Today I went to Chibird.com for inspiration. I wanted to explore the archive. I don’t know why, but I wanted to see just how far it went. After an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole amount of scrolling, I finally reached the bottom.
August 2010!
What I found down there really gave me hope. It was a tender mercy for me.
See Chibird’s posts are usually like this now:
Chibird’s posts looked like this back then:
The messages were the same. The love was the same. But the skill improved. And it took time. It took regular posting. It took vulnerability. It took Courage.
Honing my Craft
I can be courageous. I want to get better at blog writing and using WordPress. I want to get better at getting my message out. I want to hone my craft. I have heard from others that the only way to do that is to start. Start when you are not that good at it, keep going, it will get better, you will know when to make a shift, you will know when to change direction, you will know the next step when it’s time to take it.
So here’s my plan, I want to devote Mondays to improving. Why Monday? Because that is the day that I get a stats notification from WordPress. Also, I feel it’s easier to improve at the fresh begining of a new week, rather than at the end.
What did I do to improve? Today, it was learning a new block in WordPress. I learned how to get my pictures to show side by side. I thought it was the “column” block, but no, it was the “row” block. I learned how to use the “timeline” block and the “shape divider” block. I considered using them to show what I learned today, and decided against it.
I also listened to some feedback and fixed my headings. I was using titles like “Personal Connection: The Situation” and I took out all the prefaces before the title to make it just “The Situation” (read about “the situation” here). I hope that makes the posts more accessible and less like homework.
I have some other things that I want to try to improve upon today. I don’t want to say I did them when I haven’t. I don’t want to promise that I will, when I don’t yet know if I can. So here’s the plan, tomorrow I will update this post with the things I was able to work on. I feel it’s very important to return and report.
Is Improvement Monday for You?
How does this all apply to what you are going through right now? Here are some questions for you:
- What vulnerable thing are you working on right now?
- What small moments of courage are you having right now? Celebrate it!
- Is Improvement Monday a good day to try new, hard things? Is a different day better for you?
- What kind of stats help you to keep on track? What kind of stats encourage you?
Tuesday Update:
- I went to learn.wordpress.org and realized that I had 2 courses that were almost complete, and completed them. They were Getting Started With WordPress: Get Familiar, and Part 1: Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing. (I had already completed Getting Started With WordPress: Get Setup.)
- Tags ^_^ I only had 2 tags and they were for just one post. On Monday, I super tagged everything and ended up adding 35 new tags. As of this writing, I have 37 different tags. That might be a little excessive. I don’t know. We will see.
- I started watching a Keto Conference video but didn’t finish it. In case you wanted to watch it, it was “Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes (he has a book by the same name). I wanted to include that I try to do things and don’t finish all of them. That’s okay because I got quite a few things completed.
Thursday Update:
Did you know that when you add a link in your post, it is very important that you remember to toggle the “open in new tab” option. I can’t think of a moment when I’m using a link and I don’t want it to open a new tab. So, I guess today I am going through all of my past posts to make sure all the toggles are toggled.
Friday Update:
I finally finished that Gary Taubes’ talk. Very good!