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Help Amy Become Less Wishy-Washy

Self-motivation examples

Fellow Codexian Amy Sundberg is taking to heart Codexian Ferret Steinmetz’s advice in his post on winning at blogging (referenced in my own recent post “Hurrah for the Comment King!“) to go more to the center with your blogging personality: if you’re always conciliatory, be less nice; if you’re always angry, get a grip (my paraphrase).

Says Amy,

I don’t even know who you all are, but that doesn’t matter; I just de facto want you to like me. Which I hope you can see can be a bit crazy-making. I enjoy smoothing things over, keeping things calm, following the rules, being reasonable and fair-minded, and not stirring up the pot.

In her post “The Backbone Project: Help Me Become Less Wishy-Washy“, she lays out her plan for tackling the task of learning to be more obnoxious, and she invites others to help her, participate, and try the same thing, saying

If you are also a people pleaser and a blogger, you can make your own commitment of writing x number of non-conciliatory posts. I will cheer you on, and we can provide moral support for each other!

Anyone want to give her a hand? Or maybe want to put a little fire into your own posts? If you join in, be sure to link your post(s) in comments, below.

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Hurrah for the Comment King!

Resources

On Codex we’re having a discussion about what makes blogs work (and what that even means). Since there are some very good bloggers in the group (take Maya Lassiter and Kelly Barnhill, for example), it’s an eye-opening read. Two of the most useful pieces of wisdom for me that have come up so far are the twin reminders of letting yourself shine through (“letting your freak flag fly,” as my girlfriend/partner/inamorata Janine puts it) and offering humor and entertainment in your posts. People have been trying to tell me these things for a long time, but I keep protesting “No, I have to be serious because I’m writing this post on neurotransmitters.” (As if neurotransmitters weren’t fun. Try tossing back a cocktail of dopamine and oxytocin some time and just try to tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself!)

But the award for “most excellently useful new-to-me revelations” goes to Codexian Ferrett Steinmetz, whose post “The Compleat Guide To LiveJournal Stardom And Fame, Part II” covers all kinds of really, really handy insights about effective blogging and effectively engaging your readers–and does so in a profoundly entertaining, freak-flagerific way. It even starts with a jaunty little poem.

While Ferrett’s post is written about LiveJournal specifically, almost every point he makes applies to citizens of WordPress, Blogger.com, and every other blogging system.

Ironically, I’m using very few of his suggestions in this post, but I have a suspicion they’ll begin cropping up here and there any post now.

Photo by epSos.de

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Tweet and Facebook Like Buttons: Sometimes I’m a Little Slow

About the site

I only just realized that my site hasn’t had Tweet and Facebook Like buttons on it. I use such things on other people’s posts (like Tweets I put up recently about posts on Nathan Bransford‘s and Amanda Hocking‘s blogs re: Hocking’s huge eBook success) and was just assuming I had already gotten around to putting the tools up here. Oops.

If you have a blog and don’t mind if people spread the word, here’s a friendly reminder to not be like me and to put up those tools promptly. In case you use WordPress, the plugins I used were the WordPress Facebook Like Button and Tweet This.

On the subject of blogging, my friend Maya, who has a creative and interesting blog of her own (Mayaland), re-recommended the fun and cool Hyperbole and a Half blog today, and I wanted to pass on the favor.

UPDATE: Right around the time I posted this, the Jetpack plugin became available for WordPress.org users (people who, like me, host their own WordPress sites). If you install and activate Jetpack, you can then go into your Jetpack screen and turn on the free Sharedaddy feature, which provides much of the functionality I’m talking about here and more. As I like the way Sharedaddy works, I swapped that in and removed some other social networking tools from the site.

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