Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

I have made my thought process on the development of my website pretty transparent since I launched.

• It has an overriding theme instead of a subject, and I have a goal of writing at least one ‘content’ post per day.
• It is a commercial site with the eventual goal of supporting my family.
• It has as its main idea ‘Personal happiness is valuable, achievable and extendable to the world.’
• It honors a sense of fun without meanness.
• Each article comes from a place of compassion even in anger.
• Personal life affects professional life affects political life affects personal life.
• Shopping is fun and providing ways to find deals on line is a service I enjoy providing.
• Giving away stuff is also fun and something I enjoy doing for my readers.
• Alerting people to situations where their help can make a difference is important.
• Every post should add value to readers’ lives.
• I want a community to form around this website that shares these ideals.

So, to put it mildly, I have some ambitious goals around this website, which run into two primary barriers: available time and organization of ideas. And of course, limits on talent, but I do what I can with what I have.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

My sister in law Ann, jumping for joy.

I was having a conversation about content with an old friend. ‘They say,‘ she said, ‘that websites should be focused on one narrow topic.’

So I  decided to build a website deliberately left as broad as possible within the general theme of living life fully and with compassion toward others and attention to the issues around us. You know, ‘shared joy’ and ‘shared pain’ and ‘shared life’. All that jazz. (Thanks again, Spider Robinson, for the inspiration.) Go contrarian me. My friend laughed, and then decided it was a good idea after all. 

Read the rest of this entry »