life

First Quarter Review Changes And Upgrades To The Causemopolitan

April 21, 2010 · By Sloane Davidson, Founder and CEO, Hello Neighbor

This is the first of three posts reviewing the first quarter.

Life goes by fast and I've found if you don't stop and smell the roses, well, it passes fast and it's hard to look back and remember things. Remark on them. Tell those you care about how much those moments COUNT for something.

A friend of mine told me of an exercise where she takes the printout of her calendar and at the end of each month writes on the back what she is most proud of, who she is happy she connect with or who impacted her the most that month and then looks forward to the next month.

I've been wanting to do that for every month of 2010, which of course didn't happen. It was a whirlwind and instead of fighting the wind, I succumbed to it. I was wrapped up and twisted into post-Davos, Superbowl, local election, Mardi Gras mayhem, trips to Los Angeles and SXSW and wouldn't you know, a truly terrific cold and cough that once I recovered from, I was staring down the face of mountains of work. The work I love! It just leaves little time to post, to write, to share.

No matter. I can go back and recount what happened a few weeks ago, a few months ago. I'm no less busy now, but sometimes you just have to force yourself to MAKE time. This is me making time.

So looking back on the first three months of this year, I've decided to break the posts into three parts:

1) Site (and life) updates. 2) Top posts of 2010. 3) Acknowledgments (and influences).

Lagniappe: Next steps and looking forward to the rest of the year. Maybe even a Master Task List for old times sake!

Secret: I have a huge task list of updates I want to make to my blog and it's hard to get to them all. I am planning a major overhaul at some point this year, but in the meantime, I just want to make small changes each month. That seems more doable anyway. Here's what I did in January (and some with the help of my good friends an SEO whiz and easily swayed).

Writing about yourself, I think, is the hardest thing. It seems so hard to get the wording right, to remember things just so. It was a great challenge to sum up ME in 140, you should try it (if you do, send it to me)!

Kiva Fellow. Humanitarian. Sloane blogs at The Causemopolitan about her life, nonprofits, social entrepreneurship and “cause-filled living.”

Media section completely redone. This section is far from complete! It's always changing and I'm not quite sure exactly how I want the page to look or be laid out. But again, it was important to start somewhere! The rest can wait. So for now the sections are:

Sidebar Navigation has lots of goodies!

Additions to posts and the overall content. Last updates! First the RELATED POSTS at the bottom of posts can now be automated. People don't know this, but I've been handpicking the "related posts" for months, mostly because I knew which ones I wanted to include, but there is a great widget out there that helps do this, it took some reworking, but I'm really happy with it. Next, my comments are all through DISQUS now and I love them. Their platform, customer service, the way comments come through. All of it! Last is the "share" bar on the bottom. It allows people to share content across networks simply and with the touch of a button.

Last thing! All posts now get automatically feeded into my Facebook profile as a note. It allows Facebook people to see every post. I had been putting only some of them in manually. This step to auto takes one thing off my plate.

There you have it! So it might look like everything is the same, but really there have been small-to-medium size changes every month. The list is long and there are more to come, but hey, sharing these was at least a start.

Most of all, I hope everyone reading this knows that I make these changes as much for you as for me. I love this blog, I love this little corner of the Internet that is mine and I thank you for reading. And if you got to the end of this post, well you're a ROCKSTAR!