carnivals, guest posts and links

(picture from my visit to the Russian village of Suzdal in 1998)

Here are a few links to round up, as well as some site updates at the end of this post. It’s a beautiful weekend in the northeast – if you live up here I’m sure you know what I mean.

I had a post at I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… about the need for a good breakfast. I was very happy to do a guest post for one of my favorite blogs. If you haven’t checked it out before, do so now: try this post.

My post on stopping negative thinking was included at the Personal Development & Happiness Carnival: Issue 13 at The Next 45 Years. Lukeprog.com has an interesting post with 100 free motivational posters.

And now for more about the blog…

“It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences”. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), Rhetoric

I am going to drift into metablogging – blogging about blogging, and specifically blogging about THIS blog – so bear with me. I am making a few changes in the blog. Hopefully these changes are for the better, and make the blog more accessible.

Inspired by this article I took a fresh look at my blog. It is cluttered. I am going to make a few general observations – most of them cobbled together from Skellie’s excellent list.

1. Blogroll, archives and recent comments will all soon be gone to a “Links” tab. I genuinely like all of the blogs on my blogroll. I read most of them every day. I think you should visit all of them. However, I’m not under any particular illusion that people are using this tool heavily, and in fact chances are good that if you read Brip Blap you’re already reading many of these blogs, anyway. Archives and categories are both great ways of navigating, but I suspect “search” trumps all of those.
2. Linklings daily posting – gone. It’s just too much. I think it drives the actual posts off the top of the blog, and if you visit the blog I usually want a non-linking post at the top. I’m not The Simple Dollar with 4 posts a day. What I plan to do is go back to a one-time-per-week big link roundup, combined with a summary of carnivals for the week (a la The Digerati Life).
3. Tumble Log - in case you didn’t notice, it’s gone. My stats indicated that hardly anyone was visiting it.
4. I also cleaned up some of the “social networking” links at the end of each post.

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