Time and space precludes me from getting in touch with each and every one of you, but I wanted to wish all my readers and online friends a very wonderful and Merry Christmas! The most blessed present I could ever get would be you guys for continuing to read my site and for putting up with my incoherent nonsense. Because of your support I have enjoyed unparalleled success this year, and now what was once unthinkable (living off my blog exclusively) has now been pushed to the realm of the possible. Who knows what next year might bring?

Thank you all for your kindness, your encouragement, your friendship and most of all, for recognizing my supreme awesomeness.

God bless you all!

Tags: blog, Christmas, God, lighthouse, readers, support
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 24 views )

Another Thanksgiving draws near, and once again it’s time to reflect on what I should be thankful for.

… well I got nothing.

No seriously, I do have a lot to be thankful for, especially this year. This was after all the year I finally became debt free, after having paid off my credit card, car and my college loan. It was the year my earnings from this blog reached inconceivable heights, making it possible for me to travel more frequently now and enjoy life in a way I never could before. For this I have you, my readers to thank. I still can’t quit my job just yet, but the extra income coupled with a debt free existence has made it possible now for me to go out and experience new and different things, and better yet, write about it too.

My health has also gotten much better as well. I thought I would be too tired, too sick to take on exhausting road trips and weekend getaways to God only knows where, but instead it’s become the exact opposite. The more I moved around, the better I felt and the more energy I had. In a way it broke my depression and lifted me out of this mental prison that I’ve built for myself for so long.

I’m thankful for finding a new hobby in geocaching too, to keep things interesting on my trips and find new places to explore that never would have occurred to me otherwise.

I’m thankful for my parents, who are all that I have left of a once huge family that had been lost through hate, estrangement and betrayal.

I am thankful for my beautiful and reliable SUV, which continues to guzzle gas and proudly leave it’s wide load of a carbon footprint for all to see.

I am thankful for Yankee Candles, pizza and cupcakes. And occasionally brownies too.

And of course, I am thankful to God my Father and my savior Jesus Christ, who has made all of the above things possible.

And I am thankful for the new year to come, the endless possibilities it might bright, and a hope that refuses to die, the hope that I will someday soon meet my dream girl.

Tags: christ, college loan, debt, depression, dream girl, energy, family, geocaching, God, health, income, Jesus, life, new year, parents, pizza, readers, road trip, thankful, thanks, Thanksgiving, travel, yankee candles
Categories: Gone Mobile
 
(  Print This Post | | 62 views )

One of the things people enjoy about my writing is my humor, so I thought I would only update my blog with humorous anecdotes that I knew would make people smile, and that approach would largely define my theme and what my site was about.

The problem with that though is that I have to be funny ALL the time, and that’s simply impossible for me.  There are times when I can be a laugh a minute, but there are also times when I’m somber, or times when I’m reflective, and plenty of times when I’m angry.  I know some readers would expect me to always be the same way all the time, and would run for the hills the moment I blog something that isn’t sunny or cheery or funny to them, that but that’s just not who I am.  My writing should reflect the overall spectrum of my personality, not just a portion of it.  Otherwise I’d be detracting from what this blog is about, and my blog entries would be far and few between.

So what is my blog about then?  It’s about my life’s walk.  It’s about my desire to see truth shine and justice prevail for those who have been wronged.  It’s about my desire to find the love of my life, to alter the path of destruction I’m currently on and find a new path instead, (and perhaps a new career too), even in the midst of what may be one of the darkest hours in U.S. history.

It’s about finding my place in a world that doesn’t want me, and my struggle to accept the truth that I am unwanted because I don’t belong here.  It’s about understanding God’s will for my life and struggling to believe His promises, even when none of them have come true.

It’s about seeing the world through my own eyes, understanding why I am troubled by so many things, and why my spirit is continuously vexed by the things I see.

It’s about being thrust into a war that I can’t see with my physical eyes, battling evil not with guns or swords, but with my heart and mind.

And yes, it’s about cookies too.  Especially chocolate chip.  

Tags: anecdotes, blog, cookies, destruction, funny, God, humor, justice, people, personality, promises, readers, Spirit, truth, understanding, world
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
(  Print This Post | | 210 views )

I couldn’t let this one go without a mention:  I just happened to notice my Feedburner stats showed 100 readers for the first time ever today! 

It probably won’t last since my feed count tends to go up and down by the day, but reaching 100 readers is a pretty big deal.  Based on what many blogging experts have said, 100 is generally considered the magic number by which your blog begins to rise above obscurity and starts to be taken more seriously by both visitors and advertisers alike.  Thanks to all the new readers that made this possible, and here’s hoping I can continue to entertain and keep you all coming back for more. 

Tags: blog, blogging, feed, Feedburner, milestone, readers
Categories: Blog Fog
 
(  Print This Post | | 71 views )

For the first time since I started blogging many moons ago, I finally put up Google’s Adsense on my site. This I do, 4 years after its release, with the Internet now completely saturated with these types of ads everywhere you surf, during the worst advertising slump since 2000. I’m brilliant.

Oh well. I’m obviously not going to hold my breath waiting for the money to roll in, but I do think the process of learning how to place these ads on my blog has been a good learning experience for me. Some experts say bloggers should wait until they start drawing significant traffic before they start placing advertisements on their blogs. But because monetizing your blog involves so much more than simply slapping an ad in the header, I think it’s important to learn as much as you can early on, so by the time your site does generate respectable traffic (if it ever does), you’ll have already learned the most important aspects of what makes for successful online advertising, and how you can make it work for you.

Personally, I’m treating this as an experiment to see where it might lead. If the stats show people clicking on the ads despite the low number of traffic I get, that bodes very well for the future. On the other hand, if 6 months goes by without a single clickthrough, it’s either a sign that this particular ship has LONG since sailed, or that I need to try another approach. Regardless of what happens though, the bottom line is I’m never gonna know for sure unless I try. Success is usually a trial and error process, and I’m finding that I can learn a lot more through my mistakes than if I had signed up for a $2,000 seminar that offers little more than the common sense knowledge your mother should have already taught you.

The good news is that I’m venturing into an area where you don’t automatically have to be first to succeed, just one of the guys who makes it all the way to the finish line. Blogging is a marathon more than anything else, and most bloggers eventually either give up or burn out within a relatively short period of time. If blogging is something you think you can do blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back for the next 20 years, then the future definitely bodes well for you. Endurance is the name of the game, and very few people truly have it, especially when it comes to blogging. Even I burned out and stopped blogging altogether for almost a year, and I’m the kind of guy who loves to write.

Even doing what you love though can be a laborious pain at times, but then again, nothing worth having in this world is going to come easy. It’s usually a long and arduous process, but I’m confident those who believe the laborer is truly worthy of his hire will eventually reap the rewards they’ve worked so hard to obtain.

I only hope I’ll be one of them.

Tags: ad streams, adsense, advertisements, advertising, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogs, bottom line, clickthrough, common sense, finish line, google, many moons, marathon, monetization, money, one of the guys, problogging, readers, sense knowledge, slump, traffic, trial and error
Categories: Blog Fog
 
(  Print This Post | | 1,017 views )

Ok… am I the ONLY one who gets more than a little frustrated when trying to use MyBlogLog? I understand the idea behind it, but it gets tedious clicking on a reader’s avatar, then having to click not once, but twice just to see that user’s blog, and so on. It’s just a lot of click, click, clicking every dang fricking way, and I have to hope the reader I originally clicked on posted some helpful info about who he or she is and what kind of blog he or she runs, otherwise, I’ll have no clue who or what just visited my site. It doesn’t help that the pages of user profiles and their respective blogging communities look exactly alike, making it disorienting to navigate (hmm, was I here already? I can’t tell…) Up until recently MyBlogLog didn’t even have a tags system, making the act of trying to find like minded readers and bloggers with similar interests by using the search query alone a frustrating endeavor as well. When you’re viewing a blogging community there’s a list of readers, but all you see is the username and avatar. Not very informative or helpful, especially when there’s a TON of readers. Usually I just end up clicking on avatars that depict a cute looking girl (yeah I know I’m pathetic, bite me already).

Oh well, maybe I’ll get the hang of it eventually, especially if the tagging system matures enough to make finding like-minded readers a bit more easier.

Tags: avatars, blog, blogger, bloggers, blogging, clue, communities, community, endeavor, mybloglog, navigation, profilers, readers, scratch, search, tagging, tags, user profiles
Categories: Blog Fog
 
(  Print This Post | | 1,124 views )