times out of ten there are no problems. But then I’ve reached the point where I’ve spread myself way too thin and my brain and body physically hurt. I guess it’s my mind is trying to tell me, “Hey girl, slow down. You’re at max capacity. Cool your jets or I’ll cool ‘em for you”. (Yeah, my mind is kind of bossy and doesn’t take any guff.) But I think I’m getting to that point.
Or maybe the real issue is that I have a ‘wicked’ case of spring fever. Oh the beautiful weather we have been getting has been amazing. I’ve been able to go running and biking and lounging outside. It is amazing. After being couped up for several months in the winter, the last thing I want to be doing is homework. I’d rather be playing.
I have so many plans for this spring/summer. I have a week long vacation coming up, lots of day trips planned, and lots of road races to participate in. I just don’t have time this summer to be messing with homework.
Do you have any big plans this summer?
I love my iPhone. I don’t like talking on the phone though; but that’s why I love the iPhone. I don’t use it to call people hardly at all. I think I use about 20 minutes of my plan on any given month. But what I do use it for is updating my Facebook and Twitter statuses, checking my email, as my gps when running, and above all else to snap video/pictures when I don’t have my real camera around. I downloaded a bunch of the pictures from my phone today and realized that I had taken quite a few photos over the past couple of weeks. Okay, it might be safe to say that I’m a bit addicted to snapping pictures. Here are some of the ones from this month:
Okay, don’t go thinking I heart myself cause there’s a lot of pictures of me. Okay, okay, let me explain myself. My husband leaves really early for work and we normally don’t see each other in the morning. So each morning I send him a picture of me to say hi. And often times I will send my mom pictures of me cause she is always asking to see pictures of me cause she loves my face. Hey, she’s my mom. She’s supposed to.
What gadget/device are you addicted to?
When I lived in Oklahoma I ate my pancakes or waffles with peanut butter. I never really liked syrup so if I did eat syrup, I only ate very little. Then I moved to The Great White North (TGWN) and my world got turned upside down.
When my husband and I were first dating we visited his home town here in TGWN and he took me to get the “best hot dog around”. Well the fact that this hot dog establishment was actually a truck located on a gas station parking lot in the middle of Back Woods, NH I should have know what to expect. But I was naive and I ordered chili on my dog. When I took that first bite into my dog, I was anticipating the strong, smokey flavor of spicy chili. But that’s not what I got. Of course not. My taste buds were assaulted with a sweet, sticky chili that I could only assume was made with maple syrup. The same senario happened when I tried my husbands favorite barbecue sauce. Oh Lordy, I should have known better.
So these experiences with maple syrup lead me to believe that it was the devil’s snot (a.k.a. the grossest stuff on the planet).
But one day I was introduced to snow with maple syrup on it and my opinion started to change. So I decided to visit a maple sugar house this past weekend to see if I had this stuff pegged all wrong. But I didn’t really get a chance to become familiar with the art of maple syrup production because I was too busy making sure I didn’t get eaten by a vicious chickens. Yeah, the maple sugar house just happened to be on a chicken farm.
Oh and by the way, I’m deathly afraid of birds. So this maple sugar shack was like my bermuda triangle; birds, maple syrup, and more birds all in one place. Awesome!
So I was hoping that this post was going to be all informative on how maple syrup is made. But I can’t remember a thing the tour guy said cause I was way to busy covering all my soft parts that birds tend to peck at first. But if you are into all that educational stuff, here is the maple syrup ‘how to’ guide.
Step one: Drain the stuff from the tree
Step two: boil it down till you get syrup
So no, I’m not saying that me and maple syrup are all BFF now. But, yes, we are on far better terms than me and birds.
There are many elements involved in search engine optimization. SEO is like tiny pieces of a puzzle. When you have one piece, you don’t really see anything and it doesn’t really do anyone any good. If you have a couple of pieces you can start to make out what the puzzle is going to be. Once you get them all together, you have a pretty awesome picture of spring flowers. Or , in terms of SEO, people that conduct a search for a topic that you blog about are able to find not only your blog, but they are able to find content that is pretty gosh darn close, if not exactly, to what they were looking for. Isn’t that a wonderful thought. It’s like digital matchmaking or something.
But no matter how many pieces of the SEO puzzle you have, none are really quite as effective as providing QUALITY CONTENT (the one I need to work on most, yikes!). For example, someone might find you blog easily on a search but if you haven’t added a post in 6 months they may be unlikely to come back. Or if they find your blog and the content stinks, again, the are not going to link to your content (a.k.a. recommend your site to friend).
I don’t know about you guys, but for me, the content is often times the hardest piece of the puzzle. To try to overcome that I follow several blogs that are about improving content.
Copyblogger – Copywriting tips for online marketing success
Seth Godin – He is a marketing guru
ProBlogger – blogging tips to help you make money blogging
Chris Brogan – Focuses mainly on community and social media
Digital Photography School – Tips to improve the photography of your blog
If all else fails, I look for inspiration in my daily Google Alerts, which are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. They are pretty handy at helping you to stay current on a particular topic or industry.
The point of the story is, if you write good content, they will come. But if you couple good content with Search Engine Optimization and marketing, the right readers will show up faster.
I have decided to create a new weekly series of posts covering the topic of Search Engine Optimization for bloggers. I will post a new tip every Monday for the next several weeks. Some of the tips you may already be familiar with but I’m hoping that with each tip you get a better understanding of how Google robots crawl your site. Ultimately using that knowledge to apply those principles to other areas of your web site.
Now I’m not claiming to have hidden secrets that will send you to the top of a Google search. Also, there are no guarantees on how this will all work for your site. Anyone that promises these things isn’t telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But the principles I will discuss will not only help visitors to your site but will also help search engines index your site. So in my opinion it’s a win-win.
I just got back from my spring vacation. I know what you may be thinking. Beach, sun, surf, and sand. But no. Think again. I went back to the motherland. Now don’t get me wrong, during an average year if I were to visit Oklahoma, the temperature would likely be in the high 60′s, with lots of sunshine and maybe some rain storms; a good vacation by most standards. But nah. Because I decided to leave The Great White North for a week, they had unseasonably warm weather and sunny skies. What was the weather like in Oklahoma? Snowy. Yup, I said the filthy, dirty ‘S’ word.
It’s a filthy, dirty word because it caused rescheduling of baby showers, canceled lunch date with friends, and dashed my hopes of soaking up some sun. I tried to stay positive throughout this unlucky vacation, but after a while I must admit all of the inconvenience got to me.
I guess the positive aspect of this unlucky vacation is that I was very eager to get back home to my regularly scheduled life.
What’s the worst/unluckiest vacation you have had?
One of the big lessons I have learned in my journey to becoming a real, bona fide adult is that things don’t work out quite the way I hoped/anticipated/planned. That’s really the place I’m in right now, nothing is quite working out the way I had planned and I’ve been fighting it every step of the way… and it hasn’t been pretty.
Lately, I’ve realized that maybe this isn’t the best way to go about life. Maybe, just maybe, the life I had planned out 10 years ago didn’t take into consideration the things I would learn and the people I would meet along the way. Take my career for instance. I got my undergraduate degree in engineering and had planned my future around working for several years, getting my graduate degree, and eventually conducting research. All of these plans were made before I had even worked one full day out in the “real world”. Once I actually did get a job as an engineer, I HATED it. I tried several jobs but none were a really good fit. During the that time I had started blogging and learning about social media and web programming. It was just something that I did for fun that I enjoyed. On a whim, I applied for a job in the web/software industry, and GOT IT! Go figure, when I wasn’t stressing about it or worrying about it, I got a job that fit me really well and actually offered a lot of unconventional opportunities to advance that I had never expected.
The same thing happened with school. I had planned and worried about how I was going to get back to school for my Masters in Engineering. When I quit fretting and worrying I kind of fell into an MBA program. I’ve only had a couple of classes, but I love it. I feel like I’m learning a lot of applicable information and I’m actually good at it. Letting go of my plans and objectives actually allowed me to be open to different opportunities that were a better fit for me.
I definitely can’t take credit for the way my life has worked out, cause all of it has been a blessing. But what I wish I could do, from here on out, is RELAX and let my life go where it’s going to go and quit fighting for silly plans I made when I was a kid. A kid that had no clue what life had in store for me. Instead of fighting my natural talents and trying to be the person I thought I was, I want to just accept who I am.
So okay, I may have gotten a little ahead of myself since for the past four weeks I have been diving straight into ways to tackle SEO on your blog. So how about I back up about 10 ft and start at the beginning. What the heck is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. The way I like to explain it is that SEO is a bunch of concepts you can get in the habit of using to organize content and information on your site that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. But SEO only influences ORGANIC search results
The higher your site shows up on a search result, the more likely it is that you will have more visitors to your site. However, if you want to show up in the paid results area all you have to do is visit Google AdWords. But keep in mind you “PAY” for those results.
What I’m concerned with, as I’m sure many other bloggers are, is how can I affect the organic search results for FREE by doing it myself. And actually it’s pretty easy. There are some key areas of your blog that you can focus your SEO attention on to get started I’ve listed them below:
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
- URL Structures
- Navigation
- Links
- Images
- Quality Content
Don’t worry I’ll go into more detail on these later. For more information check out Wikipedia’s definition of SEO.
I have decided to create a new weekly series of posts covering the topic of Search Engine Optimization for bloggers. I will post a new tip every Monday for the next several weeks. Some of the tips you may already be familiar with but I’m hoping that with each tip you get a better understanding of how Google robots crawl your site. Ultimately using that knowledge to apply those principles to other areas of your web site.
Now I’m not claiming to have hidden secrets that will send you to the top of a Google search. Also, there are no guarantees on how this will all work for your site. Anyone that promises these things isn’t telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But the principles I will discuss will not only help visitors to your site but will also help search engines index your site. So in my opinion it’s a win-win.
