You are right, laugh is like tonic. I am told basically when you laugh our chest expands and contracts and this helps the breathing excercise. The air come out our mouth. Laugh enhances our longivity /life span. It helps you to forget the stress at that time.

best wishes.

suresh

Laughing kittens — nice icon. I like laughing kittens. :)

I imagine we each have our own ideas about what’s comedic, and our own unique sense of humor. This is my offering:

Several computer giants are competing for the allegiance of my small netbook. My Google toolbar offered to import my Microsoft favorites, and then Microsoft told me it could post to Blogger for me, using Windows Live. I clicked on the Windows Live icon out of curiosity even though I don’t have an account. Lo and behold, a Messenger showed up, and, like a genie sprung from a bottle, it refused to leave. I clicked on the Messenger’s ‘X’ and it told me that, just in case I were to need something, it would still be running in my system tray. I was writing a blog entry in Microsoft Works, offline, when an ad appeared for Hotmail — ‘Get it now!’ — with a picture of a guy whopping himself in the head like he just realized he could have had a V-8. So then the other day, I was installing a security program that Radio Shack had given me as a promotional giveaway… I unchecked a couple boxes as the program was installing. If I hadn’t unchecked those boxes, you know what the security suite was planning to do? It was fixing to set Yahoo as my homepage and install my new Yahoo toolbar…

This place has been laughless for too long…
Quick, everyone tell a joke!

@Ricardo..this isn’t a Japanese group. This group is for anyone who likes to laugh

math and science, for sure. I had terrible teachers in those subjects for the most part :(

Alaia, I do sometimes see ads in the application, though they never apear on the blog itself (the public part).

I included a line from a song from the song “Time After Time” in a post, and when I reentered the app to edit it, an advertisement for Cyndi Lauper briefly flashed before my eyes. I think it’s pretty funny, actually.

Now I hope you will view this next tidbit with a sense of humor. I am not suggesting that a current events blog or teaching blog is the forum for blinkies or jelly bean shaped buttons, but if you think it’s not possible to add bells and whistles to Blogger, Cat Spills the Beans

Maybe it’s a matter of terminology. The word ‘politics’ does mean something very different than ‘current events’ but a lot of people interchange them.

Alan is right in the since that opinions about current events can alienate some people. I guess it comes down to who your audience is. As long as you’re not saying things that could get you in trouble (and you’re not) you decide who your audience is, and you speak to them. (It’s an issue I’ve weighed a lot, too.)

There is a counterargument to everything, but I’m getting the sense that audio might be a part of your niche.

Another site with favorable reviews is Yudu
They both have free and paid account options. Free would get you going, but you might ultimately want a paid account for more media options (or if you decided to sell your work for a profit). Yudu has a more economical upgrade — but that’s a snazzy book shelf thingamajig that Issuu has got going. Anybody with experience with Yudu, or a comparison between the two?

A couple more thoughts: I’m sure there are a lot of things you can do with a paid/hosted WordPress account. If you stay with a free program, though, there are quite a few things that can be added to a Blogger blog that can’t be added to a free WordPress.com blog (that Link Within being one, and flash being another).

I would agree that it’s important to have a niche, but I don’t think it means that education and politics can’t be blended. Koichi’s blog, for example, is not primarily about teaching, though it does connect with certain subject matter he teaches. If you ultimately need to place something within a box, you can still think outside the box when designing the box!

Good advice

I’m going to second Koichi’s image recommendation. If you add some images, you might want to get a widget called Link Within which will show thumbnails of related posts under each entry. It may increase individual page views, once people do click on the blog.

I’m using the pro version because i like having the desktop app, though it’s kind of pricey. The normal version works pretty well, and you can display your presentations via your browser. I just do a screenshare to show my presentation, because (of course) it’s not compatible with Adobe Connect, or anything really.

After doing a quick looksy, here’s bulleted recommendations:

- Invest the $10/month to own your own domain and get it hosted. If you’re interested in doing this send me an e-mail since I can get discounts for folks who join my hosting service via me.

- Yep, I would recommend Wordpress. There are some Blogspot blogs that do well, but there are many more Wordpress Blogs doing better. You can customize a lot more, there are great plugins that help with things like SEO, subscribing, etc., and I think it’s easier to use, though that’s just my own opinion.

- Add an image to every post, and make those images awesome. It’s been shown time and time again that images are one of the main factors to get people to read articles and click through.

- Titles of posts could probably communicate more information about each post – hard part is to make the post still interesting while relaying that information. Right now when I read some of the titles I don’t know what I’m getting in the content, which makes me want to move on.

- For comments, a few ways to increase that: 1. Talk about something controversial. 2. Use Disqus (if you’re not already). 3. Guilt people into commenting (go to the front page of http://tofugu.com and see how I write the copy around the # of comments…. It’s increased comments by a bit since doing that). 4. Ask questions at the ends of your posts to encourage commenting. 5. Ask people to comment and see what they think.

- Drive traffic from Twitter, one targeted person at a time. It’s tough when you’re first starting, so each individual counts, and I think it’s more important to focus on single people until you hit around 100 unique readers a day, then you can start working the word-of-mouth.

- YouTube videos is also a great way to drive traffic to your blog.

- Lastly, I’d recommend figuring out more solidly what your niche is. People love reading niche news, because why read something that’s not a niche when it’s so easy to follow the absolute best niche content around the web and bring it to you in Google Reader.

- Make it easier to subscribe via RSS. Sign up for Feedburner, too, so you know how many people are subscribing. Big RSS icons are awesome.

- Read blogs about blogging…. or, more specifically, find some that you like and connect with and read all of the posts. It’ll take a day or two of lots o’ reading, but totally worth it. And then, subscribe and keep on learning. There’s soooo much to learn about blogging, and how to really make it work for you and your biz, and it’s all about learning learning learning, which, I suppose, is why we’re here at eduFire. Blogging class anyone?

Hope those help, I just subbed your blog!

Hi Terry,

I have sent you a message. Have you read it yet?
Those are just the basics of HTML coding.
Hope that helps.
Nice to meet you! Ren♫