Blogger Tools: Badge Grabs

Okay.  One more really quick post tonight.  Most bloggers don't take very long to find out that one of the best ways to increase traffic on your blog is for other like-minded bloggers to share links to your blog.  The best way to make your link visible is to make a badge.  Bloggers like to swap badges/buttons (two names, same thing).  You can find a few of my favorite sites here.

Badges can be simple or snazzy, a few minutes fiddling on Adobe Elements or  Techsmith SnagIt can produce something simple (which is what you want so other people can use it), the real trick is getting the code for your blog that makes the script that makes the badge code grabbable.  Like this:

<div align="center"><a href="http://amindwandering.blogspot.com" title="Perpetual Chaos of a Wandering Mind"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx1KDiiuSRZTQQEB3BJHsRnWaWZ-JD6nCg6m0y1jHn6BeJn7VDE44TPQah-PN1JIJKizN5gBD4mtZOG91R5xlhXejfGEuCQoS4nyEMLiCqvTTS2ofvE0wXmIIoPwetaWPTM_oUNmeGvsnE/s170/badge170.png" alt="Perpetual Chaos of a Wandering Mind" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Without that spiffy little window of code that bloggers can cut and paste, you've got nothin'.  I can produce the code in the window, but danged if I can figure out how to make the window, but, lucky me!  I found a site that does it for you for free.

To Star or Not To Star: About Book Reviews

So, I'm working with an author who wrote what looks like a very interesting book which will be released soon.  They want to send me the manuscript and I want to read it.

However, they made the stipulation that I refrain from posting anything less than a five-star review on the book's Amazon page.  They want to ensure the page puts the book's best face forward.  I certainly understand this, but I don't agree with it.  I wrote them an email telling them all the reasons why.  

I have been recently mulling on the issue of writing negative reviews, and once I finished my response, I realized I had written today's blog post.  Here it is (more or less):

SDL: The Cure For Perfection: My Response

A couple of days ago, my nephew, Dan, wrote a follow-up column to his very widely read post "The Disease Called 'Perfection'".  In one week, more than a quarter of a million people have viewed that page.  Yesterday, he posted a follow-up column called "The Cure for Perfection".  In it, he admitted that he could not possibly offer the balm required to heal the galaxy of sorrows and injuries that people posted on his first post.  Instead, he asked his readers to write the column for him, through the comments.  He asked for people to write what was their greatest struggle ever, what the person they are now have to say to the person they are then, and how the Perfection post affect their lives.  My abbreviated post is too long for even Intense Debate's generous allowances, so I posted my comments hear.

My Comment to The Cure for Perfection

There were 8 whole comments when I first started writing this comment yesterday morning.  I've given it a lot of thought, a lot of writing, a lot of deleting, and finally decided it's impossible to put 35 years of struggle in two paragraphs, or to leave religion out of it, since I would have never reached any of these conclusions without my faith.  However, the biggest factor in my deciding not to go into detail: this is my husband's story as much as my own, and I have to respect his right to privacy.

Engagement photo November 1979

THE STRUGGLE (In a nutshell):   

I've had lupus since I was 14.  I got married when I was 17.  My husband had just turned 19.  I gave birth to our first son when I was 19.  He was diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus when he was 21.  The first 15 years of our marriage were a long string of tag-team hospitalizations, the drain of medical expenses, both of us struggling to control our disease, major surgeries for me, and the high-risk pregnancies of three sons, all bound together with under- and unemployment when my husband got kicked out of the Air Force for having diabetes.  To say we had a rocky marriage would be an understatement.  Our expectations of marriage were diametrically opposed.  Our life together was one very small, very leaky boat caught in a raging storm that never ended, with both people trying to captain the vessel and no one manning the crew.

There is no new thing under the sun

Didn't Shakespeare pen that?  Isn't there something somewhere in one of his plays that he uses that phrase?  I mean, after all, as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park,

 Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. . . . His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions . . .

Well, if the Bard did use it, he borrowed it from Ecclesiastes 1:9, which was penned at least a couple of thousand years before his time.  Thus, my argument that there is no such thing as original thought.


The ultimate proof of my claim: 



This is a very, very funny comedy bit about how Pachelbel's Cannon in D has permeated modern music.

This Is It

Dear Reader,

How to begin? . . . . I originally started this particular blog to explore the whole process of creating/writing a novel. I got it started, then abandoned it because I couldn't make the nifty-keen-o template I found work, and then I abandoned it. It also didn't help that I wasn't writing anything.

Originally, I set out to write a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. That was back in 2001. Since then, I must have written millions of words, thousands of pages, and got at least seven sequels going in my head or in various stages of rough draft or outline or notes or something. But, my great book never produced itself because a: it was tooooooooooooooooooo long; b: in was scattered and confused because I tried to build in an element of mystery to it, and c: in the beginning, I was a totally wretched writer. I read my very first draft and cringed.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Although the fact may be news of no consequence, I have created a new blog. However, when one considers the fact that I have already authored five different blogs, the temptation arises to beg the question, why another?

The answer to that question is simple---or, at least, it is to me. This blog is my blog, meaning all that stuff that which just bounces around in my head and requires some sort of receptacle. Considering I have no 'pensieve' into which I can store my extracted thoughts when my brain gets too cluttered, a blog seemed the simplest solution.

The more complex answer to the need and/or impulse lies in the content of my other blogs, each of which I created for a specific purpose. Given their individual natures, none are suitable for my random, haphazard, everyday musings. One could even go so far as to say I wanted a blog that is solely my own.

In the past, I have written nice, long newsy letters scattered with pictures and only the best events of our lives the previous year. I enjoyed it and fancied others did as well, until I heard from two different siblings that they absolutely hated receiving Christmas letters and considered them disingenuous and artificial. I left off, but still felt rather guilty for not maintaining the contacts that I treasured. However, indolence combined with apprehension of becoming an annoyance served to deaden those pesky little pricks of conscience which occasionally chastised me for failing to foster connections within our very large and far-flung family. I finally decided that I would keep a blog and that, combined with sending out simple Christmas cards with our URL would serve. Those who cared could check in on us from time to time. Those who didn't wouldn't simply refold a 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper completely filled with 8 point type.

After Dallas II (hence forth referred to as D2) and Lynda tied the knot in May of this year, I decided it was time to act. I created The Fabulous Family Freeman and registered our URL because I thought it was so terribly clever and didn't want to risk losing it. Then, because 'I knew it was a matter of considerable import and required my immediate attention', I started actually creating posts about two months later.

I still primarily post letters of the newsy sort which I have written to Elder Freeman. Despite the blog later I created for that purpose, tales of erupting sewers do not really have a place on pages dedicated to spiritual things. However, the time is fast approaching where I will not have that resource, so I will have to make myself compose specifically for that blog he comes home. Hopefully, I will convince my daughters-in-law to do so as well. (My sons never would).

Despite the secular nature of FabFreeFam, it is yet intended for family news. I do not care to clutter it with my treatises on Charles Dickens vs Jane Austen, Twain vs Alcott, Tolstoy vs Karazamov, my favorite heroes and heroines in literature, and modern values in movie productions and script-writing vs the accurace of social norms in the period pieces they create.

Steadfast Faith in Christ: a Missionary Journal was created as a means of sharing the letters home from my son, Elder Paul Freeman, as well as the pictures and video he has sent. Then, realizing the missionary tool it could become, I invited the various members of my family to share the letters from their own missionaries. The authors are the missionaries themselves through their letters which are posted. I consider myself merely the publisher and but one of the editors.

A Mormon Family Journal was created as a companion to Steadfast Faith in Christ, with the equal intent of bearing testimony of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and of his church here on earth, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From their love and support of their missionaries, parents, loved ones, and friends often write letters to their missionaries inspired by the Spirit of God as a means of providing instruction and encouragement through those difficult two years. Neither would my rattles be appropriate here.

A Mormon Journal I created to have a forum exclusively my own and perhaps through a different service gain a broader audience with which to share my testimony of the Gospel, but I have done next to nothing with it since. I use it primarily as a mirror site to A Mormon Family Journal. I need to get more in the habit of writing things of an eternal nature.

Then, along came Olde Oaks Relief Society Weekly Update. This I created, as the title indicates, as another means of providing news and information for the sisters in our ward, and especially to connect to the Relief Society those sisters who serve in other auxiliaries or who are otherwise out of the loop. I was then the secretary to the Relief Society presidency, maintained a group list, and published a monthly newsletter. Of course, we needed another less restrictive and/or conditional means of reaching all the sisters in our ward, not only those who showed up to get the newsletter or who knew how to access the information on our group site. Again, helping spread the Good News was/is my primary objective. I am now no longer the secretary, but I do not mean to abandon the site. It's good stuff to share, and hopefully the newly reorganized presidency will continue to use it as an information portal, as well as help it reach its full potential.

So, here I am, creating my sixth blog and using a really cool theme that I found on Jackbook.com (thanks Gosublogger). I guess one may say I liked to compartmentalize everything (which I tend to do), that I'm just a tad bit obsessive (only a tad?), and that my life tends to be boring (not news to anyone). The most interesting things go on in my brain (so interesting that I tend to get lost in there with increasing frequency), so, here this is, my brain pan.

Hmmm. Perhaps I should change the title to My Brain Pan. Nah. That has probably been used at least a dozen times over. How could that possibly reflect the imaginative and unique products of my all-too-fascinating mind? Besides which, I have changed the name of this blog six times already.