Chronicling the MKMMA Journey
I got to practice patience this week. I needed to change the primary domain on my hosting account. I knew it was likely to induce complications, so I planned time this week to do it. It affected about half of my sites. This was one of the affected sites.
If you tried to stop in over the last couple days, I have no idea what you saw, but I’m quite certain it wasn’t this site. I’m not quite sure what I did to fix things, but it appears to be operational again, so welcome back.
Most of us know the title to our blog entry is important in getting readers to click on the link to come read it. Some of us don’t want to look like “Click Bait.” How do we find that balance between writing a title people will want to read without misleading them about the content? I started looking around for a freely available analysis tool when I discovered the one I’d used about a year ago was now charging for access — at least in the sense that I needed to submit personal information to be able to use it.
That search led me to Sharethrough. Sharethrough is simple to use. Go to the site, type your proposed title in, and click on the Analyze button. It will churn for a second and provide a number, the higher the number the better. It also explains how it arrived at that number and suggests how you might improve. It lists the strengths of your title and offers a few suggestions (note the positive term as opposed to weaknesses).
I find it interesting that my first thought usually scores around 30-something, but with just a few modifications, I can get my score into 60-something (an average range). I just started playing with this, so maybe I’ll be better with a little more practice.
I think I figured out the Mail Chimp RSS configuration (two easy drags and drops — why do I tend to make things harder than they really are?)
My trusty subscribers will receive three emails from this single post. I thank you for bearing with me.
After that point, I’ll make a decision and turn off all but one mailer so you no longer get duplicates. If I need to do more mailings to reach a decision, I’ll create a special list for that and not bug you guys anymore. Thank you for your feedback and your patience.
If you are a subscriber to this blog, you will receive this post twice. What should happen is you should get it first from the AWeber autoresponder. Then, you’ll get the second post from the Mail Chimp autoresponder (6:00 am). I’m testing to make sure I want to complete the switch from AWeber to MailChimp, and you guys are my guinea pigs.
I was also unsure exactly how to configure the template in Mail Chimp (there is a learning curve). You guys are a small, resilient group. I hope this duplication will only happen once. The Mail Chimp sending, ideally, will go well, and I can turn off the AWeber broadcast. I may wind up playing with the template a few times until I get it right.
Since you all verified you wanted to be on this list once, I imported you to the MailChimp to save you from having to jump through administrative hoops needlessly. If you’ve changed your mind about wanting to receive these, feel free to use the “unsubscribe” or “modify my preferences” link at the bottom of the email. Thanks for your patience as I figure this out.
If you’ve been seeing 404 errors, I apologize. As near as I can tell, they are related to problems I’ve been having with my .htaccess file for the site. I’ve partially resolved the problem by switching to the default permalink structure, which I am not particularly happy with, but I’m more interested in making sure people can navigate the site when they get here, so I’ll do what I have to do.
I think I have the problem fixed, and new subscription notices should go out with the right link. Accessing from Tweets should also bring you to the right place. Maybe I need to make up a custom 404 page? I’ll consider that. In the meantime, I hope you won’t need it.
I expect 99.9% of you to be baffled by crypto change time. I know you associate HJ with The Hero’s Journey. For me, it means a different kind of Hero’s Journey. Early in my military career, I was a secure communications technician. This was back in the days when we had to perform manual crypto key changes. Well, I didn’t. I was the technician not the operator. But the widely-used acronym for the process of changing the cryptographic key was HJ. As in, “It’s HJ time” I think I heard what the term meant, but I don’t remember it, and with modern digital cryptographic gear and over-the-air keying, the need to manually change a card or a paper tape or punch blocks is ancient history. If you want to learn more about that kind of stuff, go to the National Cryptologic Museum site or visit the museum if you’re in the Baltimore-Washington area of the US.
But does it tie in with this course or the Hero’s Journey? I think so. We’re changing our key material as a result of this course. We came to the course with most of us looking without for the keys to life, and we’re finding this new-fangled technology that reveals the key is within. We had it all the time. We’re learning to do over-the-air rekeying and system resets. We all have our individual codes, but the common key is the Universal Mind.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be tapping into our newfound abilities. We’re learning to execute without an operator, and we’ll be testing our circuits. Have we completed them? Do we know how? You bet we do. Will we do so imperfectly? Of course. Practice and improvement is a lifelong process, but we won’t be stumbling as much as we were when we started the course.
Here’s a Twitter Tip. I know everyone tells you to spend some time engaging on Twitter, but consider what you engagement looks like in the timeline of someone who follows you. Trust me, thirty-give or more individual @ somebody Thanks for following/retweeting/engaging emails in a row from the same person is a near guarantee I’m going to unfollow you. That’s not engagement, it’s follower abuse. This may sound unkind, but it’s not engagement. It’s filling a square for in a rote and repetitious manner.
I have a friend who schedules a repeating round of tweets advertising something she’s selling. No engagement, but the same tweets over and over and over. The only reason I still follow her is because she’s a friend. Were she anyone else, I’d have unfollowed years ago. Og says, “I place my uniqueness on display in the market place. I proclaim it, yea, I sell it. I begin now to accent my differences; hide my similarities. So too I apply this principle to the good I sell. Salesman and goods, different from all others, and proud of the difference.”
Spread your thank you’s out throughout the day or do them in a PM (possible to annoy there, too, so be careful). If you’re retweeting with a personalized comment relevant to the tweet your retweeting? Go for it. Be your unique you.
I had a little time in the motel room yesterday afternoon and evening. I used that time to play with the blog settings and reconfigure it. Did you know WordPress removed the Blogroll list feature a few versions ago? I didn’t until I went looking for it in this installation. All my other blogs had a blogroll entry or two, even though I’ve hidden most of them in recent years, so the option was grandfathered in as I updated, so I never noticed.
I spent a few days looking for a plug-in, and I decided to use the Simple Links plug-in. It’s been updated recently even though it wasn’t guaranteed to work with this version of WordPress (so far, it seems fine). I’m using the free version, and for now, that’s adequate. There are some things I’d like to do differently, so I’ll see if there’s another plug-in that might work better or if the Premium version of this one will do the job. If not, this is fine for now.
I changed themes. I use a Weaver Pro theme on my other blogs. That’s been superseded by the Weaver Extreme theme. I’m experimenting with their free version for now, but once I get things figured out, I will probably spring for the paid version to support them (it does not convert nicely from the old version to the new version, if with their converter Plug-In, so I’ll wind up making note of my settings and manually inputting them when I convert my other blogs). When they first came out with this new version, their pay structure was not as amenable to my multiple (non-income-producing) blogs as the new version is. Once you learn where the settings are, it’s very configurable.
I like the Papyrus font for the Blog Title and Tag Line, but for the post and sidebar texts, I felt it was too hard to read, so I tried to find a compatible font. I am not quite satisfied with that look and feel yet. Expect more subtle changes, but I hope it’s readable not
The header photo is from my hayfield at sunset back in December 2004. I love the lighting and the peacefulness that photo captured.
I also realized that even though I created the list sign up for people to subscribe to each blog entry, I forgot to actually configure and set up the blog broadcast. Oops. I set up a rudimentary configuration last night. I’ll tweak it later, because I’m not completely satisfied with it.
I downloaded and printed Week 3 materials this morning. Pretty exciting stuff. Three more weeks on the road. Looking forward to getting back home after that, but these three weeks are important, too.
