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Have or Thinking About Getting Your Own WP Domain? A Little Advice.

For a long time I sat on the fence, wondering whether or not to switch my account from “.wordpress.com” to a “.com” site. In fact, I paid for my own domain long before I actually switched over. I had a few concerns, but my main one was whether or not the links I already had out on the web would lead back to my site after I changed the address. As it turns out, they do. I can still ask people to drop by lindaghill.wordpress.com and they’ll show up here at lindaghill.com. Which is wonderful! But… (There had to be a “but” in there, right?)

When I was doing research for my article about dying before scheduled posts are published, entitled “Blogging from the Grave,” I asked in the forums whether my site would still exist if I failed to pay for it, i.e. if I die. The answer was yes. All of my content will just revert back to my old lindaghill.wordpress.com address and will be here forever as long as no one deletes my account. However, all the links I leave behind which lack the “.wordpress.com” will either go nowhere or they will go to whomever buys the domain after I allow my payments to lapse.

My point is this: if you own your own WordPress domain and you want your links to last forever, don’t leave off the extra part of the address! Just a little thing you might have missed when you paid…

Edit: Now that’s interesting – I added the “.wordpress.com” to my link for the “Blogging from the Grave” post and I didn’t get a pingback on it. Could that explain the mystery of why sometimes pingbacks don’t work? (This edit is also an experiment.)

Edit2: YES! The pingback worked that time. Double the advice in one post – pingbacks don’t work if the address isn’t precise!


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Q is for Quash

I opened my thesaurus to the word “quash” and actually said out loud, “oooh quash!” What a great word! It’s like the lazy person’s way of saying “squash” – who needs that pesky extra letter when you can just leave it off? And bonus – it means the same thing! Unless you’re talking about the vegetable… wait, is a squash a vegetable? You’ve gotta be careful about that sort of thing. You remember what happened with the avocado, right? (Click the link for a story.)

There are so many great words associated with quash too! Words like crush, hush up, overthrow, quell, rescind, and squelch. The word “squelch” always makes me think of walking in the pouring rain when I’ve forgotten my umbrella. It’s the feeling my feet get when they’re sodden inside my shoes and socks. There’s a feeling I’d rather quash.

What have you quashed lately?


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SoCS – The Piece

It starts with a speck, a mere morsel, an element of thought in the vast space that is the universe of the mind. It’s a whiff, a spore at first – hardly a niggle like the frustratingly fading emotion that was a dream that’s just out of reach. A word on the tip of the tongue that can’t be read, even if it’s stuck out agonizingly far enough to see with eyes crossed, brows twisted to the point that even the scalp strains to pluck it off.

But then it begins to grow. Like a jigsaw puzzle made of sky on which the clouds roll in, the wind giving direction. Hues of gray and white and silver – yes! Is that a silver lining?

Bigger and bigger it fills the spaces until all else is blotted out… bits and pieces get lost in the shuffle of what is this and what is that. Hearing strains inward instead of out and nothing nothing nothing else begins to matter but that which started as a speck and has now grown, fills life and limb and thought and sky in the most amazing double rainbow!

It is the magnum opus!

It is a novel!

 

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Go here https://lindaghill.com/2015/04/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1815/ to find out more and join in today!

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions


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P is for Pack

As in packin’ it in. I’ve decided, pretty much, that I’m not going to. So this is what’s up with my blog:

I’ve spent the better part of this week contemplating the idea of going private for a month. At first I thought it would be the ideal solution to staying away, but then I started thinking about SoCS, and One-Liner Wednesday, and the fact that I don’t want to take a break from either. I think I’ve come up with a compromise.

I’ll post twice a week for the month of May. Once will be One-Liner Wednesday, which is pretty easy for me as far as the amount of work that goes into it. The second time will be the SoCS prompt. I won’t participate but I will spend the week reading other people’s entries. That way I’m not trying to cram in all the hours, happy as those hours are when I’m stress free (haha), that it takes to reply to comments and post. I will try to get caught up on my comments from older posts however.  Anything that I absolutely must write during the time I’m “away” I’ll save as a draft and publish in June.

Anyway, I’ll give it a whirl for the first week of May at least – that’s the best I can promise – and as long as I don’t find myself being drawn back in, I’ll continue that way until June.

I was just thinking about how this post really didn’t have much to do with the word “pack” until I looked at the synonyms in my thesaurus. As a verb, “pack” can be used to mean burden and overload. As much as I don’t want to say my blog has become a burden, the importance of the other things I need to do off-screen have pushed this place lower on my list of things-to-do than ever before. And it’s causing an overload in the stress department. I hope I can finish out April…

Thanks to all for putting up with my waffling for the past little while. I’ll try to make my posts more upbeat for the remainder of the month – it is after all in my nature to be optimistic.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful Saturday!

 


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O is for Once

Once upon a time there was a girl who spent most of her time alone. She lived with her parents; their best friends–a childless couple–lived next door. On weekends there were parties. Parties with all adults. The girl would go to the parties until an acceptable time which was bedtime and then she would go upstairs and read in her room, or colour, or play with her dolls. Occasionally one of the adults would come and say hello, but for the most part she spent her time making up stories in her head. In her imagination she had a life with many friends of her own. They would have parties most weekends and they would laugh and have serious discussions.

The girl didn’t mind being alone because even when she was with people, she would usually observe, listen, and let her imagination wander. She was a little jealous of her friends–her real friends–who had siblings, but she couldn’t really picture what it would be like never to be alone.

As she grew up she found that she liked people well enough. In high school she had a wonderful group of friends with whom she used to party. They’d sometimes skip school and drive to Niagara Falls just for fun.

But what comes around…

Now the girl is older and has a family of her own. She still has one of her old high school friends who she sees every day. She sits in her room and reads and imagines worlds in which people have parties with lots of friends, but now she has a computer on which she records her imaginings full of colourful adventures and happy endings. Stories that begin with “Once upon a time.”

 


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for SoCS April 18/15

It’s Friday; time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt! For those of us participating in the A-Z Challenge, the letter of the day for tomorrow is “P.”  To potentially make our Saturday blogging experience easier, your prompt will again start with that letter. Remember, the prompt word is really just a take-off point to get you started. As long as your post is stream of consciousness writing and somehow contains the prompt, your post qualifies for SoCS. Here we go!

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “piece/peace.” Make one or both your theme or just include them somehow in your post. Enjoy!

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!

To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!

socs-badge

Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. Have fun!


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N is for Nonsensical

It’s so much fun to be silly sometimes, isn’t it? Daft. I love the word, “daft.” It’s the third synonym of the list in my thesaurus. It conjures the image of Daffy Duck with his aweththome liththp and having his head blown upside down by a shotgun. It’s incomprehensible to me how they can sensor Bugs Bunny, and yet when I read it here it sorta makes sense.

But I didn’t grow up violent because I watched Loony Toons. The coyote never made me want to mail-order in a few sticks of TNT to blow up a bird. (I used to feel so sorry for the coyote. Especially when he put up that tiny umbrella just before a gigantic boulder landed on him.) I’m glad some of those old shows still exist though.

I often write absurd scenes, like the one on my fiction blog last night: click it. You know you want to. But I’m trying to think of the last time I actually did something silly when I was alone. Like skipping down the sidewalk instead of walking. Mostly I do these things with Alex. My neighbours must think I’m crazy sometimes, dancing in my kitchen or screaming back at him for fun. I know I get some strange looks when I make faces at him as we stroll through the mall. But these are my real pleasures in life. Being a kid again. Or at least acting like one. It’s very freeing.

When was the last time you acted like a kid?


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EM is for Merciful

Merciful is how I strive to live my life. When I consider the synonyms: Compassionate, forgiving, generous, kind and sympathetic among others, it just makes sense to me to try to be these things.

I’m not a Christian of any particular kind. I’m not even sure I believe in God, though I’m not adverse to the idea that there is more than we can see in the universe that is plain to our mortal senses. I don’t believe in the concept of karma as it relates to an eye for an eye. I believe in existence. I believe that it’s something we all have, whether we’re of this race or that, whether we’re human, animal, insect or herb. We are all equal in the fact that we live – we, all of us, affect one another in at least some small way. I also believe that we have choices in this life in how we exist. The sick can be happy – the healthy miserable. We can make the best of what we have to deal with, no matter what it is. Or we can dwell on that which is not ideal.

But what can we do for each other? If we all strove to ease one another’s existence, how wonderful would the world be? Yes, there would still be challenges; existence cannot be free of pain. Sometimes a smile, a helping hand, or a compassionate ear for someone who needs to talk things out can make all the difference.

I don’t need a God to tell me these things. I don’t need a proscribed belief system at all. I just need to be and to recognize that so does everyone else. Equally.


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L is for Lowly

I am but a lowly member of society. Lower than a proletariat – I’m not even working-class. I’ve been judged for the way I look, the way I dress… or at least I suppose that is why I was judged. I resemble a plebe.

It was about 21 years ago. I’d just moved into my own house, miles away from where my mother was trying to sell hers so that she could be closer to me. Since I was already in the area, I was shopping around new subdivisions for her. For a while we were considering sharing a home–a big one–so I went to my local bank manager to see what I could get pre-approved for. He gave me a number and so out I went.

I walked into one sales office and was looking over floor plans. There were two sales people, a man and a woman; both smiled at me and let me look, which was fine I supposed. Then a couple walked in. Both sales people pounced. Now here was a sale!! I waited patiently for the other potential customers to leave and then finally I guess the sales lady got tired of seeing me there (or assumed if she didn’t talk to me I’d never leave – I might even scare away real buyers!) and came over to ask if she could help me.

“This one,” I said, pointing.

“Yes, that’s a very nice house. The second largest.” She smiled, humoring me.

“I’m thinking about buying one. Can I see your lot layout?”

She stared at me.

“I’ve been pre-approved for $250,000…”

Never seen anyone move so fast in my life.

I took the information and left. I didn’t go back.

Among the synonyms for lowly, are average, dutiful, humble, modest, and unpretentious.

There are also these: common, inferior, poor, submissive, and unassuming. Ah, how ironic.


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K is for Key

What is the key to writing a successful blog? I had a comment on my Priorities post of Saturday which asked, Why do good bloggers always contemplate leaving.. (thank you Celona’s Blog). The truth is, I’m not really sure what it is that makes a “good blogger”.

Although one might argue that a blog is made up of its content, I don’t believe that’s all it is. I think it’s the amount of caring that goes into it. The grammar and spelling could be fair rather than excellent, the photos could be mediocre instead of professional, and the artwork may be less than fantastic, but if there is an abundance of passion, knowledge and love for whatever it is that a blogger does, others can see it.

The secret to producing a great blog is also the communication that goes on between the blogger and his or her audience. The very translation between the blogger’s life and how it relates to the experiences of the reader can make or break the connection that keeps the reader coming back.

As a noun, some of the synonyms of “key” are code, cue, interpretation, and solution. “Cue” is also an important answer to having a successful blog. When we cue responses we keep our readers engaged.

As an adjective we have influential, and leading. How do we influence and lead? With passion and caring.

Do you feel as though you have these things covered on your blog?