Lorelle challenged me. Me! I’ll show her. I can write about traveling. After all, I’ve been places. Let’s see. Yes, there was that trip…and that one. Ahhh! Dynamite!

You know how in narratives the reader sometimes has the upper hand on the character? The piece of the story the reader knows but the character doesn’t seem privy to because of his or her shortcomings?  This is not one of those stories. I know what’s happening, but as the reader you will have no clue til the end. However, there’s a lesson in there. Somewhere.

A Mysterious Dragging

One evening, a friend and I had been driving for a few hours on a main interstate that bisects Illinois. It was dark. We were approaching a major city, less than ten miles ahead of us. My friend was smoking. It was winter. The air was cold coming through the sliver of an opening on the passenger side. Up ahead a car was in the right lane, while we moved along in the left. As we drew closer, I could see something hanging down from the driver’s side door, bouncing along the interstate asphalt.

It had to be the driver’s coat. They must of had one of those long coats, with the floppy tails. A business man for sure. The driver had shut their coat in the door. I saw their license plates–Ohio. How could this person drive from Ohio cross an entire state without shifting out of his coat? He must be damned uncomfortable.

“What is that hanging out their door?” I asked my carmate.

“Not sure. Looks like he shut something in his door.” It looked rubbery as it slid and fluidly bounced along the interstate. In the darkness the form of it began to take shape. It looked like a stuffed toy a child would carry. One of those old monkeys with the long tails and the short fur. Or, maybe it wasn’t stuffed.

Unfortunately for the Ohio driver, when they packed their Cadillac full of clothes and necessities for their trip, they did so in the comfort of their garage. The warm garage that the family cat had access to from the utility room door. And in that cold January evening when they had packed everything in the trunk. They started their car and closed the door. However they closed it on the cat’s tail.

The new Cadillac had appealed to that driver. When they took it off the lot for their test drive, they loved how it shut out the sounds of the world. How the traffic seemed to fall away like a dream.

My friend and I tried to inform the Ohio man, with his eye beams focused straight ahead. He ignored our horns and waving hands. Our blinking headlights, until at the dawn of that city, we rushed off the exit ramp.

 So how does this story and challenge pertain to making our blog more successful. Easy. There’s a dynamite lesson in that story for any blogger. The destination seems to matter the most. However, we should know exactly what we had to give up in order to get there.

Look out! Coming through!

 Places logo on header. Steps away for a look. Grabs it by the corner. Straightens it.

In the famous words of The Dude, “It really ties the (site) room together!”

What does everyone think? I love it. And I have three separate iterations to choose from when I’m marketing my blog on other people’s sites.  I’ve begun creating a 125×125 ad for inclusion on EntreCard. I’ll be buying up some cheap ad real estate just as soon as I have more of my draft posts completed and published to the blogging world.

How Can a Logo Explode Your Potential?

A logo creates your persona to the world. It embodies the essence of your blog in a quick and easy to identify manner. For instance, this logo guessing game assumes you can put the company name to the logo. We can probably get the majority of logos right. Why? Because we are inundated with their images throughout our life. Most of those companies have huge budgets that allow them to plaster their logo in all types of media. We can do our part by exchanging ads with up-and-coming blogs (hint, hint), use our logos in our signatures on forums, and use the logo on comment forms when available.

Your logo should be your footprint on the internet, a trail for others to find you.

A logo has to appeal to our visual taste buds. The aesthetic quality of the logo may do more for our site’s popularity than we realize. Let’s assume we dress our blogs up to attract the right readers. Some of us tempt these readers into our RSS feeds with candy (contests, free giveaways, etc.). While this works for a time, the real attraction comes when a few criteria are met. All of which combine to form a loyal readership.

3 Things that Attract Readers to Blogs

1. Love at first site (the visual appeal.)
2. A great smile (the logo and graphics.)
3. Brains (the content that makes them think, write, come-back, question their beliefs, write like maniacs, buy this, buy that, sell this, offer that, and most of all talk about your blog!)

These three things can be met with time, effort, and through humility. We can ask for help.

Imagine going to a site that has a discombobulated design, poor graphics, atrocious colors (one’s our aunt’s curtains resemble), but good content. We may grab the feed in a reader, but maybe not.

The whole package will attract Mr. Right Reader. What can you do to make your blog more attractive?

Naming is the process of assigning a particular word or phrase to a particular object or property. This can be quite deliberate or a natural process that occurs in the flow of life as some phenomenon comes to the attention of the users of a language. Many new words or phrases come into existence during translation as attempts are made to express concepts from one language in another.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name

Last night, I talked with my wife about my new blog, Geeks’ End. I wasn’t satisfied with the name, I told her. How will people relate to the name? Will they remember it for its simplicity or will it be forgotten for its tiresomeness? We talked a bit more, and we decided that I should choose a new name with a little more forethought. So that’s exactly what we did. We discussed the following criteria for my new domain name.

The domain name should…

1. be memorable.
2. have a meme that could be used to market the blog. (Geeks’ End was too confusing. I needed something that strung up lights and shocked you when you plugged in to the socket.)
3. not be cheesy (too much).
4. be easy to type.
5. be available for purchase, preferably below the $50 range. (sorry blog.us, maybe next time)
6. appeal to me! 

We both decided the meme would be my first name coupled with a word that conveyed excitement. I wanted people to feel the burst of energy when they came to my site. We went through a few variations, including Jason Nice, Jason Hardcore, until finally hitting on, Jason Boom. My wife came up with the name,like it popped through her eyeballs. Her eyes dancing with the idea of it. Jason Boom, I rolled the name around my mind for a while. I could have a character to make the blog more exciting, lively. I could market the blog using all the imagery of a explosions, bombs, fire. I loved it.

I’ve bought the www.jasonboom.com domain and transfered the www.geeksend.com site over to it. Wordpress migrated relatively simply. However, the site does have a few problems updating comment counts, and displaying the title correctly in the browser title bar.

Unfortunately, my RSS feed had to change on feedburner, so please resubscribe using the link on the right or below the post. And don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comment section.

UPDATE: I realize the title bar name wasn’t showing up because there was no value in the All in One SEO plugin field for title. It’s been fixed!

I woke this Sunday morning with a strong desire to see what key bloggers had written to their blogs. It is Sunday afterall and what blogger doesn’t give it their best on Sunday? As I was sifting through blogs, I read the Blogging Tips post from the Deborah Ng on how she spends her normal days. For her, the idea of it being Sunday seemed to call upon the other days of the week in a type of review. Does this separate Sunday from weekdays for every blogger? Let’s look at some more evidence…

Well, Daniel at DailyBlogTips offered us links to help grow our blogging community. The post seems to say, yes, it is Sunday–my day off. Very well…maybe Daniel will return later today with more helpful links. Afterall, they were useful.

Does Sunday mean more downtime from blogging or does it mean more substance, more bang for your virtual buck, more pizzazz?

Chris Brogan begins the day with a part in a series of posts regarding audio and video usage in your business. While the article suspends the meme of the day–Sunday is relaxing, calming, not deep blogging–I can’t help but feel it was written on a Thursday morning. It just doesn’t have the feel of a Sunday post. Good writing, though, Chris.

Chris Guthrie took the day off (so far–it is only noon CST). He did post on Saturday, regarding a contest he’s holding to give away some ad space on his site. Well, in my Sunday post I’ve just possibly set myself up with ten entries into that contest. How-you-like-that? Now that’s Sunday blogging!

I have not heard a ‘present’ from Lorelle on Wordpress today. She is presumed absent as well.

Daniel Rowse, however, has posted on Monday. His exact time of posting?

Written on January 14th, 2008 at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse

That’s right. He posted at 12:01, thus making that a post for Monday, not Sunday. I cannot accept his post as a sign of the Sundays. But, of course, there was a post on the 13th, which does qualify as the Sunday post for his blog. This, eventhough, I read it clearly on Saturday afternoon.

The ProBlogger post was clearly written on a Thursday morning, alongside Chris Brogan’s diatribe. But, for this Sunday, it wins.

The Blogging Game comes to you every Sunday morning, in an attempt to choose the best post of a randomly selected group of blogs. If you would like to be included in the next Sunday’s humiliating roundup, just drop a comment and we’ll begin analyzing your Sunday post’s PH levels.

In the spirit of community, I’ve taken a picture of my home office. The majority of the furnishings came together during 2007. I’ve also shown the view of the shelves to my right, with the inspiring picture of the men working on a skyscraper. These men worked such dangerous jobs that no insurance company would cover them.

I use a Dell 19″ monitor with a Dell XPS 420 system, touting 2GB of RAM and 2.6 GHZ dual core processor. The laptop has a wide screen monitor and runs Windows XP (a fresh install - check later posts for more on that).