Thursday, March 4, 2010

Help me grow this community, or How to be a more active participant.

My "hits," or visits at this site have gone up over the past few months. Readers come from all of the United States, and provinces of Canada; and readers also visit from three to four dozen countries on six continents. I'm humbled and honored by this. Here's how you can help me to build this online home:

It REALLY helps when you leave comments after a post. By doing that, you help me create the community I want this to become, and you help others feel less nervous about commenting. (You DO know that I don't get paid for this, don't you?) And hey, if you have trouble remembering your password to leave a comment, may I suggest you just place your info in a word processing file? This isn't high security stuff, so keep it simple and save it to a file where you can find it. Or you can just make an anonymous comment anytime.

Also, when you check an impression box at the bottom of a post, it shows signs of life. Not even 1% of you do that, and it only requires a click! Try and remember if you would.

It is extremely helpful when you sign-on as a "follower." It lets us see who hangs out here, and again, not many of you have done that. It isn't really very hard to do. You get a google i.d. and go from there. I'd love to see you jump in with this step.

Finally, the thing that makes this work more easily is the "feed." See the orange button on a white background with the word "Posts" (and the one below with "All Comments") next to it? It is just below the search box. If you click on that and then on a service you use online, you can find out every time there is a new post here. Then you remember to visit, read the post, click an opinion box and start or join the discussion by writing a comment.

That's how this thing ties together. Use the "feed," read the post, click an opinion, leave a comment, and watch for more discussion.

By the way, I added a new feature to the blog yesterday. The search feature on the top right hand side is pretty cool! Google provides it free, but it allows my blog to be searched using keywords. I noticed that if the word "hiking" is entered for instance, several posts from the past couple of years pop up. Maybe it will help you in the future.

3 comments:

Zee said...

way to go on the search feature - that's VERY useful (learned it the hard way when i needed to install search on the Chamber website)...

regarding the comments - the person can easily use the name/url identification (which, i believe, is the same thing which is employed on my blog) if they want to comment and don't want to just be anonymous.

happy to know that this blog is getting more popular. we need more blogs like this (well, we need more people like you who will keep a blog)))

deb said...

will try and be better about commenting
love the search box you installed.
just signed up as a follower.

hows the no tv for a week going?
Not hard is it, espically in the beautiful area in which you live

david said...

Thanks Debbie! No, it hasn't been hard at all. In fact, I like the clear air in my brain. Thanks for signing on also. Any comment along the way just keeps the community going. And yes we do love where we live.