Mrs. Ruiz’s Blog

Ok my initial frustration/irritation has subsided and I’ve decided to rewrite some of what was lost in my 1st post of the day. (Lucky you!)

What I had said before that got eaten by the blog monster was that part of my renewed passion for blogging is to get in the habit of regular writing.  I have always had this deep seeded urge to write, but never sure about what and doubtful that anyone else would care to read it.  So I thought, why blog?  It would be like talking to myself, but I guess I do that already, so what’s the harm?

One of the huge motivators for this is that I am pursing my National Board Certification.  If you have been through this process you are well aware of the amount of writing involved.  Now I realize National Board writing and blogging are really not in the same leauge of writing with the previous being way more academic than my blogging style, but my hope was that through regular blogging I would be less reticent about writing for my portfolio.  As of this point I have yet to write anything significant for my portfolio, but I am in super planning and executing mode, so I know I will have something on paper for my portfolio very soon.  I had hoped to post it here, so I guess it is a good thing that Steve’s 4th assignment was about protecting your content.  I may have something worth stealing one day. haha

Ok I hope the blog monster doesn’t eat this one! (Mrs. Ruiz crosses her fingers…)

I just posted my blog and it appears to have gotten eaten in the process and is not there.  I hate when that happens.  I guess I will have to give you the gist of it…

Assignment 4 was to use Creative Commons to obtain a content license.  I did so and got this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I said some other stuff, but I am too frustrated at the moment to redo it.  Oh well.

So let’s see what Steve has in store for me today…

Assignment 3:  Write a thank you note

Hmmmm, sounds simple enough, I think I have written a few of those before.

Since I am a new blogger, Steve says “Pick out a blogger who in some way influenced your decision to begin blogging and write them a thank you note.”  Well, that would have to be Steve!

So I would like to publicly thank Steve Dembo for the amazing work that he does with Discovery Education.  He has repeatedly shared his techic knowledge with scores of teachers and we have all benefited tremendously from it.  I think it was a wonderful idea when he came up with this whole series on blogging.  I have always wanted to be a better blogger and just never knew where to start.  He made it simple and fun.  So thank you Steve for all you do for bloggers and teachers and techies everywhere!

30D2BBB

Yay!  I made it to day 2!  What could today’s assignment be about?  Playing in traffic?  Oh, site traffic.

I have 3 websites I have created and maintain, the oldest of these being 3 years old.  I hate to admit that I never bothered to look at my stats…ever.  I didn’t see the point.  My oldest site is my class website.  I created it strictly for classroom use.  I knew my kids were using it because I made them…those were my stats.   I think I may have also ignored stats on it before because I don’t think my host (Start Logic - Great host!) had very easy to read reports.  They have recently done a revamp and the visitor report is awesome and easy to read.  I only came to know this because I started a side business and hooked up with a consultant that forced me to look at my stats.  So that is kind of what Steve is talking about with site traffic, only in this case specific to this blog.  So I’ve got to add some special thingys to it to start getting some data.  I guess I figure no one is really reading this except for Lori and Mark when I started it a several months back.  So I guess I know I’ve had at least 2 hits! haha

Ok, I’ve got Site Meter all set up now.  I will have to check it later to see if I got it going right.  Now onto Google Analytics…  Oh, that one is scary!  haha  I signed up for it easily enough, but then it threw this large amount of HTML code at me with some cryptic note about posting that code on every page I wanted to track….  Uh….what?  I think I like Site Meter better, was MUCH more user friendly.  Guess I will only be going with one tracker for the moment!

I am a terrible blogger.  I really must get better at this as it is something I want to do.  I have always kept a journal, several as a matter of fact.  I guess my digital accent is too strong and the common concept of blogging has always seemed a bit too public for me.  Anyway, Steve Dembo from Discovery did a series back in November called “30 days to becoming a better blogger.”  I meant to do it then, and didn’t, so here I am doing it now.

Assignment 1:  The “About Page”

I think I had this set up, but I am not sure now, so I will have to go check.  Ok I checked, it was terrible, surprise surprise.  So I made it better.  Check it out by clicking the “About” tab above.  See you tomorrow for day 2!