All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.

A New Thing In Subscribing To Comments

November 28, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 11 Comments

I happen to use the Subscribe To Comments plugin for this blog. My version basically just adds this little box at the bottom so people can check it and get notification to any post they’ve left a comment on.

It seems that’s not quite enough for most folks these days. I’m starting to notice more and more than I’ll leave a comment on a blog, and almost immediately I’ll get an email saying if I want to subscribe to comments I have to click on a link.

I have yet to click on any of these links. I know why people are doing it, or at least I think I do. In their own way, it’s to try to cut down on spam, although I’m not sure that’s quite correct. After all, it’s not like any of the blogs I’m talking about haven’t shown my comment as soon as I’ve written it, which means any spam comments would automatically go through.

Frankly, I can’t think of any other reason for people to have added this particular wrinkle to their blogs. Once again, we get into talking about making the commenting process easier for those people who leave you good comments, and telling people that if they want to see if they’re being responded to that they have to click a link in an email and then they’ll hear back from the blog owner just doesn’t seem all that friendly to me.

Of course, I could be way off base. For anyone who has this set up and feels there’s a good reason for doing it, please enlighten me. The only other thing I can think of is that someone is worried that the person leaving the comment isn’t actually that person, and I can’t think of a single time that’s happened on any of my blogs, and I mean ever.

Blogging can be interesting, can’t it?

Westport Big & Tall: Look Your Best

Entertainment

Rocky And Bullwinkle Turn 50

November 27, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 6 Comments

I always knew 1959 was a special year for more than the fact that I was born that year. Turns out Rocky and Bullwinkle debuted on TV the same year this month.

My earlier memory of Rocky and Bullwinkle was actually in the mid 60’s, when my family returned from Tokyo. By that time, is came on Sunday mornings, but it seems that it started out as a prime time cartoon, like the Flintstones.

That’s because it wasn’t really a cartoon for kids. Sure, the animation was goofy and the dialogue, for the most part, was kind of silly. But it was a thinking person’s cartoon. There were a lot of in-jokes and things that you had to have read as far as literature goes, or had to be up on the news. In an odd way, it was the Family Guy of the past, only clean.

It was easily my dad’s favorite cartoon. It was one of the few things we watched together, and he would laugh outrageously at it. I would laugh also, at different things, although I also loved hearing my dad laugh, so that made me laugh too. He also loved Fractured Fairy Tales while I was a Mr. Peabody fan, and every once in awhile, we’d deal with Aesop’s Fables. The little interludes with Bullwinkle’s Corner and Mr. Know-It-All were fun as well, and even now, every once in awhile, I’ll say to my wife “Watch me pull a rabbit out of the hat.”

One of my best memories of Bullwinkle and Rocky actually came while I was in college. My friend Scott and I decided to go to Syracuse University for a Bullwinkle marathon. I don’t even remember which one we saw, but we laughed long and hard throughout the night. We finally got all the jokes that we’d missed when we were younger. What a rush!

At this point, I have two DVDs of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and 4 or 5 VHSs, although I don’t get to watch those all that often; man, what are we all going to do with all those VHS tapes? I was probably one of only 25 people who actually liked the live action mix called The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and I might be the only one who enjoys the new cartoon they’re working on now. How’s that for being a fan?

Happy Birthday to Rocky and Bullwinkle; what memories do you have of this dynamic duo?

Personal

Thanksgiving; My Last Favorite Holiday

November 26, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 9 Comments

As a kid, I used to enjoy holidays mainly because it meant we had days off from school. By the age of 13, there was only one holiday that I actually cared about anymore.

That holiday was Thanksgiving. I cared about it even more than Christmas because it was the only time of the year that my mother would make her cornbread dressing. Actually, as a kid, it was also the only time of the year we would have turkey, but turkey didn’t mean as much without the dressing.

Why not Christmas? Sure, on Christmas you get all sorts of gifts, but when you think about it, you’re always getting gifts. You get gifts for your birthday. And, being an only child, your parents are always giving you stuff here and there. Actually, I think most kids probably get gifts, or other things during the year, and don’t think about it as anything special. I have always thought that the stuff I got was pretty special because I figured my parents didn’t ever really have to give me anything. So, Christmas was never really anything all that special; and no, I’m not religious either.

So, it was always Thanksgiving for me. The family would get together, and, odd enough, it was often the only meal of the year that all of us would sit at the same table for dinner. How strange is that? All of us have always had our own TV’s, and most of the time we watched different shows, so we rarely shared meals with each other either.

The last Thanksgiving all of us shared with each other, my dad knew he was really sick and probably wouldn’t make another one. It was my dad, mother, grandmother, wife, and myself. I wasn’t feeling all that thankful because I felt like I knew what was coming also; lung cancer, diabetes and renal failure doesn’t give one many chances for a full recovery. My mother really went all out for the meal, and for one day, Dad didn’t worry about sticking to this strict died they’d put him on. We had a blast on that day, and forgot everything for a few hours.

After that, things were never the same. I brought my mother and grandmother to my house a couple of years. Mom made her dressing only one more time. One of those years, Mom went on a trip out of town with some group, and my grandmother stayed with us, but we didn’t do anything overly special.

Now, Thanksgiving doesn’t mean as much to me anymore, and, since it was the last holiday I cared about, it means that I have no more holidays that I care about at all. I see it as a special day whenever I see my mother or grandmother, which means I don’t need one day to call a special day. Mom has stated she’s never making the cornbread dressing again, so I’ll never have that in my life again, as I never learned how to make it.

Last year we had food from Cracker Barrel, which was okay. This year we had food from Boston Market, much tastier. It’s easy food to eat and heat up, and it seems that’s the way we’ll be going from this point on. The day either my mother or grandmother aren’t here anymore, if they go before me (and that’s not guaranteed), nothing else will change because my wife and I know we can get food elsewhere, since we don’t know how to cook a real Thanksgiving meal either.

What we will miss is the opportunity to sit and have a meal with Mom or my grandmother; that will be sad for sure. But it won’t have to be Thanksgiving anymore.

So, I’m thankful for every day from this point on; but Thanksgiving itself… I wish everyone else a happy one, and of course I wish happiness on you every other day of the year also.

Product

2009’s Top Inventions

November 25, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 6 Comments

Time Magazine has come out with a list of the Top 50 Inventions of 2009. I’ve taken a look at the list and feel totally lost. Most of these things I’ve never heard of, and as I like to consider myself a news and science junkie, this is quite disappointing. Let’s see which ones I’ve at least heard of, if not personally used.

I’m not a gamer, but I have heard of controller free gaming, where the body is the control and everything reacts based on body movements. That sounds intriguing, but I’ve yet to see it in practice.

I’ve heard that there’s a new Aids vaccine, but it comes along the lines of every other vaccine that still hasn’t had much done with it. Why it’s on the list, I have no idea.

Vertical farming is a very interesting concept, one that’s not really an invention in 2009, but has started coming out as a viable option in farming. In essence, it’s farming in buildings rather than on the land. One builds tall buildings where some of the layers have dirt and crops. You could build these in large cities, which would cut down on the cost of importing certain items into the city, and potentially be able to feed the entire city from within. The problems right now are having enough electricity to handle it on a large scale and of course having enough water But the concept is a fantastic one.

The 3-D camera is the last thing on the list that I’ve heard of. Instead of one lens, it has two, trying to simulate how life views things to try to give a more realistic image. The problem is that, to see it in 3-D, you have to have a special viewer, otherwise it looks just like any other image. Not necessarily Harry Potter stuff, but it’s an interesting concept.

Isn’t that a shame? Out of 50 items I’ve only heard of four of them, and only one of them do I know anything significant about; ouch. Is this a sign of age, or is this a sign of everything else being so cutting edge that there’s no reason I should know about them? I’m sure you’ll let me know, and I’m betting those closer to my age will give answers closer to mine, if they’re honest. lol

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Blogging

How I Write Blog Posts

November 22, 2009 Mitch Mitchell 27 Comments

Lately I’ve been seeing a rash of posts on blogs that are telling people how to write blogs. Of course, I have my own blogging tips, which I hope some folks have checked out here and there, but what I’m seeing are the same tips over and over from other people.

Let’s face this fact; just how many times do you want to read “first come up with a keyword rich topic, then write a keyword rich article on your niche?” No matter how many times you read that and how many ways someone tries to write it, nothing is different. How different is reading “write in your niche so that people will find you on search engines?”

I’m not saying it’s not true; I’m just saying it’s boring seeing the same thing over and over. And I’m not saying what I’m about to write is any better than what you’ve seen someone else say. But it will be different, and I’m thinking that’s my little niche. Let’s begin.

Believe it or not, the longest part of my blogging is trying to figure out what I want to write about. For someone like me, that doesn’t often take long. For this blog, since I pretty much write about what I feel like, it doesn’t usually take me longer than a couple of minutes. The same for my business blog, because I know my topic there. For my finance blog, it takes a little longer. I usually scour the news to see what feels like it might be interesting enough for me to expound upon, then I’m ready to go.

The next step, if needed, is the research. For instance, when I wrote my post the other day on my 13 favorite singers, that one took a long time to put together because I had to first list my singers, go find the videos for each of them, and then find the product links for each artist. For the last post, 34 questions, I had to actually answer the questions first. I could have answered them once I started writing, but I had some formatting I wanted to do so I answered them before I posted everything. For my finance blog, research is always essential, because I don’t want to use only one news source to write those articles from.

Next it’s time to either start writing or paste certain things into the writing area. When I’m writing, I go into my zone and just write, and I don’t usually stop until I’ve finished the article. That’s why it doesn’t take me all that long to write. If I have an opinion on something, my mind just puts things in the order I want to talk about them in and I go for it. Kind of my own Mozart thing going on. If I’m just pasting something, most of my work is already done.

Now it’s time for my internal linking. I don’t have full recall of every article I’ve written, but obviously I know my topics. So I go back through my topics to search for articles I’ve previously written on a topic. The internal linking serves two purposes One, it helps my site show off previous material that I’m hoping someone might be interested enough in to want to check it out. Two, at least on my finance blog, it helps with the SEO in reinforcing topics I write about there. This blog does okay in the search engines, but it probably will never get its PR back, which means probably only my affiliate advertising will ever be here, whereas that blog has a high PR, does okay on Alexa, and if I can increase the visits a bit more it’ll be prime property for financial advertisements.

Next is something I don’t always do, but I will check for it. Since everyone says text advertising is supposed to be so great, I go back through my words to see if there’s anything I said that can link to a product. Then I go looking for a product that I can link to and add that link, with the new blue lines.

The next to the last piece is trying to decide what I’m going to highlight at the bottom of each post. Will it be a product? Will it be just a banner ad of some sort? I certainly have plenty of stuff to choose from, so that usually doesn’t take much time either.

And now, the final pieces of the puzzle. I go to All-in-one-SEO and I write something in the description box on what the piece is about. I type in my keywords. Then I go up and type in my tags for the post, which is something I just started a few weeks ago. I select the overall category for the post. The last thing depends on if I’m posting the article immediately or on a delayed basis. If I’m delaying the post, I set the schedule for when I want it to post. Sometimes I write my posts a couple of weeks in advance, so that works great.

And there you go. Now, it takes me less than 5 minutes to write a post, but all the other stuff I add on is what builds up the time. It may eventually take me 10 to 20 minutes to fully complete a post, but that’s okay because the possible rewards for the extra stuff are worth it if you ask me.

Now, whether you fully agree or not, wasn’t that better than the cookie cutter posts you see all the time? 🙂

I'm Just Sharing