internet | Bertram's Blog

Come See My Etchings!

January 14, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I couldn’t resist using the old come-on line for the title of this article, but etchings I’m referring to aren’t my etchings. They are the work of Mickey Hoffman, a talented artist and author. (She wrote the mysteries School of Lies and Deadly Traffic, published by Second Wind Publishing.) The first etching is one Mickey did of Beijing, and the second is Myanmar.

If you’d like to see how involved the etching process is, check out Mickey’s blog, What the heck is an etching? She shows step-by-step what exactly goes into the making of her etchings.

If you are more interested in travel than in how to make an etching, here are a few of Mickey’s wonderful travel blogs:

Up and Down, More from Tibet

Myanmar: Bagan, a City for Dreamers

The Islands and the Death Railway

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to check out Mickey’s books:

SCHOOL OF LIES: by Mickey Hoffman is a funny mystery novel about a dysfunctional public school. http://tinyurl.com/783sq7r

DEADLY TRAFFIC: The local sex trade flourishes and girls are disappearing from Standard High http://tinyurl.com/83crtzh

Posted in blogging, culture, internet. Tags: Deadly Traffic, etchings, Mickey Hoffman, Myanmar, School of Lies, Second Wind Publishing. 2 Comments »

Willpower vs. Won’t Power

January 11, 2013 — Pat Bertram

tugofwar I got spammed by a company that wants me to go to its site and take some sort of psych test to assess my willpower. The comment said their studies show that “when it comes to being disciplined and making healthy lifestyle changes, men tend to have a stronger resolve than women” and that “women may have a little more difficulty staying away from temptation and sticking to healthy habits this year.” Apparently, 46 percent of women rated their willpower as good compared to 61 percent of men.

Since the company has obviously made up its minds about my determination to stick to my resolve based on my gender, there doesn’t seem much point in following through. But besides that, the study seems dubious.

Their sweeping statements about men and women’s relative resolve was based on approximately 200 self-assessments, which isn’t exactly a “study” but more of a poll. Many things could skew the results. Perhaps men who didn’t have a strong resolve when it came to health resolutions didn’t want to go on record as having a weak resolve and so didn’t respond. Perhaps women are harder on themselves than men are, and see any infraction as a lack of resolution where men let it slough off. Perhaps men overrate themselves. Perhaps women have a better knowledge of themselves. Or perhaps men and women interpret their resolve differently. For example, if someone vows to eat healthier and passes on a second piece of cake when normally they would eat three pieces, that could be interpreted as sticking with their resolve and having willpower.

The poll revealed that “if pressured by a friend to “pig out” (after eating healthily for an entire week), 7% of women would totally give in, 46% would only share some of their friend’s junk food, and 47% would stay disciplined and eat healthy. For men, 8% would give in, 41% would share, and 51% would stay disciplined.” Not exactly a resounding indictment of women or a pat on the back for men. Assuming that the participants in the poll were equally divided between men and women, only four more men than women claimed they would stay disciplined. Which means that almost half of both sexes say they won’t. (The poll didn’t reveal if in fact more men would stay disciplined, only that they said they would.)

New Year’s resolutions are always difficult. By making a big yearly resolution, you’re setting yourself up to fail because it’s very difficult to make a major change all at once and stick with it. For one thing, habit is too strong. For another thing, you have to retrain your family and friends so they don’t pressure you back into your pre-resolve lifestyle. For still another thing, once you’ve broken the resolution, there seems less impetus to re-resolve.

Willpower in action seems more like “won’t power,” — “I won’t eat potato chips. I won’t go off my diet. I won’t sleep in instead of exercising.” For myself, I stay away from “won’t power.” The more I say I won’t do something, the more I want to do it. As for willpower, I think it’s highly overrated. I try to do the right thing for my health most of the time, and if I get side-tracked, I don’t beat myself up for it.

One thing for sure — I won’t go to the spammers site and rate my willpower. And I won’t even need any willpower to stick with that resolution!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+

Posted in culture, internet, life. Tags: men vs women, new years resolutions, pigging out, sticking with resolutions, willpower. 3 Comments »

An Accidental New Year’s Resolution

December 31, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Untitledt When I first got the internet in 2007, I embraced it as if it were a wonderful new friend. At the time, my mother was dying and my life mate/soul mate was sick. There was nothing I could do about either of those circumstances, and the internet gave me a place to escape from my real life.

The terrible times continued. My mother died, then three years later, my soul mate died, and one of the few ways I could escape from the grief was to spend time online. (Screaming also helped alleviate the grief, but being online was so much easier on my throat.) I moderated writing groups, connected to thousands of people, dived headfirst into blogging. I used a couple of my blogs to promote other authors because . . . well, because the blogs were there and it seemed like the right thing to do.

Several unsettling incidents happened recently that made me rethink what I’m doing online. These incidents didn’t amount to much. A contretemps over an excerpt someone wanted me to post. The discovery that a terrible writer I know who writes awful books is making a fortune. A discussion about talent vs. persistence (most writers seem to believe that talent is more important, which disheartens me — are writers really so arrogant in their belief of their talent?). Just trivial things, but they got to me more than they should have, and it suddenly dawned on me that if I turned off my computer, these things don’t exist.

The truth is, except for this blog, I’m not having any fun online. I seem to have fallen into an alternate universe of self-published writers. I’m even getting known as a promoter of self-published writers, but I find this new world of publishing very discouraging. Many of the excerpts I post on my blog are not well written or are excerpts from books I’d never read if they were the last books left on this earth. And that’s saying a lot since once I read everything that fell into my hands. So why am I promoting such books? I no longer know.

It used to be that self-published writers were iconoclasts, following a dream at any cost. Now so many self-published writers are conformists, following a dream at no cost. Even worse, they are a militant lot, demanding regard for no apparent reason. I have become friends with numerous self-published writers in an online sort of way, and I know that many are good at the craft and strive to get better, but just as many self-publishers dash out a book in a month (sometimes even in a week) and expect to be taken seriously.

To be honest, I have no regard for most of the authors published by the big six, either, so this isn’t a self-published vs. traditional-published discussion. It’s about me. I am not self-published, though many people assume I am (guilt by association). Nor am I published by a major publishing company. Authors who were published by small independent presses used to called “indie authors” but self-publishers have adopted that name for themselves, so now there is no name for us.

In my case, it no longer matters what kind of author I am since I am not writing much fiction. Being around so much bad writing and so many self-aggrandizing writers has stifled any urge I might have to contribute words of my own.

So, to save my sanity, I’ve decided to escape from my online life. I’m going to keep up this blog, of course, but I’ll be cutting back on other online activities, especially those that involve promoting authors I don’t know and don’t like.

This resolution isn’t accidental — I’ve been giving a lot of thought to where I want to go with my online life. What’s accidental is the timing. What was supposed to be simply a resolution has accidentally become a New Years resolution.

***

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: escape fom the internet, escape into the internet, New Year's resolution, promoting other authors, self-published writers. 6 Comments »

2102 Year in Blogging Annual Review

December 30, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I received my 2102 Year in Blogging Annual Review from WordPress today. According to WordPress:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 77,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2012, there were 365 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 1,099 posts. There were 358 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 53 MB. That’s about 7 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was December 3rd with 1,683 views. The most popular post that day was Thirty-Two Months of Grief.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2012 (Some of your most popular posts were written before 2012. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again):

Sex With Sister Tips. Um…Yeah (July 2009)
Describing a Winter Scene (February 2008)
How Many Books Are Going to be Published in 2012? (Prepare for a Shock) (April 2012)
Describing a Scene in an Interesting Way (November 2007)
Meaningful Names (December 2008)

The top referring sites in 2012 were:

The top commenters were:

Visitors:

stats

***

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: 2102 Year in Blogging Annual Review, WordPress. 11 Comments »

iTunes, Anyone?

December 24, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I just discovered that all of my books are available on iTunes, so if you receive a new iPhone, an iPod or any other iProduct this gift-giving season (or if you already have such a product), think of me! If you don’t have such a device, you can download a free iTunes app for your computer — just click on any of my titles, and at the top of the page is a button to click for a free iTunes app.

- A Spark of Heavenly Fire

Posted in books, internet, writing. Tags: iTunes, iTunes app, Pat Bertram's books on iTunes. 4 Comments »

On-Page SEO and Keyword Usage

December 18, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I give my blog spam folder a quick look now and again to make sure that non-spam comments don’t get relegated to spam limbo. Sometimes the spam comments are totally absurd, such as this one: Nice tips. It is actually incomprehensible opinion now, but also from general, that usefulness in addition to significance is usually overwhelming. Thanks once again and all the best.

And then there was this one:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings. You now NEED On-Page SEO.

So what is good On-Page SEO? First your keyword must appear in the title. Then it must appear in the URL. You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1, H2, H3 tags in your article. Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword. There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….

Considering that this was posted by someone trying to get me to subscribe to their Search Engine Optimization company, and considering that the comment actually made sense (or would, once I translated the jargon) and considering that my website domain provider has been trying to get me to buy SEO Visibility to the tune of $36.00 a month, I decided to research the topic a bit.

I started with “keyword.” Obviously, it’s the key word in the post or web page, but more than that, it’s a word or phrase people use when searching the internet. There’s no doubt that using the exact search terms adds to one’s search engine visibility. I often check the terms people use to find this blog, and then use those search terms as topics for articles. I made sure to use the search term in the article and in the title, since it stood to reason that if people were looking for such topics, I should make it as easy for them to find as possible. (A few of those articles are among my all-time most viewed posts: Describing a Scene in an Interesting Way, Describing a Winter Scene, and What Do You Say to Someone Who is Grieving at Christmas?) Apparently, although I didn’t know it, this was good On-Page SEO.

Luckily, I never had to worry about the keyword being in the URL — if the keyword is in the title of the article, WordPress automatically adds it to the URL of article. I used to try to write cute titles, such as Writing to the Extremes for a post about hands and feet (the extremeties), but not surprisingly, that post didn’t get many hits. So I try to keep the cuteness to minimum. (The key word here is “try.” Sometimes I let my attempts at cleverness get the better of me.)

Also, the title of the post uses H1 — Heading 1, so that fulfills one of the requirements for H1, H2, H3 tags. Since I try to follow good essay styling when writing, I generally include the keyword (the topic) in the first paragraph and then bring things full circle by referencing it in the last paragraph. I’m not going to worry about H2, H3, bold or italics in the body of my posts — I don’t want to lose the stream-of-consciousness flow that so many of my posts have by kowtowing to SEO.

I have recently begun to use an internal link in all my blog posts as a hedge against content scraping and plagiarism. And now it turns out to be good on-page SEO usage. I also use an image for each post, as suggested by WordPress in their articles about how to get Freshly Pressed, so now all I have to do is add the keyword to the alt tag. (When you upload an image, there is a place for Alt Text. I never knew what it meant, but apparently, if for any reason the image can’t be displayed, the alt text will be shown.)

Which brings us to the final point — Latent Semantic Indexing. Search engines have the capability to scan articles to see what they are about. A page with both the keyword and semantically related terms has a higher search enging ranking than one using only the keywords. (In this article SEO, search enging ranking, search engine visibility, and Search Engine Optimization are semantically related terms.)

Whew! All that research because of a spam comment! I learned something tonight, and I hope you did too. (Hmm. I might have learned something, but I didn’t follow through — there was nothing about SEO in the first paragraph, and until this sentence, nothing about SEO in the last paragraph. So perhaps this article is really about spam!)

***

Posted in blogging, How to, internet. Tags: blog spam, H1 tags, Keyword Usage, Latent Semantic Indexing, On-Page SEO, search engine optimization, search engine terms. 9 Comments »

Celebrating Life and Offbeat Occasions

December 11, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I like to celebrate offbeat occasions, or at least acknowledge them. For example, I celebrate the anniversary of my connection to the internet with a sacrifice to the online gods to ensure the safety of my travels in cyberspace. In other words, that’s the day I renew my virus protection. It’s also the day I celebrate the birthday of my online persona, “Pat Bertram.” (The persona I established then has now become the real me. Odd that. The name, of course, has always mine, or at least a version of it.)

And just few days ago I celebrated my father’s 35,000th day.

Years before these celebrations were other offbeat parties. One of the most fun was the long ago day my best friend and I had a birthday party for a tree. There is (or was, anyway. I don’t know if it is still there) a stunning elm in the corner of Denver’s City Park at Colorado Boulevard and Seventeenth Street. A plaque beneath the tree said “Shakespeare Elm: The scion from which this tree was grown was taken from the tree at Shakespeare’s grave at Stratford-on-Avon.” The plaque also noted that the tree was planted on April 23, 1916, which is exactly 300 years after Shakespeare’s birthday. (April 23, 1616).

How could such a momentous occasion not be celebrated? So my friend and I baked elm tree cookies, made a “pin the leaf on the tree” game, stirred up gallons of green punch, even baked a tree shaped cake with candles. We sent hundreds of invitations to friends, family, Denver notables, the media, but on April 23, only family and friends showed up. And two cops.

The cops stood apart from all of us, though they did nibble on cookies and take tentative sips of punch. At one point, one of the cops turned to the other and said in amazement, “They really are having a birthday party for this tree.” Apparently they had been dispatched to the site in case we were staging a drug rendezvous or some such. As it turns out, it was lucky that no one showed up. Since it ended up being simply a family picnic, we weren’t fined for putting on a public event without a license. Whew!

Another idea my friend and I had was for a restaurant in the mountains. I don’t remember much of those elaborate plans, but I do remember that the menu was going to feature Alferd Packer pancakes and democratic sausages. That still cracks me up.

Well, life had its own plans, and when we grew up, it flung us separate ways. Over the years I looked for her, but it wasn’t until recently, thanks to the internet, that we reconnected. (See why I celebrate my connection day? What a wondrous thing the internet is!) And now we are planning to meet in person next year.

I wonder if she still has that creative mind and wacky sense of fun? I wonder if I do?

At the very least, it should be a great celebration.

(BTW, I am on the left in the photo. My friend is on the right.)

***

Posted in being me, culture, internet, life, relationships. Tags: connection to the internet, Denver, offbeat parties, Shakespeare's Elm. 2 Comments »

Is a Blog or a Website Better for Reaching Out to Readers?

December 9, 2012 — Pat Bertram

A new author with little internet experience and no money recently asked me which he should set up, a website or a blog, and which was better for reaching out to readers.

As for which is better to reach out to readers, a blog is. A website is generally static. A blog is a fluid site that is updated frequently, and sites that are updated frequently get better exposure in search engines. Also, a blog is a place where author and reader can communicate instantaneously. It doesn’t always work that way, of course, because first you need readers to communicate with, but that also holds true for a website — generally, you need readers first. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that anyone will see it.

I have a website (http://patbertram.com) but I seldom update it unless I have a new book available or other such news. It’s mostly there just to be there, a landing place for people who Google me or my books. I paid for the domain, but not much else — I even used a template to make it easier to set up. Still, it does exactly what I want it to do — let people know that I am an author, what books I’ve written, and where they can buy them.

This blog doesn’t have a domain name — I’m sticking with ptbertram.wordpress.com for now. Some people say it’s unprofessional, but it gives me what I need — a place to write about what comes to mind each day, a place to talk about what matters with those who follow this blog, and a place to promote my books. (In case you didn’t realize it, all the books on the right side bar are mine.) In fact, if I’m asked for a website when I comment on a post, I use this blog for a web address rather than my official author site. Not only does this blog show my books and bio, my posts reveal way more about me than my website does.

I recently found out I’ve been doing this website/blog stuff all wrong. (So feel free to disregard everything I’m saying.) Each of my blogs should be a subdomain of my website, so that combined they get a higher ranking than each separately, but then I would need to pay a yearly fee for a domain name for each blog, and I’d have to hire someone to set it up for me. If I ever become a world famous writer with sales in the millions, then perhaps it would be necessary to do things right, but for now, I’d rather just have fun playing with my blogs and letting the website take care of itself. Besides, this way I can do it all myself.

As for deciding which to set up, a blog or a website, that’s an easy choice to make. A blog is a website. If you set up a wordpress blog, pay for a personal domain name, and set up a static landing page, then you have both a website and a blog. http://lazarusbarnhill.wordpress.com and http://rubiconranch.wordpress.com are blogs set up as websites, though as you can see neither paid for their own domain name.

(To set up a static front page on your wordpress blog, write your post as always. Then go to “Visibility: Public” on the right hand side of the page, click on edit, and check “stick this post to the front page.” Then publish the post as always. If you want to set up an already published post as a sticky post, you can edit the post, edit the visibility, and then click “update”.)

As with everything else on the internet, setting up a blog or a website or both can be as easy or as involved as you want it. Me? I choose easy every time.

***

Posted in blogging, How to, internet. Tags: blog or website?, domain name, Google, static front page, sticky post, using blog as webiste, wordpress blog. 4 Comments »

Getting Freshly Pressed. “What? Like It’s Hard?”

December 3, 2012 — Pat Bertram

A couple of nights ago I got an email from WordPress. The message said:

Hi there Pat Bertram,

Congrats! We’ve picked your post ( https://ptbertram.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/thirty-two-months-of-grief/ ) to appear on Freshly Pressed on the WordPress.com home page.

Thanks for sharing this — it’s simple, succinct, and quite touching. It will appear on Freshly Pressed in the next day or two, so get ready to welcome your new readers.

This line caught me in particular: “My emotions are on a slow Ferris wheel ride, usually sliding down into sadness on Saturdays, the day he died — a day that apparently is etched in my very psyche — and then a gradual climb to hope and possibility on Monday and Tuesday.”

FYI, I noticed a typo: “I find it impossible to pretend that this new experience of life alone is positive thing.” >> Add “a” before “positive”?

Thanks for making the internet a more interesting place!

–WordPress.com

***

I’ve been Freshly Pressed three other times: I Am a Three-Month Grief Survivor, I Am a Six-Month Grief Survivor, and A Perfect Grasp of Storytelling, so when I read the email, I chuckled to myself and thought, “What? Like it’s hard?” (Remember Reese Witherspoon’s line in Legally Blonde. Her ex-boyfriend says in amazement, “You got into Harvard Law?” and she responds, “What? Like it’s hard?”)

I don’t mean to be facetious, because getting Freshly Pressed is hard. There are a more than a million new posts every day from a half a million bloggers. Most people won’t get pressed once, let alone three or four times.

All four times, the honor came as a surprise, but the truth is, I had prepared for such an eventuality by following the guidelines in “So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.” Until I read that article, I’d never used photos in my posts, but now taking the perfect photo to accompany my words has become an art in itself. I’ve always aimed for eye-catching headlines and typo-free text (oops, I missed one this time, but luckily they caught it), but I don’t always have a strong point of view. (I don’t much like contention.) Apparently, though, I’ve managed to strike the right chord with the WordPress editors four times, and you can, too. Just keep blogging, telling your truth, letting yourself be vulnerable, and your day will come.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the conspiracy novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+

Posted in being me, blogging, internet, writing. Tags: "What? Like it's hard?", adding photos to blog posts, freshly pressed, Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon. 16 Comments »

UnSocial Networking

November 29, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m starting to play rough with Facebook, unfriending people with the same abandon I once friended them — sort of reverse social networking. (Would this be called Unsocial Networking or Social UnNetworking?) Start with 5000 people at random, and then one by one, remove the annoying ones. You know the people I mean:

1. The authors who send you one message after another asking you to like their FB page, download their book, check out their website, read their blog. I’m not talking about notifications or the posts that show up in your feed, but repeated private messages. I now have a new policy: if you spam me once, I might let it go if I know you or if I’m in a good mood, but if you send the same spam message a second time, I will unfriend you. Friends don’t spam friends.

2. The rabid political lobbyists, those who are always lobbying for their party, their agendas, their preferred candidates, their right or left wing propaganda. These people aren’t interested in being friends. They want power, even if at one remove.

3. The uncompromising religious folk, those who never acknowledge that another person’s religious beliefs might be as sacred as their own. These people remind me of the folk in Emo Phillips joke. This joke was voted the best God joke ever, but was not credited to Emo Phillips, and truly, it’s such a classic, he needs to be acknowledged as the author. I don’t remember many comedians, but I do remember the delightfully waifish Emo telling this story:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

I’m now down to about 1650 friends on Facebook, and who knows, at the rate I’m pushing people off the bridge, I might end up with only one or two hundred connections, but those will be real friends — people I enjoy following, whose blogs I read, and whose opinions I respect. And never, ever, do they spam me or lobby me or disrespect my beliefs or unbeliefs.

***