Virginia Breeze

April 30, 2008

There is a lot of discussion about links and finding relevant and quality links to advance page rank. So I am going to try to do it the right way and see how things go. If you received a link to this page it means that I have taken a close look at your blog and like it a lot.

In my humble opinion we have similar blogs and they both contain quality posts. Maybe you agree. Maybe you don’t. But I hope you will look at this blog and consider the possibility that we do.

Depending on when you read this post I may have found none, one, ten or more blogs that fit the bill. So whatever the number is they will be linked up with this blog and they can be linked up with your blog too if both sides agree.

If things are just starting when you read this I can offer you two PR 4 links .

This is my main blog and it’s called Virginia Breeze (PR4) htp://davidnotes.com. It contains writing about our lives in Virginia, quality photos, poetry and writing about other things including shows like American Idol and The Tudors. We watch a lot of movies prior to the Academy Awards and I also write about them. This blog was started in the summer of 2007 and I am pretty dedicated to its growth in the coming years.

I also have a photoblog called PhotoLink Love (PR4) and will be looking for other photoblogs to link to it. http://photolinklove.com

I have a humor blog called NewsLink Briefs (PR3) that was started in late February and I will be looking for great humor blogs to link to it. http://newslinkbriefs.com

I use Wordtracker and try to come up with good keywords. It seems to be working well but I can always do better. And higher PR is a step in that direction as we all know.

So if I have contacted you let me know how you feel about this. And good luck with your blogging efforts. I enjoyed my visit to your blog.

And if you just happened by here and are reading this let me ask you a question. How many times have you discovered a blog that had relevant and quality content and NOT asked the author to exchange links?

If you are like me it has happened quite a bit. Why is that? I had the feeling for a while that my blogroll should be for close blogging friends so we could support each other. So it was an emotional decision instead of a logical and mathematical (statistical) decision.

And I also linked to a few blogs that were “way up there” and had no interest in returning the favor.

I hope you will let me know if we have similar quality content. We can move this thing forward and the next time a keyword goes up to Google it will land on page one and stay there awhile instead of going to page five where nobody will see it.

And lots more folks will read you posts and mine.

Update (two weeks later)

So it has been a couple of weeks since I did this page. And it has been a very good time blogging-wise. The blogroll has increased in size and the additions are very cool blogs. They fit here in terms of quality and relevance.

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We were off yesterday to see another movie with Academy Award talk swirling around it. This movie is the second one we have seen recently about the emotional crisis surrounding the move of a family member to a nursing home. Julie Christie played a married woman with Alzheimer’s disease. So she is up for the award in the Actress in a Leading Roll category.

And in The Savages Laura Linney is up for the same award for her role as the daughter of someone who needs to be placed in a nursing home.

Allen Page of course is also up for the award but her chances are not great I would say. And in her movie we are dealing with arrivals and not departures. Baby boomers will soon be transfixed with all sorts of ideas about nursing homes as thy approach en masse the realization that there are far fewer than are needed to care for them all.

For this reason alone I suggest the award will head in this direction.

The movie The Savages we found very interesting and entertaining to a degree. There was a scene in an airplane that prompted me to head for the popcorn machine. We have two adults who are confronted with the need to care for the father who left them long ago. And they are surprisingly compassionate.

They grow during the movie. That is one of its most satisfying features. And they manage to resolve the crisis with some help from Medicaid. Their father has nothing so there are no battles over property or savings.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as Juno but it was better by far than Away From Her with Julie Christie.

The other two nominees deserve another post. So here are some videos that I thought were pretty good. My good buddy YouTube is a real help these days.

And here is a review of The Savages in the NY Times if you want to read maybe a real review of the movie before you go see it.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/movies/28sava.html

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This is so cool. I have a new toy this morning. And I now understand why YouTube is such a phenomenal deal. For instance Beth and I went to see Juno as we go about seeing Academy Award nominated films. It was a great film and thought provoking at times.

Juno is a beautiful young woman and she reminded me for some reason of Bridget Bardot although she has a very outgoing personality and relies not a bit on her beauty. But maybe I am out in left field (again). Who knows? So now I can add a trailer from the movie and you can decide what position I am playing on the field. And, more importantly, you can decide whether you are interested in the film.

Some readers say that “Nobody talks like this”. Juno’s mind does work very quickly and she has an interesting vocabulary. But she is very intelligent and could conceivably talk this way if she was a real person. She certainly demonstrates her smarts in the movie by unwrapping the perspective parents of her child. She gets to the bottom of their situation with just a few visits and is able to make an informed decision about them. W0uld this happen in real life? Ever? It’s very doubtful. And this is where the movie stretches credibility.

However I think we go to movies expecting to have our credibility stretched. We can always say it is conceivable if not credible. Stranger things have happened and will again within a couple of minutes somewhere in the world. Here’s the trailer.

It is early Saturday morning and I sit here trying to undo some of the mess I have created in the past week. It is not worth getting into the sad details but the whole situation was prompted by the idea of adding YouTube music videos here. And it seemed like many of them would not fit in this three column template. The template is great in most regards so it’s not going anywhere. And then I decided to put the videos over on my other blog. It has only two columns and photos and videos tend to fit better. But going back and forth is not good. It’s just not good. Google would probably wonder what was going on after awhile and start uninviting me to the dance.

So I took a deep breath and went to YouTube prepared to read some instructions and figure out what I could do to fit all these wonderful music videos in Virginia Breeze. And I am happy to say it has worked out pretty well to this point.

It is simply a matter of creating a custom music video player and embedding it in a post. Then (and this is the most important part) I had to change the values for width and height before closing up the post. I quickly learned that once this was done you can never mess around with the post again. If ANYTHING is changed or modified it will blow the thing up. At least that is my experience.

I also was able to create lists of music once I established an account. I now have a list of Andrea Bocelli videos and a list of Jordin Sparks videos for example . And it is fun to add to them and also create new lists. One thing that is really helpful is the fact that you can add music videos to your lists later on and they automatically are added to the custom player in your blog.

So here is the music video I created for Jordin and her new CD. She reports that it has reached platinum status. I have no idea how many copies that would be and maybe will look it up if things ever reach a relaxed status around here. Here is an example of a custom player loaded with music videos. You choose the color and embed it in the Code section of the Write Post section. And then as I said you do everything you need to do. It reminds me of those movies where they set demolition charges and wire everything up. They check it about fifty times and then throw the switch. Except hopefully in this case the explosion does not happen.

If I do make a mistake and need to “Go back in” it’s simple enough to go back to my account and grab the embed code again. Maybe there is a simpler way but I would not know.

So if a word is misspelled and I see it later it’s too bad Jack. Maybe I better make sure right now and then we will try to leave a video player here.

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More Writing About Blogging

http://davidnotes.com/2008/02/18/technorati-authority-how-to-increase-it-increase-traffic-too/

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