Changing the header

You might remember me mentioning a website about blogging a few posts back. Anyway they have  a 31 day blogger challenge to get you started on your blog. And challenge one was basically change your blog description or elevator pitch as they call it.

Or create one if you didn't have a description. Well I tend to go with lengthy, wise and looong quotes. Half a page from some great mind of humanity is my blog description. Well that doesn't tell people what your blog is about and that might be problem for people who have never seen your blog before.

Your blog has a title in the header but also a blog description. And that description needs to tell your potential readers in a sentence or two what you blog is about and what makes it interesting for them to read.

So I got about four blogs that needed a relevant description what they are about. It took me a couple of days to figure out four descriptions for each one of my blogs. Well technically it's the same blog but in different language and blog portals. So they were custom fitted for each blog and I think it worked out rather well. Links to the right...

Busy day

Well today was sort of a busy  day but we got everything done that we had scheduled to do =).

A pro blogger

As some of my readers may have noticed I've have had a bloggers block for the last few years or more truthfully most of this decade. Not that I think any of my readers are still around due to the not so frequent updates.

However I found this website or I actually fond their podcast first on how to improve you blogging. It's called ProBlogger and I'm truly impressed and inspired to start blogging more frequently again. With 8,000 blogging advice posts, over 100 podcast episodes, a community with over 300,000 bloggers, Facebook group (82,000 members), Twitter account (236,000 followers) and some other web sites, this got to be the Internet Bible of blogging. What you can't learn here you can't learn anywhere else.

I think I have some reading to do and some blogging =)

Web browsers

It's been a long time since I've written anything here but I thought I would say a few things about web browsers. First of all Chrome works better on Android phones than other browsers since they are both made by Google. For example the only web browser on your Android phone you can download pictures with is Chrome. According to Google they haven't disabled  that option for other browsers but some functions works better with Chrome. So on my phone I'm stuck with Chrome because I want to have the ability to download pictures.

Don't get me wrong Chrome for PC:s is a fast browser and very much integrated into Google. And you can easily sync your bookmarks, just log into Google in Chrome on any device and it's all there. So that's why I have been using Chrome on my laptop as the default browser.

However as a blogger who has the ambition to write blog posts in three different languages, the spellchecking function doesn't work that well. It underlines the words that are spelled wrong but doesn't give any suggestions. And for Finnish there's no spell checker at all, which is the language I definitely need to improve.

So I'm now using Firefox on my laptop...

Lazy

I'm sorry for being a lazy blogger lately. Well I'm still lazy. But I really think I should make a serious attempt of trying to improve my knowledge of the Finnish language. I really need to do that and since my blogging is generally quite slow these days, why not? So if you speak it or just understand it, please check out Pohjoismaisesta näkökulmasta. And if you don't, please hang around this blog for some more blog posts in English, eventually, now and then...

Yeah I know this sounded a bit too commercial but it's a blog post, I'm posting =).

Time to dust of the old joystick

I'm following Steam on Twitter and in yesterdays Twitter stream I noticed a couple of interesting things. Microsoft Flight Simulator X can now be found on Steam and it has been there for a couple of months. It's also on sale this weekend for 4.99€. It's of course called Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition. It contains the original game and all the official add-ons (deluxe, gold and acceleration) apart from the SDK. Time to dust of the old joystick this weekend, by the way a Saitek Cyborg 3D. It's old and no precision tool for the hardcore simmer but it's very sturdy and has more buttons I can remember for a casual simmer like me.

Blogging on my phone is not that great

Lately on the Windows Phone blogosphere there have arisen a few problems, mainly with Blogger. The is that if you load this page I'm on now writing my blogpost (on my PC) you see a bar above this text where you can insert a link or a photo, they no longer work. I don't know if it's because Microsoft did some changes to their web browser on WP or Google made their blog writing page less accessible for either IE or smart phones in general. Short story, not being able to post links or pictures in you blog is bad. There are some workarounds and several step processes to work around this but on your phone it's too tedious. Well HBlog works...

The blog of the mobile generation

With the common use of smart phones today the internet has moved in part from people's desks to their pockets. No longer do we need to go home and start up our desktop computer in order to go online.

And with that so have some blogs moved along. Smart phones are great for reading and commenting blogs. However writing an actual blog post on your smart phone takes time.

So the blogs got shorter. There was a micro-blog service released before smart phones became common. We all know it, it's called Twitter. Today Twitter and smart phones are a perfect match. You may not produce lengthy, intelligent and well thought out blog posts like we did when we blogged a decade ago. Time changes and Twitter is the blog of the mobile generation.

Winter is here

Well winter have been here a month but now we are getting snow on a a daily basis and not that overwhelming. Well some days we have rain. From an optimistic point of view that means less snow shoveling. It's not hat cold either so it's fun for the kids playing outside in the snow.

New name

You may have noticed I have changed the name of my blog. Yesterday I came up with the idea to specialize my blogs. The Finnish one would be about everyday stuff, a bit of everything so I can improve my Finnish langauge skills by learning new words and new grammar. I'm keeping that idea.

My Swedish blog would be about fitness, training and health. Great idea, I even changed the name of the blog to something more fitness oriented. I do came to realize  there's a lot of other stuff I want to write about too. And eventually I would run out of of fitness stuff to write about. Turning into a fitness blog sorts of constrict other things I want to write about. It is still a good idea so whenever I want to write about exercise and health it will happen in that blog, nowhere else.

The last idea was  my worst. Turning this one into a World of Warcraft blog. It's what I do with most of my free time when I'm not spending it with my family and I also write a lot about it on Facebook. Yes I did the World of Warcraft name change there too. And I probably would have run out of ideas to write about in a blog after a few posts. But part of that idea was good. When I write about World of Warcraft it will happen here.

As a result of this I changed the name of all my blogs to the same name, exactly the same name in 3 languages. They are now more streamlined and similar than they have ever been, because I tried to diverse them. Calling them Nordic also gives a broader view on things, less local, more regional.  Hmm did that sound too much like a politician? Doesn't matter really, it's my blog.

A healthier life

Yes this is New Year's resolutions time. And a few of them actually started the later part of last year. So these were not invented on New Years Eve. First of all I hired a gym card at the local gym. From 15th December to 18th January. Working well so far. I'm not sure if I will seek a permanent  membership but so far I like going there.

Another thing with living a healthier life is eating healthy. That is not an issue really except eating too much of the healthy food. So being more strict with the meal schedule have to be imposed. That is not always possible with 3 kids and shift work but I'll try when I can.

And the last thing for this blog post. My bloggers block. Having goals and a schedule is important when you want to achieve something. That goes for training, eating, blogging and many other things in life. Aim high but be realistic. Aim to high and you will quit. Be all realistic and aim too low and you won't change anything. But I want change so this is how I will bring change to my blogs. One blog post per every 10 day period for mu blog in English AND for my blog in Swedish. So that is 3 blog posts per month for this blog. If you read my Swedish blog you will find 3 blog posts there too. I also intend to improve my Finnish language skills this year so there I will try to post at least 1 blog post per day. I know it's not always possible but learning a language that is so different from your own mother tongue requires time and dedication.

White Christmas

It looks like we are having a white Christmas. Or we are definitely having a white Christmas. With about 20 centimeters of snow. Temperatures from -3 C to -10 C over Christmas and more snow on Christmas eve. It's looking good.