Damien at the Speed of Life – DATSOL

Me 1989 at 19

Me 2009 at 39

I’m celebrating my 40th birthday today.  Here’s a few words on how I feel about it.  American media shows us that it’s better to be young than old. I am not saying I’m old, but when I first heard the words “You’re turning 40″ I began to think about what it might mean to me. Some countries and nationalities, like Native Americans for example, see the value in wisdom that comes through age. I agree with that notion and I’ve always respected what my elders had to say to me. Have you noticed the way older Native Americans are always so at peace in pictures? I think I’m beginning to know why. They’ve seen life pass by in cycles of thankfulness. “Will we have corn?” The angels brought corn. “Will we have horses, the wind brought horses.” “Will we have the wisdom to know what to do?” The full moon brought the wisdom.

When I was younger I had a lot of anxiety about what I would end up being be and who I would be. My 20’s were just utter craziness finishing college and trying to “be someone.” My 30’s were a time of growing into my own skin. It was through my 30’s I learned the value of defining and avoided distorted thinking. To this day, those ideas of modern psychology by Albert Ellis still help me stay thankful for all I have. “Overgeneralizing,” “I must do this or else …” All the stuff he has defined as negative energy. I have become a life-long student of psychology and I will always respect what it is for people. Also in my 30’s I met my lovely wife Sarah.

She was a waitress and a teaching student at the local community college. Those were pretty neat things, but the fact that she was a freckle-faced cutie quickly won me over all the way. Seriously though, Sarah has so many talents that keep the Rileys going, it would astound you if you saw them all. Just one example is this party.  everything from booking the place, to inviting all of you, to the slide show, it’s all her.  Thank you honey for making my birthday awesome.

I am so lucky to be sharing my 40th with her. If you know her, you know what I mean about her giftedness. I became a somewhat instant Dad and Brandon has taught me a lot about being a good member of a family and being a good person. As for teaching me to be a better dad? I don’t know how much better I get but we keep trying and we never give up trying to do better.  I love you son.

My baby girls Isabella and Julianna are 2 other of my delights. What man could ask for more than to hear his name screamed with joy every time he walks in the door from work? They have both shown me signs of nothing less than genius through their speech and drawing and sense of humor skills. We have been blessed with so much which the pictures tell a story of. I came up here for a job interview where it all began in August of 2002. Now, I am a lead teacher in my District. For me, it doesn’t get any better than that. I worked a long time to get there so I will say I am an example that if you stay true to what you want and give it your best shot, you will make it.  It doesn’t have to depend on your ancestry dna. Last, like the peaceful Indian … getting older is cool because you see that everything is going to be okay.  Just hang in there.

40 is great … every decade is great … it just gets better.  Thank you all for coming … cheers!

Listen to Damien Riley on Blog Talk Radio

Here’s a list of companies that pay bloggers. I have used and been paid by all of them to varying degrees. THE LIST IS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER. Book mark it and check back as I update it about every 6 months or so.

• PayU2Blog
• Blogsvertise
• Blogging Ads
• Blog to Profit
• BuyBlog Reviews
• ReviewMe
• Text Link Ads
• Google Adsense
• Social Spark
• PayPerPost
• LinkShare
• Linkworth

Please feel free to leave questions and comments on the subject of mmol.  I’m happy to help you if I can. Curious about what I pull down? Check the latest figires here at my blog stats archive. I started a webcast from my garage recently. I have some office furniture out there and a decent recording setup. I may start broadcasting more about making money online.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my FEED Thanks for visiting!

I host a recurring Blog Carnival called “Amazing Vision.” In it, I feature your blog posts about people who have innovated or otherwise dramatically impacted their world. Some posts are about grandfathers and others are about the founder of McDonalds, or Betsy Ross. Fame is not a pre-requisite, amazing vision is. You’ll find examples linked on the index page.

Perhaps you have a story to tell? I hope you’ll enter the carnival and get some more readers coming your way.

Submit your blog article to the next edition of amazing vision using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Thanks to Chris for posting this on her blog:

My favorite and most notable quote is the one by Stephen King. Isn’t it hilarious how he writes that “fear” is the root of all bad writing. Because, everything he has made money on is about fear? Hmmm. Certainly he must be talking about another kind. I hope this video of quotes inspires the writers out there.

What’s your favorite quote in the vid?

One sided phone conversation with a new blogger:

Photo from: Coffee 2 Go

So you want to blog eh? Well, you’ve come to the right place. I love helping people start their semantic journey. It reminds me when I started making a personal website on Geocities way back in 1997. You had to do everything in HTML back then and the closest thing to a blog was a guestbook I suppose. It was still freagin fun! But let’s get back to you. I understand you are on Blogger. No, I don’t mean you smoked the ashes of someone who used to blog, I am referring to the free blog platform owned by Google called “Blogger.” You are? Oh ok great. Actually not great. Did you know most school and public institutions block that provider? Why? I don’t know, ask them. Maybe the word “chat” pops up too much who knows? Anyway, if you want a decent audience, that fact alone will cut back your chances considerably. Oh, and did you know you can’t really change the appearance much other than their small collection of templates? I know a format that will make your appearance choices virtually unlimited. Oh, one more thing, you should know that your Blogger account has the most obtrusive and difficult to fill out comment forms for your readers. You will have a lot of people turn away because it’s so complicated. The one I know of has a simple box at the bottom of each post. Oh last but not least, did you know your blog platform is not as SEO friendly as mine? This means the search engines will place you lower than Wordpress blog with the same topic. Ready to try something different? Ok then! Cool. What’s that? You say you can’t afford to pay? Hmmm. You can’t afford $8.95 a month? What if you made $100 a month on your blog? Something to think about.

If you are interested in making the jump to a self-hosted Wordpress blog, I’d be glad to help. Drop me a line.

I was astounded today to find out that some serious internet folks I work with in blogging had never heard of a Blog Carnival.  I’ve worked with Blog Carnivals since 2006.  I was equally shocked when another internet type shared with me their fear about a clearly viral and well known email hoax.  It brought up a good point for me to blog on here today: make sure you remember you know more things than many people.  They may know other things  more than you as well.  This is relevant to blogging because when you write you need to assume they know hardly anything.  If the goal is to get them coming back and reading more, then you need to show them the way.  Assuming they get everything you’re saying can be like shooting your traffic in the foot.

Aside: I publish a Blog Carnival called “Amazing Visions.”

After much thought, I’ve decided to reinvent my mission statement.  The CAN page has changed and you’ll find the following(below) if you go there.

From the revised CAN page:

It has been said: “If you aim at nothing, you will surely hit it.”

That’s why I rate my own blogs monthly.

It’s also been said that if you do the right thing consistently, then the right things will happen to you.

I’m listing my mission statement here so you will better understand my what I do.  It is:

To create and innovate value for others.

These are my monthly “CAN” goals defined:

C- Circulation is measured by the number of posts and guestblogs I do each month.
A – Association is commenting I do on other blogs.
N – “Nods” are my Blog Safaris, or “link love” posts.

Each month I set new goals and record the results publicly.

Each category gets a percentage score then I add them together and divide by 300 to get the final rating.

I assign my blog a monthly rank value according to this scale:

• 90-100%=
• 75-89%=
• 51-74%=
• 30-50%=
• 11-30%=
• 0-10%=

Current and past monthly CAN. updates can be found here. I enjoy and welcome your comments on this topic.

My friend Eric Stefani did this sort of thing and I thought it was so appropriate for my 1,000th post celebration.  If you didn’t know, I often live and write wacky … Head over and leave me a comment won’t you?  Thanks for sharing this meaningless moment with me ;) Have a great day folks. KIT.

Damien Interviews Damien at Postcards

Besides the elementary rules of usage, there are some elementary guidelines of composition, or writing, that can make any blogger better.  If you’re reading this, you probably have a great style and just want to make it better.  Let’s face it though, there are a lot of blogs out there that really need some help.  Ironically, I don’t think they’ll be tuning in :(

This post suggests a template idea that helps me every day.  Just to reiterate, I get the ideas for these posts from Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.”  Just like there are some technical “constants” of good blogs, so there are constants of writing worth looking into.

Create a template and stick to it. I have gone through many templates for my blog posts.  They have all shared one thing is common: links to other posts on my blog and links to external blogs either in my blogroll or ones I have run across and found interesting.  Stumbleupon is an excellent tool for storing these links and then retrieving them later.  I will share my basic template I use when creating blog posts:

Introduction: A catchy sentence(s) that can serve as a stand alone teaser.  About 160 characters because most search engines don’t pick up beyond that.  It should promote what follows.

Body: 1-5 paragraphs.  Each paragraph should be about something distinct.  They should not be too long.  I’d say no more than 4 sentences max.  Blog readers’ eyes get bored fast.

Conclusion: Try to include a question or request for a response.  This stimulates comments.

Links: 3 internal links, 3 external links

This is a very basic outline, but it gets the point across that you should analyze and create a template and then stick to it.  Your readers will notice and read with greater ease and interest.  With daily serious blogging, templates are almost a non-negotiable.

What do you think of choosing a suitable design for posts and sticking to it?

The Elements of Style calls these the “Elementary Rules of Usage.”  These are common errors you see literally everywhere on the internet.  I’ve listed the ones from the Elements of style in my own words and created some examples for each.  I most commonly see.  I hope they help as a reference for you in this series.

Form the possessive singular noun by adding ’s

The car’s headlight was out.  Angela’s bike got a flat tire.

A very common error is mistaking it’s for its.  Its is a possessive pronoun whereas it’s is a contraction combining it and is.

The dog was sleepy as evidenced by its droopy eyes.

It’s a great thing to be a blogger.

Another very common error is in the homophones: there, their, and they’re.

there=a place, a location. I looked all over there for my keys.

their=possessive pronoun for them, they.  They forgot their scruples and bought Amway.

they’re=contraction of the words they and are.  They’re great friends and always have been.

Finally, another homophone common error is the use of to, two, and too.

to=preposition, direction.  The arrow points to the highway.

two=number

too=a degree of intensity.  That song was too loud.

This ends the basics of usage for bloggers.  What other rules of usage do you know of that are commonly broken on blogs?