The Fearless Blogger

If I asked you to describe your idea of a “fearless” blogger, what type of person would come to mind?

Someone who feels powerless, paralyzed with fear, and overwhelmed by basic activities that intellectually should not be a problem to achieve?

That’s what I thought.

You read it here first. I’m done with pretending.

I call myself the Fearless Blogger. Yet, if I had to choose one word to sum up the past year of my life, that word would be “afraid”.

That’s not a Fearless Blogger. That’s a fraud.
It’s much easier to admit that to you now – the hardest part had been admitting it to myself.

Now that I’ve come clean, it’s time to turn things around.  It’s time for me to live up to the moniker.

I’m not afraid anymore.
And now I’m ready to share my story.

These past few months have been focused on creating a healthy & balanced life for myself.  In other words, I’m choosing to make creating the life I want a higher priority than creating websites.

Part of this process included learning to accept the debilitating impact of my ADHD and OCD, and how to better manage them.  I choose not to let my diagnoses define me; still, I embrace that they’ve each had an integral influence on my life experience and perspective.

And now I’m ready to share my story, with hope that others like me might connect with it.  We can feel stronger when we know we’re not alone.

Yours Truly,
The Fearless Blogger

image credit: Sarah Rydgren

While I don’t feel the need to hide my ADHD, I don’t feel the need to hide behind my ADHD either.

This blog is my outlet to share my interests with the hope that others might find them interesting.  It’s where I stash my collection of ideas, resources and experiences – an eclectic assortment of things humorous, helpful, and/or enlightening. If I’ve benefited from something, it belongs here to give others the chance to benefit from it too.

I’m not “ADHD GIRL” and this is not “AN ADHD BlOG”, so I’ve never felt compelled to include anything ADHD-related in the collection. At least not until recently.

These days, understanding and managing my ADHD is pretty much a full time job for me. My current priorities revolve around finding the right tools and learning the right skill sets to help me structure my life to allow for my brain’s “quirks”, instead of constantly fighting against them.

As a result, I find myself holding back from adding the majority of my recent ideas, resources and experiences to the others in my collection; since more often than not, they are in some way, shape, or form, related to ADHD. MY ADHD to be specific.

image credit: Lauren Murphy

I’m growing less comfortable with this approach, however.

If The Fearless Blogger is intended to be a reflection of my interests, omitting the chunks related to ADHD twists that reflection into something you’d get from a fun house mirror.

Furthermore, I’m holding back information and experiences that someone else might benefit from – or perhaps even find comfort with.

I’m choosing to change that.

As of today, I’m adding a new flavor to the blog.

My hope is that while it may not be the flavor you were craving when you initially stopped by, you’ll be able to appreciate (or even enjoy) it nonetheless.

image credit: Sarah Macmillan

As an under-employed, aspiring blogger, it’s occurred to me more than once that I’d gladly help spread the word about local eateries in exchange for an occasional free meal.

It’s also occurred to me that businesses might do well to attract people to their establishments by connecting with active tweeters, bloggers, social-media addicts, etc. to help fill their tables on slow nights – and get some publicity in the process.

Seems that the good folks at TasteCasting agree:

TasteCasting combines socially networked people and the social media platforms and applications they use to help establishments build awareness, announce grand openings, introduce new menu items, distribute special offers and encourage people to visit the establishment.

read more

A journalist that wore two hats

In her blog Save the Media , Gina Chen shares  10 ‘Journalism rules’ you can break on your blog.

As an intro to these rules, Gina writes:

there’s a part of me that loves blogging because you’re allowed to break the journalism rules. In fact, I’d argue the best bloggers break them regularly because blogging isn’t a news story; it shouldn’t read like one; it shouldn’t look like one.

At a high level, Gina encourages taking advantage of the dynamic, interactive and community qualities of the web when writing for a blog. I encourage you to view the post to read the list in full – below is a summary of her 10 rules:

1. Use partial or fake names
2. Tell part of the story
3. Insert opinion
4. Link to a report or news release rather than rewrite it
5. Link to background rather than repeat it
6. Link to the enemy
7. Use second person; heck, use first person
8. Get personal
9. Answer your critics or supporters
10. Fix your mistakes rather than just publish a correction

As newspapers are shutting their doors and mainstream media is hopping onto the social media bandwagon, this will become an increasing relevant issue in the near future. It seems natural that a new set of rules begin to emerge. read more

In the past couple of weeks a number of WordPress plugins have been surfacing to search and “collect” tweets which include blog links so that they can be displayed with the corresponding blog post.

I’m a big fan of anything that helps consolidate the conversation and give a blogger visibility to any response/reaction to what they write.  I’ve been looking at the various Twitter/WordPress tools, both to find the best to include here as well as to write a review of what’s out there.

I’ve not yet played with them all, but regardless of what’s out there, I’m thinking (hoping) my search is over.

If all goes well, I’m sticking with Chat Catcher.

My decision has nothing to do with bells and whistles – it boils down to one word:

SERVICE