The Reflective Teacher

It’s back to school time! Today’s Best Blog looks at school from a teacher’s perspective. And who better to talk about what it’s like to face a classroom of eager (and not so eager) faces than The Reflective Teacher?

Why is this a Best Blog?

• The usual reasons: well written, frequently updated, a real voice.

• And a new reason (although one we’ve noticed before): a useful blogroll. Many things on that blogroll will make you want to take a further look, especially if you’re interested in education.

(By the way: We’d like to feature a student’s blog next — if you have a nomination, feel free to leave a comment — and don’t forget to say why it’s a Best Blog.)

ZeroTwoHero

Zero Two Hero came up this morning when we were tag surfing. (Tag surfing, in case you’re wondering is one of the new features on your dashboard.) The first thing we saw on this site was a link to a ton of downloadable classic comics. Very cool.

There’s a lot to Zero Two Hero. Technology, music — and he reads a lot. Zero Two Hero is one very busy guy! We like the looks of this one.

(Why is it a Best Blog? It’s consistently updated. He’s committed: he’s been blogging since December 2005. And he has a voice — that ineffable thing that just means he sounds like a real, unique person. Not somebody else, not a clone of somebody else, just himself.)

Midtown Lunch

Midtown Lunch is a great read. It doesn’t matter if you don’t work in Manhattan. It doesn’t even matter if you never go out to eat lunch. Midtown Lunch is fun anyway.

Midtown Lunch perfectly illustrates a great formula for Best Blogging:write about things you love and things that make you laugh, and your blog will be magic.

Mirkwood

 

Mirkwood’s a lit blog with a bit of a twist. The author is smart and eloquent about books. But Mirkwood can also tell you a little something about how to use CSS and the new Sandbox theme to make your site look really spiffy. How about that?

In case you love to read and you’re wondering about lit blogs: WordPress is home to many great lit blogs. If this interests you, here are a few links, just on WordPress alone: Tales From the Reading Room, Charlotte’s Web, Make Tea Not War, Eoin Purcell’s Blog, Everything in Between, Distraction No. 99, Great War Fiction, QAZSE, Quirk, Ruth’s Reflections, So You Think I Can, Words of My Father.

This just scratches the surface — if you write a lit blog, or follow them, or have some opinion about them, use the comments section for what it’s for: tell us about lit blogs.

Some Unconventional Blogging Advice

As a blogger you can talk about SEO, feedburner statistics and wordpress plugin strategies all you like, but there are very few advice columns on the human element of blogging. You know the human element, like that commercial on TV.

The writing is often stale, boring and sometimes downright painful because you know the person has nothing better to do with their time. It’s a mix of politics, blog culture and internet flames but at the end of the day even the most successful people don’t even want to deal with the culture and yet there are people who love it.

I think perhaps Scrivs from 9rules hits the mallet on the pogo stick in a recent post in which he says that the reason why people love the internet so much is because “they can pretend to be somebody they are not or maybe they get to connect with other geeks like themselves”. AKA some people take the web a little bit too seriously.

Personally as a writer, I would not find things to write about if I simply hung out on the web or went to the same places time after time. Is eating at the same pizza restaurant ever satisfying? No and to be honest it would be downright depressing.

Because in the end blogging is only a supplement to life and to be perfectly honest, if you don’t have much of a life outside of the internet, chances are that you won’t have much of a blogging life on the internet.

Here’s my advice: go to the beach, meet new people, by golly eat a hot dog / cheesesteak. And when you’re done come back to your computer and voila! You might find that you have something to blog about. And if not at least you had fun.

Commenting on Comments

Lorelle on WordPress, one of our favorite Best Blog alums, has a great post up about how to write a good comment. 

Lorelle says a comment is like a resume. if you write good comments, people will want to check your blog out.  So, if you want to make people sit up and pay attention then you have to learn to be a good commenter.   

Kudos to Lorelle for showing people the way to Best Blogging. 

Knit Blogs

Knitters are a literate bunch. Two knit blogs we like: Knit-Write and A Bird’s Nest. They’re funny, and written with flair, two attributes that make a blog a Best Blog. Both are pretty new to WordPress, but we’re betting on a long run.

If you don’t know much about the huge phenomenon that is knitting and knit blogs, you’re not alone. Secret Mojo Dumbs it Down for You has a few things to say about it, from the perspective of a guy who doesn’t knit. Not yet anyway.

(Saturday Morning Blogroll found these two as she finds many things: through the “knitting” tag and from browsing around people’s blogrolls.)

Brain Ethics + Unique Hits

We’ve been getting a lot of submissions lately. (It’s strange. I mean Best Blogs isn’t even a blog network.) Keep it up! This submission comes from the blog Brain Ethics. It’s a blog about exploring the brain and they’ve been doing it since December 2005. Not bad. And I hear that they’re getting some unique hits too!

BTW I have a cool side lesson I’ve been wanting to teach for a while. It’s about unique hits and I feel it’s appropriate to talk about them since Brain Ethics the blog is getting them. Okay so a unique hit is when a person visits your site directly and isn’t referred from Google or perhaps another blog. It means that you have loyal readers.

If you have a non wordpress.com blog, be sure that you’re hits aren’t coming from your own IP address. Analysing your statistics isn’t always easy as it sounds. If you’re into that kind of stuff I recommend talking to some marketing guys, it’s their life.

Walk-in For Jobs

Walk-in For Jobs
If you’ve got tech skills and want a job in India, Walk-in for Jobs is for you. This blog gives you information about walk-ins happening in India. It’s thorough and a good resource.

If we could suggest any improvements, it would be that the “about” tab tell us more about the author and how he or she goes about compiling the list. Other than that, Happy Job Hunting!