Friday 17 April 2009

More muppet fur and a call for topics

First things first, after posting the dead muppet fur hat a couple of days ago, Gabriella from New Zealand posted photos of her sweet children wearing an entire garment made out of the same stuff. You have to see it. It's here. I love it.

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This month I've been very loosely participating in a project called 31 Days to Building A Better Blog over at ProBlogger. Darren, the Aussie driving this project, is churning out an amazing amount of material on the subject and given the thousands upon thousands of people who signed up for it, it's apparent that many people are interested. He has useful suggestions about building a community, getting the word out about your blog and how to make money from it, if that's your thing.

I was keen. I looked forward to the project beginning and settled in to see what I could learn because, as is probably evident by the three years I've given to this blog so far, I love what I do. So far though, I feel like I've not learned much from the Better Blogging project. Why? Because it seems largely driven by the idea of how to make money from blogging and that's not for me.

It seems the internet is crawling with people who want to make money from their blogs and I admit to finding this a bit odd. Until recently, it never occured to me that it really was something that could be pursued as anything other than a hobby. 

I take my blogging pretty seriously. I like to give it my best, but when it comes down to it, it's still really just a hobby. I periodically consider ways that I might move into a career in writing through this venture, but it's a side consideration, not the reason I'm doing it.

So this is a roundabout way of getting to today's post. Topics.

Today's suggestion by Darren is to come up with ten topics to use in future blog posts and this is a great idea because there are some days, particularly when I'm doing this daily blogging thing, when I get to the computer and am met by a blank screen. And it stays blank for some time until I can cobble something together.

I get there in the end, but I'd like it if I had more ideas planned in advance. Sometimes I have a draft or two waiting in the wings, but more often than not, I'm flying by the seat of my pants.

So I've got this idea for, well, getting ideas. Suggest them to me! Anything you'd either like to see me write about, or which you think is just generally a good idea for a blogger to write about and anyone who wants to pilfer them can do so at their leisure! We could end up with some great shared topics out of this.

I want to see what people come up with. This could be a great way to pretty much fill up the rest of the month and I think the topics should be as open and random as you like. Not just about knitting.

To make it more fun, there'll be a prize of stitch markers (or something else if you're not a knitter) awarded early next week. It might be randomly selected or I might get Sean to be a judge and choose the best suggestion, or suggestions, because there'll be more than one, I'm sure.
Go for it.

Bells