You want people to visit your site. Even better, you want people to stay awhile and enjoy your content. The more time visitors spend at your site, the more likely it becomes that they will notice the little things that make your site unique. As your guests scan your pages, you want to reassure them that you have accounted for everything. When I notice that a blogger has addressed the subtle nuances associated with running a site, [...] • Read more »

I don’t know about you, but I have been fascinated with the fine art of interpersonal communication for many years. Specifically, I am intrigued by the complex subtleties involved with human conversation. Although I fail miserably at small talk, I enjoy following its unfolding and continually look for opportunities to lure the conversation into deeper, more relevant territory. Frequently, such attempts are met with unenthusiastic mockery, as conversing parties prefer to revel within the safe corridor of [...] • Read more »

An excellent way to exercise your critical thinking skills involves critically analyzing corporate slogans. Company slogans such as Nike’s “Just do it,” Budweiser’s “King of beer” and Fruit Loop’s “Follow your nose!” are ubiquitous in contemporary capitalistic culture. So, as you journey through your day, keep your eyes and ears open to the various business taglines that you will inevitably hear, and pick your favorite for further analysis. • Read more »

One of my favorite things to do involves reading and listening to the opinions of others. This is great for me, because people and their opinions are everywhere. I derive pleasure from considering alternate points of view and even enjoy arguing against my own ideas. Whenever I think that I honestly know something, I try questioning it until I prove myself wrong or decide to try again later. It usually doesn’t take very long to realize that [...] • Read more »

I have been fairly nervous about starting mindfeed.org*. Like you, I fear ridicule, rejection, and criticism. Although I don’t understand exactly why, I find myself differentiating between the criticism of others and the criticism of myself. Perhaps the reason involves the perceived intention of the criticism. I know that when I criticize myself, it is done with the purpose of improving or bettering some aspect of myself. However, improving myself is not the result of every personal [...] • Read more »

I have to admit, I am completely intrigued with human ideas, thought, and opinion. My favorite part of blog posts are the comments, and the best part of the newspaper is the opinion page. When talking with people, I am generally the one doing most of listening. In fact, I find that the more I listen, the more people are willing to talk. Often, they will talk with apparent and utter disregard for anything that I may [...] • Read more »

People love to argue. Often, to resolve conflicting opinions, people will “agree to disagree,” saying something like, “it’s all relative.” The idea behind this common statement is that everyone believes in their own version of the truth, which may or may not happen to prove true for other people. Saying that “it’s all relative” also implies that every version of the truth is equally valid. Unfortunately, important discussions are often abandoned to the familiar tune of universal [...] • Read more »

Your first post is going to suck. Everyone’s first post sucks. It’s a fact of blogging. Despite your best intentions to write a stellar first post, it isn’t going to happen. Even after all the hard work setting up and configuring your blog, all the time spent obsessing over every CSS rule and semantic detail, and imagining your very best content presented at the very outset of your blog’s career — even after all of that, an [...] • Read more »