8 Things I Learned This Week #94 (Blog Frog, impact, winner, publishing, book, Swift, dogs)

Blog Frog

I finally learned the best (and easiest) way to make use of Blog Frog. First, I finally put the widget to my "neighborhood" on all three of my blogspot blogs and discovered that if I sign in to Blog Frog before I go visiting other blogs, then whenever I see questions on others widgets that I want to answer, all I have to do is click on the question and it takes me right there! Much easier than trying to find my way around on Blog Frog.  How about joining my neighborhood and either starting a discussion or answering some questions?  I'd love to get this going but need your help!

Make An Impact

I was very surprised when I went through my Facebook messages last Saturday to discover Ryan M. considers me to be one of six people other than his family who "significantly impacted the course" of his life. WOW! What a great feeling to hear this! Read more about it at One Simple Act Made A Big Impact that I posted here on Monday night.

Two-Faced Pumpkin

I saw my first ever two-faced Halloween pumpkin this week over at Show Me Mama. I like the boy one better.

Spooktacular Giveaway

Christine Senter, a wife, mom and writer, has to be the biggest book lover in the blogosphere! She entered my giveaway and posted about it at Christine Senter's Blog so I went to see. It turns out she actually posted about all the giveaways she entered and she entered 87 out of 88! She is one of our winners chose by Spunky Doodle. I posted a video of our pets announcing our Stephen King Spooktacular winners. (They want me to let you know!)

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7 Things I Learned This Week-#80 (blogging, checkers, bromeliads, writing, conference)

bromeliads

Daisy the Curly Cat left a comment on my Strange Sight-Covered Trees post saying she likes seeing bromeliads growing on trees. I had no clue what those were so asked her and she told me that they are a kind of spiky plant; there are tons of kinds! In Florida, you can see lots of them growing naturally on trees. This link has a picture of bromeliads in trees.

Checkers

In my Three Questions For You post, I asked about our checker game and everyone who commented about it said I was right and Gerard should not have been able to go back and jump me after he moved something else. However, since then I found the rules in the box and read them. It clearly says that you HAVE to jump and doesn't say anything about losing your piece if you do not jump. So, actually, Gerard did have to change his move and jump me. Gerard was right and we were all wrong! Good for you, Gerard!

Resizing YouTube Videos

Over at Design it Chic is instructions on Resizing The YouTube Videos to fit your blog. I always just played around trying different sizes but you can actually find the width of your blog space in the HTML code and there's actually a formula to use to determine the height. Also, there are two places in the embed code you have to change.

Adding The "Like" Button

Thanks to Mrs 4444 at Half Past Kissin time, I learned how to add the "like" button to posts. It's something you need to do for individual posts. According to the Facebook plug-in page, "When the user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in the user's friends' News Feed with a link back to your website."

I Write Like

At Joann's Best I found out about a fun site that analyzes your writing and then compares it to a famous author. I used 20 random samples from the book I wrote in memory of my dad, and posted my results on "My Funny Dad, Harry" blog. Go head, give it a try at I Write Like.

Book Bloggers and Authors Online Conference

At Crazy-for-Books I learned that a Book Bloggers & Authors Online Conference is August 6 & 7 and the cost is just $15. The list of topics looks very good. I've never seen an online conference before!

Tips For Interesting Article Titles

At the Ad Master, I found "5 Types of Titles That Can Get More People To Read Your Article". They are: make a question, use the word "why," include a benefit, the list of tips or things, "How To" title.



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Newsletters: Why Bother?

Builds Up The Boys And Parents Like It Too: The reason I write a newsletter is to keep in contact with the boys in my Sunday School class as well as keep the parents informed. Sometimes I’ll add a personal handwritten note too, thanking them for something specific they did or encouraging them to try to come more regularly or work on their memory passage. I always try to build them up though. What parent doesn't like to hear good things about their son? Every year parents have commented to me that they like reading my newsletter.

Reviews What We've Learned And Done: If you work with children, you might want to consider writing a newsletter for your group and mail it to them once a month like I do for my Sunday School class. I just write about what we’ve been learning, upcoming events and try to mention all their names somehow. I recap the review games we played and congratulate those with perfect attendance for the month, welcome any new ones who came, secret seat winners, and give an update on the scripture challenge standings. Then I throw in some pictures and a “Who Am I?” using clues about one of the boys. I try to keep it to just one page, but this year it’s gone to two since I started adding pictures and cumulative game review statistics.

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