Todd's Blog

Happy New Year!

This is a picture of the flag pole here at Ali Air Base, Iraq, that I got up and took early this morning. I plan for this to be the first in a series of "pictures of the day".

About a month back, I got a comment on my don't be an invisible blogger post from a young lady who goes by curious illusion. When I went to visit her blog, I saw that she had post some pretty cool picture. Plus, she was doing something called Project 365 ... which, I'll be honest I still need to investigate a bit more, but basically it looks like it revolves around a flickr group, where people take a picture a day, and post it to their site. Even though I don't know everything about it yet, today seems as good a day as any to start ... ready, aim, shoot.

The way I figure it, I went to all the trouble to bring my Canon 20D, and 3 lenses with me here to Iraq, only to have the poor camera sitting on the shelf in my room 95% of the time since I've been here. Now I h…

The number of travelers increases every year. Don't we love to get to know different culures and visit new landscapes, after all? Although going off the beaten track is oh-so-cool, we still need to focus on traveling safe whenever we visit places we don't know.

The travel industry has become conscious of these problems, developing numerous items to insure our protection. You probably have already seen a travel money belt for purchase at the travel goods area of major malls or airports. The best component is that nowadays there's a wide variety of variations to select from. These will suit most needs of just about all tourists!

Money belts are available with 1, 2 or 3 separate compartments. Most of these are made to be put on around your waist.

You can get additionally travel money belts that are worn around the neck this particular type is popular with females. This particular type has a strap that may be regulated to go around the neck or also go around the shoulder or maybe…

Wow, I can foresee these weekly link love lists becoming way long at some point :-)

But I promised to spread the "good stuff" I've been reading, so below you will find my list of shared items from google reader for the week ending December 11th, 2009.

First a quick aside ...

One thing I have noticed upon compiling this weeks picks, is that unlike my friend Sire, I actually do still read and share quite a bit of stuff from so called "A Listers". That being said, Sire's post last week about why he No Longer Links to Problogger and John Chow was a great example of the "rule" that apparently the easiest way to get the attention of "big name bloggers" is to write a controversial post about them. Honestly though, I don't even think that was Sire's intention ... none the less, his little rant definitely generated links, traffic, and even several visits to the wassup blog comment section by Darren Rowse himself.

Definitely interesting.…

What is the purpose of my blog? ... What am I "selling"?

This is a question that I suspect many of us never really ask ourselves until we've been doing this for quite a while. Yet ironically enough, it's probably THE Question that we should have absolutely known the answer to before we ever even got started.

The good news is, it's not too late ...

Simply "start over".

Before you change your theme again for the 21st time, or write another post about a subject that you're not really all that interested in, but it's the "niche" you've chosen, STOP ...

Think about why you started your blog. What is your goal?

NOW ...

Build your blog around that goal. DON'T get DISTRACTED by other things.

If you've decided that what you're really selling is YOU ...

Then why the heck are you running off to check your adsense statistics every 3 hours? (and btw why do you even have adsense on that type of blog?)

On the flip side, if you've dec…

According to the new site performance tab in Google Webmasters Tools, my blog here at tmtips.com loads slower than 92% of the sites on the Internet.

Obviously, there are a few things that I can fix, such as compressing the css, and optimizing some of my images.

With rumors that google may be incorporating page load time in to their search rank algorithm, it's kind of ironic that by far the worst culprit in slowing my site down was that Google Friend Connect widget.

So, I took it down ... for now.

Hopefully the people who" run the internet" can, at some point, figure out how to serve up a widget that doesn't take 5-6 seconds to load.

Todd

I recently wrote about how I intend to become a more well known blogger by having greater interaction with my online friends (and soon to be friends) ... mainly thru doing a better job of sharing some of their good stuff ... or pay it forward SEO as SY has called (lol, I wish I had thought of that, much better keyword blog title than my original post).

After making that post, I quickly discovered that I may have given myself a challenge with a few obstacles. You see, I do quite a bit of reading at work. Most blogs and such are blocked by filters. However, I can still browse just about anything via RSS in my google reader (note: if you want me to be able to read your blog regularly, please offer a FULL FEED). The problem is, it makes it a little difficult to comment, when I can't visit the blog itself.

My solution is, to use the "Shared Items" button at the bottom of each post in my reader.

Then, via a plugin called Recommended Reading I can post links to the stories I…