meL’s Word

So, the challenge for day 10 was to look into how your blog looks in browsers other than the one you typically use, and also different screen resolutions.  I normally use IE 7 so I set out to check to see what meL’s Word looks like in FireFox (fine), Safari (fine – on a PC, haven’t checked on my Mac Book yet) and Chrome (fine).  I was disheartened to see the commercial “links” that appear in Chrome, a distinct turn off for me in using Chrome.  What do I mean?  An example – the word “blogs” appears with a double underline and when you mouse over the word, a little text window pops up advertising of all things, the TV show Married with Children.  There were other such links on random words.  I was NOT impressed.  I also looked at various screen resolutions – all are fine except 800X600 – you must scroll left/right to see the sidebars on the blog, but you can read the text of the blog itself.

Bottom line, I’m going to leave well enough alone on this one.  The Word seems okay in most browsers (I didn’t check Opera) and most resolutions – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  Doesn’t seem too terribly broke to me….

So, the challenge for Day 8 is to leave comments for others on their blogs.  I sometimes comment, but more often I don’t, forgetting that comments (or the lack of) are one of the more frustrating things I find about blogging.  I post these random thoughts out there, but seldom does anyone comment, so I never know if anyone really reads this.  But yet, I do the same thing on the blogs I read – I read and don’t comment.

BTW – both Steve Dembo and Karl Fisch replied to the emails in which I thanked them for inspiring me to blog.  I did get a laugh, both replies were virtually identical – my thank you made their day.

I know, here it is day 5 of the challenge and this is my first post – “slacker”???

Not really.  Here are the challenges thus far:

1. What does your “About” page say about you?” – I added to mine, tried to make it a little more informative.  No, you won’t learn everything about me, but you should get some idea of what drives me.
2. Check into your site traffic – where does it come from, all that jazz.  I did add a Geotracker badge so I can at least see a map of where folks come from.  If it starts getting pins other than mine (grin) I’ll work more on site traffic info
3. Thank those that have inspired you.  I did that – sent an email to to Steve Dembo himself, and also to Karl Fisch (The Fischbowl).  These are the two blogs that I really follow and they are probably the main reasons I blog myself
4. Establish a Creative Commons license for your content- haven’t done this yet.
5. Globalize your blog – provide global visitors a means to translate your blog.  Maybe one day.  I’d be happy with a few local visits!

So, I have been following the challenge, just not all of it is visible to the public. 

Since I started this blog, first on WordPress and now on Edublogs, I have been only the occasional blogger – posting only when I thought about it and had something I thought might be worthwhile to write.  I added the blog to my email signature file.  But I never know if anyone reads this thing.  If they do, they never post comments.  Occasionally a teacher will email me about something on my blog, instead of comment.  Every once in a while someone says something related to a blog post of mine.  But most of the time, I wonder why I even bother. 

Then Steve Dembo who write the Teach42 blog wrote a post recently about being in a blog rut.  Beginning tomorrow and running the month of November, he is running a challenge – Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days - 30 days of tips and ideas to becoming a better blogger.  I thought I would give it a try, see if maybe one of my fav bloggers can inspire me.  (Okay, knowing Steve gets into a blog rut, too,  does make me feel better…..)