Reprint on Blogging from 2013 from this site

introduction written today Saturday November 26th 2022

 I was thinking about new bloggers coming online and that I had written things about this before so I did a search on my site and found this article I wrote for 2013. I have been blogging since my health forced me to retire in Fall of 1998 with a heart virus. Though I survived this unlike many people I was suddenly retired. Luckily, I'm a person with a lot of interests and I like to travel and visit my friends and kids and grandkids so this was a good change for me and lengthened my life. Also, in 2006 I finally was diagnosed with Hypothyroidism with a t3 and t4 blood test and realized this was shortening my life getting bronchitis every winter. I haven't had any bronchitis since I started taking Armour Thyroid in 2006 by the way and it made me feel in my mind like I was 20 years old once again which was really good too. By 2009 I felt well enough to buy myself a KLR 650 Kawasaki Motorcycle and considered riding it around the world but realized pretty soon at 60 this wasn't the best idea for my kidneys, eyes or liver because of all the jarring. You have to watch for torn retinas and harm to your kidneys on that far of a journey bouncing around on a motorcycle both on and off roads if you are traveling all around the world on a dualsport. Also, I researched that Kawasaki motorcycle parts were more available in more countries than BMW motorcycle parts. I got inspired after watching "Long way Round" with Ewan McGregor and his friend when they rode their BMW motorcycles all the way around the world starting with England and Scotland through Europe and Russia and Mongolia and likely China then Alaska, Canada, The U.S. and by boat (from Asia to Alaska and the U.S. east coast back to England. However, I love riding into remote places with my dualsport which is designed for any type of road you might encounter from pavement to rock roads to dirt it can travel fairly safely (if you know how to ride) over almost any terrain on earth on various roads and trails. This is what my 2009 KLR 650 Kawasaki looks like still:

 

 

 

Bikez.com

2009 Kawasaki KLR650 specifications and ...

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Blogging

I have now been Blogging at one site or another now since 1999 when I almost died for 7 months and was forced to retire. They didn't call it blogging then, it was just something I wanted to do in gratitude to God for saving my life. Also, it was something to do to stay alive and to transition into my unexpected retirement at age 50. Also, I was grateful that I didn't have to just die and could afford to retire unlike many people on earth so I wanted to share that grattitude to try and help others retire if they wanted to or needed to. So, I began sharing my insights about all aspects of life that I was interested in as a way to facilitate people being happier and living longer more useful lives both to themselves and all around them.

However, here I'm trying to share what I have learned about blogging. The first thing is it likely might be important to you, (especially if you are over 30) to protect your identity from the few people out there that might be harmful to you and to your family and friends. Most people are okay and will respect your needs for privacy while you share interesting and useful things with them. However, this is only 99% of humanity that might find your blogging site. So, protect yourself by not sharing your physical location exactly with them. Sharing the region you live in or whether you live in the mountains or near the ocean might be important but you don't want to share your address, your telephone number, or more personal items that might be misused.

Also, effective blogging or (developing your site) which increases your readership around the world and also your personal influence on the world hopefully in a positive direction for everyone comes from understanding the interests of those who come to your site. In some ways the people who come to your site come by accident or by chance. So, remember you aren't picking the people that come to your site. However, once they come and you look at your statistics page notice what they are interested in reading. You may not know who they are. You may not know where on Earth they are visiting your site from. But, you do know what they are reading. And if you share their interests by giving them more of the types of things they seem to be interested in makes your site become more desireable to people worldwide to visit.

When I first started this particular blogging site in fall of 2007 I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing here. I had read about people doing this sort of thing (once it was actually called blogging) but I sort of gingerly moved into this new site at first trying to get my feel for the whole thing at this particular blogging site. The previous site I had was at Geocities and was also free like this one and then I started another site and moved longer writings of mine to dragonofcompassion.com which is run by Yahoo business. This site I believe costs me about 150 dollars or so a year to run and it took me a while to figure out how to operate the software there. Whereas the software here is pretty easy to navigate as long as you keep it in the "Compose" mode. If you put it in the "HTML" mode it is much harder to navigate unless you are a professional web designer or something like that.

But, basically if you know how to type and paste words or pictures you can make the "Compose" part of Blogging work for you and your readers.