Sheila's Guests and Reviews

One day I'll sort out all my websites, blogs, links, connections and other wondrously ethereal e-things. Meanwhile, in an effort to answer a friend and at least sort out what I've got, here's my quick and easy guide to getting started with a blog. Note to self - "a blog," not a gazillion blogs! Note to anyone reading this - HELP! Any advice you can offer would be most welcome! blogger.com  - (Was it blogspot before it was blogger, or was it the other way around...? Anyway, this is where I started long years ago...) Blogger let me create blogs free - so I foolishly made five of them: sheiladeeth.blogspot.com which is where you are now. sheiladeethhome.blogspot.com which was meant to look like a webpage sheiladeethdrabbles.blogspot.com because I wanted a place to post scraps of writing inspiredbyfaithandscience.blogspot.com as a webpage for my Bible stories and sheiladeethstudies.blogspot.com for my Bible studies - the "blog" connected ...

It took a while. I sort of got an idea of how to feed and furnish a blog. I made one for "stuff," one for writing. and one for Bible studies. Then I sat back, feeling suitably proud of myself till I realized I had to write things too. And finally I stuck them all together, made a website and felt really good... ...and then I found all these writer friends that used Facebook and Twitter and nings, so I followed them there... ...and then they had "lenses" that had nothing to do with my eyes growing old and tired, and squids that didn't need to swim in the sea... So now I've tied my blogs and my website together, added another potential website, and included links here and there to a Squidoo Lens that I linked to some quizzes. If you're bored (and not just bored with my boring old blog) or otherwise have time (ah but what is time? Existentialists rule) I'd love to know what you think of the new-look links, and even the squid: http://www.squidoo.com/in...

I really ought to get back to writing, but this website game gets addictive. Still, I'll try to make this my last change for a while. I'd been asking for feedback on my fledgling site, and the major comments I got were: 1. Nobody knows what a drabble is - so I've change the heading (above) to read "STORIES" instead. 2. The free download's too well hidden on the Lulu site - so I added a note at the top of my Lulu page. 3. Advertise the free stuff - see 2 - so I added "FREE STUFF" to the headings above. Unfortunately I ran out of space, so "BIBLE STUDIES" just says "STUDIES" now. Comments anyone? 4. I should use the same colors for titles everywhere - so I changed them in the html code and now they mostly match. 5. I should use the same colors and highlighting for links - so I tried: Oh, how I tried. My blog's template says it's the same as all the other pages, but the change just doesn't seem to happen. Maybe when I get...

A friend asked why I use rainbows as the theme for all my sites, so here's the answer(s). 1. I started out using pictures from my books and trying to advertise. When I wanted to change the picture, I'd just published A Bible Book of Colors on Lulu, so I sliced a piece of rainbow from the cover as my new image. 2. I wanted visitors to my sites to see the text without having to scroll. My rainbow just happened to be nice and thin, so I kept it. 3. And now I'm working on themes - well, the rainbow's a sign of God's promise. Okay, He was promising not to destroy the world with a flood. But seeing a rainbow on my sites serves me as a nice reminder of His love. 4. Then there's the fact that as a kid I "knew" the flood was "just a story" 'cause there had to have been rainbows ever since there was rain and light. I reckoned God couldn't have waited till Noah to make them. But when I read the Bible for myself I found it doesn't actually s...

It doesn't look like my efforts have improved the queries reaching my site, but I have to admit, coming up with a catchphrase feels nice. (And I do thank you for your encouragement.) Now I can label my advertising materials more appropriately, and the timing's great since I have my first Christmas Bazaar coming up next weekend. I've even updated my Lulu storefront to match - http://stores.lulu.com/sdeeth - and I like the new version much better. My next job will be to make sure all the colors of the headers are the same, and then to update my blogs so their colors match too. Soon, I hope... Meanwhile it's November and I still haven't written my first poem-a-day for the Poetic Asides challenge . But I have posted two Mayflower drabbles on my drabble blog . Time to wax lyrical I think... Poetic Asides to the rescue...

I checked. My Bible Study blog really did come up on Google if I searched for "demon impregnation stories," but now it's been edged out by my last blog post. In fact, it's been edged so far out it doesn't appear, which I think means nobody's bothered to click on it (not surprising I suppose). And my Halloween drabbles are nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, I've tried to come up with some labels with words I might use in a post. A friend was helping with lots of great D words for Deeth, drabble, draw, draw out, discern, depict, and Deity... but I still couldn't make it come together. I guess I'm just too attached the whole "faith and science" thing - though Google brings up a ton of stuff (and not me) if you ask about that. Would three words work better... Faith Science and Inspiration perhaps? FSI? I don't feel inspired, but IFS looks more fun: How about "Bible Study What IFS: Inspired by Faith and Science." Or do you think it...

I found this thing called Webmaster Tools at the bottom of my blogger dashboard a while ago. I'm certainly no master, but perhaps I can learn... I signed up (easy), added my blog (likewise), and put the extra bit of code into the html (just followed directions). A week or so later the "query" field started to fill. People were actually finding my site. The problem is, they seemed to be looking for "what to do if you hear a fire alarm." Not quite what I intended. A few weeks ago I added my new blogs - lots of nice scary stories for Halloween; my first three "what if: faith and science" Bible Studies; and my home page. The dashboard kept telling me "no information" for them, but I waited and hoped. Meanwhile I studied how to make Google look at my labels and list me more often. Now my blog gets found by people looking for "Deeth" which is a slight improvement. And today I finally got some queries returning my Bible Studies. Unfortunat...

So, I did it! I searched the web for advice, found lots, then got myself another blog - http://sheiladeethhome.blogspot.com - and tried to set it up as my home page. (The most helpful advice I found was from Camy Tang, a pdf on how to blog your website - highly recommended.) 1. I want my "posts" to appear like separate pages, not all down the screen, so I set the new blog up with 1 post per page, and enabled post pages under archiving. I think that was so I could find and edit (and link to) each page separately, but I'm not sure. I'm just a beginner. It's what the pages I looked at said I should do. 2. I want the "welcome" post that I put on my home page to keep appearing there. But blogs always show the newest post first. So I use the "post options" button at the bottom of each new post and set the date to sometime in the past. It's really neat. 3. I don't want dates appearing my web pages, so I edited my layout and used the "ed...

I read an article about turning blogs into websites and it got me thinking. Maybe I could try. So if you've noticed anything odd about my blog today, that's why. I'm going to start posting my drabbles on their own special page (which is really just another blog) - see the DRABBLE link above. And I'm trying to tidy up some Bible studies that I worked on for my books on Lulu - they're under BIBLE STUDIES, not too surprisingly. HOME is here, till I work out a better place for it, GATHER is my gather profile, TWITTER my page on Twitter, BOOKS takes you to my Lulu storefront, and BOOK REVIEWS points to a page listing all the books I've reviewed on Goodreads. I'll work on making some more logical pages to jump off from later. But meanwhile I'd love any feedback you care to give. I'm even learning the odd scrap of HTML as I work on it. And the links bar is just a nice plain boring text box dragged to sit at the top in my layout, with words and links and col...