Joy is the Word

2015: Joy is the Word

I first blogged about this last June.  It's about time I followed through:

One Word 365

One Word 365 suggests that instead of New Year's Resolutions we choose one word to make the theme of our year, to focus on daily in whatever way encourages an increase in or fulfillment of its essence.  

To further such an aim they have provided a kind of social network/support group for those who'd like to give it a try.

I'm thinking of joining and if I do I'm choosing JOY as my word.

For obvious reasons I think.  And the pun is fully intended.

JOY because it is the light at the end of the tunnel of depression which has been my struggle for decades.
JOY because it is my name and thus my sense of self, my identity, my life theme, my aspiration.
JOY because, whether having lost myself stole my joy or having lost my joy hid my self from my sight, seeking after either joy or Joy has to be the path toward reclaiming both and I've come to believe I can't have one without the other.

I can't say my heart's really in this right now.
I'm hoping that will come.
Truly, my heart has not been in much of anything for months.
Not even in me.

Well then, one word
One day at a time
It's worth a try.

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Of Spring Flings, Sidebars & Social Networking

SITS Girls Spring Fling Event:
A Blog Improvement Challenge--
Build Your Community &
Improve Your Blog

While working so hard to finish Mom's scarf/shawl before Moother's Day I dropped the ball on SITS Girls Spring Fling for Thursday and Friday assignments.  So my goal today was to catch up those two assignments and do today's which was to declutter our blog.  Thursday was share your Google+ link and Friday was share your Pinterest link.  Though I had a Google+ page I hadn't done a profile for it.  I didn't have a Pinterest account at all.

Earlier last week we shared our facebook and Twitter links.  Those I already had well establishes so those two assignments took only minutes.  Except for the visiting others part.  That always takes me a looooooong time.

But today I spent hours on Google+ and Pinterest.  Signing up for the latter and setting up profiles on both and following and pinning and liking and...


I was so bummed that both JoyRenee and Joystory and Joywrite were already taken as usernames.  I probably spent half an hour just staring at the sighup screen before I finally went with 'storyismyjoy'


Might as well round them all up here:

Joy Renee on Google+
Joy Renee on Pinterest
Joystory fanpage on facebook
Joy Renee on Twitter


For the declutter project I chose to begin with getting rid of all of the old buttons for events and challenges from the past.  But I didn't want to just delete them.  So I moved them into a footer at the bottom of the page in a section I named Once Upon a Time.  That was so easy I wondered if maybe I was about to loose my aversion to sidebar fiddling caused by a frustrating experience every single time I attempt it.

But then of course it happened again.  One of the buttons I wanted to leave in the sidebar above did not reappear after I'd removed the others and saved the widget.  I spent nearly two hours beating my brain over the problem.  If it had been any other button but Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon I might have given up and deleted it after fifteen minutes.  It wasn't until I did a character by character comparison of the code in the sidebar widget with the code in my last read-a-thon post that I discovered that somehow the url for the image had lost all its capitalization.  Once I'd copied the url again from the post and inserted it in place of the deformed one it worked again.  Now, tho, I'm left confuzzled as to how it happened.  All of the letters were still in place but had converted to lowercase.

So altogether today I must have put in seven hours on the Spring Flling.  Including a few comments left and reading some of the posts on SITS Girls about Google+ and Pinterest.  Some of that time in the last three hours has been about waiting for pages to load and tabs to unfreeze. It must be time for a browser restart or computer restart.  Or both.

My mind feels like a pretzel.

If tomorrow's assignment looks like it will take me more than thirty minutes I might have to pass so I can focus on getting caught up on a crochet project that has to be done a week from today.

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The SITS Girls Spring Fling Has Sprung

SITS Girls Spring Fling Event:
A Blog Improvement Challenge--
Build Your Community &
Improve Your Blog

I signed up for this a couple of weeks ago knowing that it was to start on the day I was leaving home.  I was actually able to get Monday's task [link your blog at SITS and leave comments on two others] done before I had to shut down my netbook and pack it for the trip but there was too much getting unpacked and organized at this end not to mention rested yesterday to get Tuesday's task done so this evening I caught up on Tuesday's [link your Twitter at SITS and follow two others and send some tweets] and after I get this posted I'll be doing Wednesday's task [link you blog's fb page at SITS and fan two participants pages]

It's not too late to join in.  It last through next week.  Here are the links for signing up and doing the first three tasks:

Sign Up: Get on our email distribution list for this event

Blog link-up: Share your blog URL and get commenting

Using Twitter to Build Your Community

Facebook Fans Page

Tomorrow will be about using Google+ and Friday about Pinterest.  The only one I'm not already signed up for is Pinterest.  But Google+ is sitting dead in the water since I signed up a couple months ago.  I don't really know how to use it.  Hoping for help from the tutorials at SITS tomorrow.  Same for Pinterest.

I'll also be looking into the tutorials on Twitter, and fb available at the links above.

As soon as I've done today's assignment I've got to get busy crocheting again.  Can you believe that I started a shawl for Mom for Mother's Day in the car on the trip up her Monday.  *shakes head*  *sighs* 

Look for pics of what I have so far by tomorrow afternoon on tomorrow's post.  Right now it is about 60 inches long and 2 inches wide. It takes me just under an hour to do two rows. Four rows equals and inch and I'm aiming for somewhere between 10 and 18 inches. I'm working a simple rectangle the long way so that I can stop wherever I reach by the wee hours of Sunday morning.  If it ends up being a scarf instead of a shawl, so be it.  I'm using the hand painted silk lace weight thread that I made my MIL's shawl with last year and using the same love knot stitch aka Solomon's knot.  Tho I won't be changing up the stitch size as I did before.  I'm making the knots about a third of an inch long which makes the mesh just right to stick my thumb through.

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Storify with Social Media

 Storify

This is an interesting concept. Storify is a site that allows you to collect multi-media items from many of the social media sites into a single coherent 'story' that you can share via email, fb, blog embed and more.

 Whether you wish to tell the story of your year for a holiday newsletter, the aftermath of an earthquake or severe weather, the protests in  Cairo, London or Oakland, the breakup of a marriage overheard in a fast-food restaurant or a top ten list on any theme, you can collect the relevant tweeets, youtube vids, fb photos, and more, add comments and post on Storify then share.

I'm anxious to experiment with this but I have no time for it before mid January.

The example I'm sharing here--of a delivery of a computer monitor being made by a toss over a fence and the repercussions after the recipient of the monitor posted a video of the incident that went viral--I chose because it is tangentially holiday related and loosely related to my husband's job on the shipping docks of a major catalog retailer so besides personal horror stories I've heard a number of Ed's job related ones.  I would not single out any one service either as the blame is spread almost evenly among them.

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Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure | Science | The Guardian

cotton candy pics on Sodahead

Facebook friend tally is associated with differences in brain structure | Science | The Guardian:

'via Blog this'

I suspect there are problems with this study--small sample, self selected, so forth--but it intuitively rings true for me as I always suspected the parts of my brain to do with social skills might have the density of cotton candy.

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I'm in a Social Media Swamp

I've just joined another social media site.  Its for readers to recommend books to each other.  Its a beta and it has a lot of promise.  But I'm wondering whether I've not already got involved with too many of these.  Between goodreads, Bookdrum, facebook, twitter, ning, cheezeburger.com and the several for fiber arts, current events, entrepreneurs,  bloggers, and  and and... there are more than I can visit every day--more than I can even remember as I sit here.  And for most of them I mostly lurk.

This might not sound like a rave recommendation for Custom Reads but I did just spend an hour browsing on it and ordered two books from the library which I encountered on there for the first time and that's added to the two hours I spent on it last night.  So it is obviously something worth taking a look at and a viable player in the 'survival of the fittest' game playing out on the web.

One of the things Custom Reads has got going for it that is different from most similar sites is that recommenders get a commission off sales made when a user clicks over to one of the booksellers from their recommendation and makes a purchase.

One of the things I might change about it if I had any say would be the ability to keep a list of the titles that interest me.  The only options given are 'I want to read' which sends you to the links to the stores, 'I have already read', 'Not interested' and 'Skip for now' which takes you to the next recommendation.  

Also, and this might be related, they keep stats for the percentage of likes you've registered for certain themes and for reccomenders and yet the only apparent way to register a 'like' is to make a purchase.  Even someone with discretionary income in this economy--which I have none--is not going to buy enough books in a month to make any kind of percentage meter go up over 1% anytime soon.  I think the fact that I was sent racing over to my local library catalog tab to look for four titles in half an hour should count for something.

Still and all I'm probably going to be lurking on Custom Reads and soon will be making recommendations myself.  I was upgraded to recommender immediately after signing up but I'm not sure if that was because I'd been issued a special invite via email because of my blog or anyone signing up gets the same upgrade.

At any rate, i recommend Custom Reads as worth a look for anyone looking for the next book they'll love.

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