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.

*

*

***

It has been quite awhile since I have ruminated in a random fashion here at Virginia Breeze. “Why is that?” you might ask. But a better question might be “Why are you pretending that we are talking to you?”. And I don’t know the answer to that question to be perfectly honest. Except perhaps it has something to do with my widgets. Because ever since I did what they asked and upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 some of my widgets have been complaining. And some of them haven’t been doing what they are supposed to do. And who can blame them? They had no idea when they were born that someday they would have to deal with Wordpress 2.5. How could they anticipate what would be required of them?

So they have slowed down certain processes. And when I change something in the sidebar it takes about twenty minutes for it to show up. There’s a delayed reaction as WP 2.5 digests the new code and spits it out again in the sidebar.

All of this is pretty boring I know. But I just want YOU to know that if you don’t see something around here like a piece of your last post in the comment you made it’s not my fault. (And if I go nuts later tonight you will understand why).

And I also would like to tell you about a guy who is my hero. I don’t know him personally but I see him all the time. Usually he is coming in the opposite direction as I cross the James River close to our home. And he usually is wearing an Eskimo parka with a scarf that covers most of his face.

And there is a very good reason for him to dress this way. He drives a tiny little motorbike with twenty inch wheels. I guess it is his sole mode of transportation because he drives it all year round. He is hunched over this thing with his knees sticking up in the air and his scarf blowing in the breeze as he flies across the bridge at about twenty miles per hour. The rest of us are going about fifty in our cars and it’s a very narrow bridge. One line either way and no room for bicycles either. It’s a very old bridge and it is full of potholes.

When I see this guy coming I couldn’t be more impressed if he was a biker in leather driving a Harley with huge handlebars and tires making a big racket as he goes sixty miles per hour on the back wheel.

I’ve been carrying my Nikon D70 on the passenger seat hoping I can get a photo of him as he navigates the bridge. But it is a very narrow passage and I am afraid I might run over him while trying to drive and focus the camera at the same time.

So that idea is out the window. You will just have to go with the picture I have tried to draw for you in your mind’s eye. Because writing is an ancient form of photography.

And I am the Ancient Mariner.

Sorry. But I did warn you.

Back to the widgets.

*

*

***

Permalink Views

1. 5285 Virginia Animal Wildlife Photo/ Bear Poses With A Stick
2. 2450 Writing In Journal/ Pictures Of Christmas
3. 1724 StumbleUpon Manifesto
4. 1621 Men and Crying
5. 1543 Redskins VS. Cowboys/ Free Prediction Of The Future
6. 724 Virginia Animal Wildlife Photo/ My Favorite Commercial
7. 679 Poems About A Boss / A Goodbye Boss Poem
8. 572 Football Games And Commercials
9. 301 Andrea Bocelli Listen/ A Great Sound
10. 259 Virginia Beach And The Things We Love

Category Views

1. 270 Dating And Thanksgiving / What’s It All About?
2. 200 Very Cool (Or Hot) Photos Of Mars
3. 181 Revisiting Martha Stewart and MySpoogle
4. 160 Poems About A Boss / A Goodbye Boss Poem
5. 157 Tag/ You’re It/ Time To Split
6. 155 Best Fall Foliage/Autumn In Repose
7. 144 I AM Glad I Am Not A Turkey/ My Search Engine Keywords
8. 134 Bad Neighborhood Is Working
9. 130 Virginia Animal Wildlife Photo/ Bear Poses With A Stick
10. 127

Number 10 never will follow along when I copy/paste this file into the post. It’s just another one of those mysteries. But being active in Blog Land is for me something that is full of mysteries. There are so many things going on that I do not understand. It truly is a miracle that this blog functions as well as it does.

There are basic things that go wrong all the time. I have been learning about Google Analytics and feeling pretty good about it. But now the calendars have disappeared. I was using them to track different lengths of time. Maybe they didn’t like that because they sure did go away.

We have a little person with us for a few days so The Wizard Of Oz is again going in the next room. It was on last night. And it will be on tonight, tomorrow and the next day. She is not interested in Jordin Sparks. Most five year olds don’t even know who she is and don’t care. But I care and I’m going to be supportive. Jordin sang at the Kennedy Center Awards Show the other night. She came out and sang for Diana Ross who was being honored. When she finished she looked up at Diana and said, “I love you” . Then she started walking out and crying at the same time. This girl cries a lot. She used to cry every week on American Idol when someone was kicked off. I used to wonder if she would cry when she was kicked off. But it never happened because she won.

And she cried plenty when that happened. I’m hoping that she wasn’t crying the other evening because she felt like she hadn’t done well. Because she was good. Her lower range doesn’t project like her upper range. But once she gets going up there in the loft it is amazing stuff. Scorsese was being honored and he just shook his head when she went through one amazing run near the end. Diana was sitting right next to him and probably filled him in on the fact that she is only 18 years old and she has all the talent in the world. Diana loves Jordin. She lit up the room with her smile when Jordin said she loved her. They have known each other for at least nine months now since Diana was on American Idol last year. I’m thinking Diana asked for her to be on the show.

Performing before the President and the rest of that crowd has got to be a bit intimidating for an eighteen year old who one year ago was standing in lines and being told she wasn’t good enough.

One of my goals before I am shipped off to Amateur Writer’s Paradise is to have dinner with Jordin Sparks. It can be a group affair but I need to have an opportunity to talk to her. Or listen to her. Either way is fine. Mostly it will just be a diversion so I can look at her. “This is Jordin Sparks! And she is exactly the way she seems on video. Except she is much closer!”

Would I rather have dinner with anyone else except my wife? No. Sorry. Actually it may be that this entire effort with the blog is just a platform for me to say “Jordin when you next are in Virginia let’s all go out and have a wonderful dinner! It’s on me and you can bring Mom, Dad, Bro and anybody else you like.”

If she ever reads this. Having dinner with Beth and Jordin together would just about make my life complete. I’m sure there is a lot of curiosity about Beth the former rock star who is so afraid of appearing on the internet. What does she look like? Jordin! You can see her in person and find out!! Believe me she is very beautiful too.

Well, I must get back to increasing my page rank with Google. Why? I bet you know the answer. I’m sorry. But when I get started with Jordin I need to write about it. She is such an amazing human being.

And I am writing a note to someone. You!

But this has also become one of my best keyphrases and so I use it. I suppose you could use it too if you wanted to try it. We could hang out in Google together in one of the billions of pages out there. Lately I have discovered the good that keywords can do and have much more traffic. Why did it take so long?

The Grand Design

It’s all part of the Grand Design. Why have many more folks come here when this blog was still wandering around and waiting for a great new template? And all the different parts needed to be linked together so readers can easily travel deep into what’s here. But did I plan it this way? No. I didn’t have a clue about how things would go. The Grand Design is a lot bigger than this blog and it leads us all to better days. Always. We can see it all around us in nature. And if we just get out of the way it will work its magic.

This is the optimist inside me going to work. How would I feel in the year 1915 as we were getting ready for war, depression, war again and then cold war? This is progress? If you lived long enough it was surely progress. We have left a very authoritarian male driven world behind in many places. But bad things can still happen. And we will certainly die someday. Is that progress? Yes, actually, I think it is. They were talking about a new strain of flu on the radio a few days ago. A killer bug. Let’s imagine that it somehow spread through our world and thousands died. What sort of progress would that be?

It would be terrible, of course, for families and friends. If something happened to Beth and the children I would not survive. But they would be in a much better place enjoying the bright lights and freedom from so much of the misery on this mudball of a planet. And I would be hoping to join them very soon. I might have to volunteer to help the sick and forget to wear my mask if all my family left me here. Also our world would become a less superficial place. Many people would start looking for spiritual solace and understanding. There would be terrible suffering but in the end the Grand Design would pull us all through. The further back we look the more progress we see.

Christmas Is A Time For Giving

Why did I get off on this? It seems rather dark for the week before Christmas. Christmas is a time of celebration about the birth of God’s son in one of these humble little bags of bones we carry around with such pride. But look what happened to that beautiful child in just a few short decades. Is the darkness so far off on this day that is bright with laughter and decorations?

My suggestion for this holiday is to think of the person you know who is the most genuinely needy. Someone who is suffering through trials and tribulations. And you wonder why because they don’t seem to deserve it. And give them a large gift of cash inside a nice Christmas card. Take the money you were going to spend the next time you went to the electronics store and give it to them. Then sit back and imagine how they are going to feel when they receive it. Enjoy thinking about their joy. Oh yes. Suddenly the Christmas Spirit has arrived. And it pours down upon us.

A Woman’s Courageous Act And Angels Watch

I have been thinking about the lovely security guard in the church who put a stop to the mass murderer who arrived at her sanctuary armed with his assault rifle and much more. She recalls how she prayed and then confronted him with her little gun while everyone else was looking for the nearest window.

Her hands did not shake. Her heart was full of the courage that God gave her in this moment. And she took him down. But this is the thing I find so wonderful. She didn’t kill him. Once he discovered he was shot he killed himself. He ran like they all do behind that invisible door seeking to avoid all consequences for evil deeds.

So she doesn’t have to live with the knowledge that she killed a fellow human being however much of a mutant he must have been. She doesn’t have to wake up every day with this knowledge. This could be God’s response to the idea that you should never kill another human being. Remember the Quakers? What would they have done? Sat there and waited for the end?

A Happy And Meaningful Christmas

I like this ending better. And now I am off to enjoy another beautiful day here in Virginia. We have had record temperatures and it seems like just another wonderful autumn day. No humidity. Where is all the ice on the other side of the mountains? Is it not coming at all?

And tonight we go to our club for Christmas carols, food and drink. Friends and ritual gatherings to celebrate another year brought home and packed away. So many years all packed away.

And hopefully many more before we move on towards a more perfect life and leave our worried little bodies behind.

I hope you have a meaningful Christmas. And please feel free to respond to my Christmas message. I have read several blogs lately that have encouraged bloggers to introduce a little controversy into their blogs. Give readers something they might want to respond to in a meaningful way. And so I have tried to do it here.

So let’s hear your voices out their in Cricketland. You know why I call it that don’t you?