About bad titles and another thing…

Martha Burtis reminded us to come up with great titles for posts. Great titles are my kryptonite. If anybody reads this post, that means they’ve read others, so they’re already aware. I stunk at titles as a student, stunk at them as a reporter, stunk at them as a grad student, and stink at them today. Bad puns are my crutch.

I linked Twitter to my blog earlier, adding the widget so the latest Tweets show up in the sidebar. Of course, most of my Tweets had previously been announcements about blog posts, since I’d already linked the blog to the Twitter account. Now I feel like I need to have real Tweets so all my latest don’t just cycle people back to the blog. However, the AHA magazine Perspectives had a January article suggesting that linking personal sites to social media sites (which Google algorithms like, apparently) helps move them up the search rankings, so there’s that. I think I have practically inert LinkedIn and Academia.edu profiles I could connect, and I guess I could connect with my professional biography in the AHA system, too (and since I have to pull one of those together for UMW anyway…). If I can figure out how it is that I link these things.

Also, adding blog posts and links and tweets, I just killed off a good hour I should have used for grading (which is among the last things I find appealing anyway, so not something I need another excuse to avoid). The writing is obviously much easier than academic writing, so goes much more quickly/doesn’t demand nearly as much time, but I posted on drought in California, data mining and studying the 1918 influenza epidemic, an update on an article, in addition to writing my FAAR this week–needless to say, other writing didn’t happen. I think I need a goal, like posting once a week or so, and not blogging about reading, teaching, technical stuff, musings, and research, but rather picking one or two per post. Otherwise I’m likely to spend way more time doing this fun stuff, and musing, than doing my “real” work (though if we can make this count as “real” work, that’d be grrreeeaaaat–Okay, thanks Peter.).