Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:15 AM
New Year’s resolutions aren’t like ordinary goals. In theory they have a far more powerful effect on our psyche because the start of a new year symbolizes new beginnings, a new chapter and a clean slate. Nevertheless, researchers tell us that over 1/2 of us will fail to commit to their New Year resolutions past six months. No sooner have we set our resolutions and announced them on social media, we find ourselves finding reasons to give them up.
So why then should meditation and mindfulness be the first two resolutions on your list? Because life is unpredictable, stress is normal and mindfulness can help you with all of it. A mindful meditation practice can helps you develop enough stillness to become aware of your internal state and the forces that drive your day to day behavior. In this way your meditation practice can go a long way to helping you keep your other promises to yourself! It also allows us the time and space to sit with difficult feelings and make better choices toward more helpful behavior. Finally, our time in meditation naturally spills over to become everyday mindfulness and the next thing you know, you're actually paying attention to the actual moments of your actual life! How radical!
Tag: resolutions
Going IndieWeb for Lent?
Although I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore, old habits are hard to die. I plan to reduce my time on social media this Lenten season. Less time here and more on my blogs: Personal Blog: http://bryanruby.com/ Fifty-Two Posts a Year: http://fiftytwoposts.com
I sometimes feel guilty about failing miserably at these based on the way GoodReads counts their books vis-a-vis finishing complete books, particularly when I’m often reading such dense technical books in which reading a page a day is a near Herculean task.
Thus, because I can have finer control of things on my own website, I’ll try to break things out on a more granular level.
I want to read (aka work my way through) 2-3 technical textbooks in 2018.
I want to read 10 non-fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 20 fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 10 juvenal fiction/literature books in 2018.
IndieWeb: The Book
Back in January Timo Reitnauer wrote Let’s Make 2017 The Year of the Indie Web. I agree wholehearted with the sentiment of his title and have been personally wanting to do something specific to make it a reality. With the changes I’ve seen in the internet over the past 22 years, and changes specifically in the last year, we certainly need it now more than ever.
In large part, I’ve been inspired by the huge number of diverse and big-hearted developers who are an active part of the growing community, but specifically today I came across a note by Doc Searls, an email about the upcoming NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and then a reminder about the 100 Days of IndieWeb project. This confluence of events is clearly my tipping point.
As a result, I’m making my 2018 IndieWeb resolution early. For the month of November, as part of NaNoWriMo, I’m going to endeavor to lovingly craft together a string of about 2,000 words a day on the topic of the IndieWeb to create a book geared toward helping non-developers (ie. Generation 2 and Generation 3 people) more easily own their online identities and content.
Over the past year, surely I’ve read, written about, or interacted with the IndieWeb community concretely in one way or another on at least 70 days. This sprint of 30 days should round out a 100 days project. To be honest, I haven’t necessarily posted about each of these interactions on my own site nor are they necessarily visible changes to my site, so it may not follow the exact requirements of the 100 Days of IndieWeb, but it follows the spirit of the creator idea with the hopes that the publicly visible result is ever more people adopting the principles of the movement for themselves.
I’ll focus the book primarily on how the average person can utilize the wealth of off-the-shelf tools of the WordPress content management system and its community–naturally with mentions of other easy-to-use platforms like Known and Micro.blog sprinkled throughout–to own their own domain, own their content, and better and more freely communicate with others online.
If you haven’t heard about the movement before, I’ll direct you to my article An Introduction to the IndieWeb, portions of which will surely inform the introduction of the book.
If you’ve recently joined the IndieWeb, I’d certainly love to hear your thoughts and stories about how you came to it, why you joined, and what the most troublesome parts have been so I can help direct people through them more easily–at least until there are a plurality of one-click solutions to let everyone IndieWeb-ify themselves online.
As a publisher who realizes the value of starting a PR campaign to support the resultant book, I’m also curious to hear thoughts about potentially launching a crowdfunding campaign to support the modest costs of the book, with profits (if any) going toward supporting the IndieWeb community.
I’m happy to entertain any other thoughts or considerations people have, so feel free to reply in the comments below, or better yet, reply on your own site and send me a webmention.
Homebrew Website Club Los Angeles notes, December 28, 2016
Last HWC for 2016
Tonight was the last meetup for HWC in Los Angeles for 2016. We’ve managed to make it through more than a handful of meetups throughout the year as well as an excellent IndieWebCamp experience. We also recently managed to get our first virtual meetup off the ground two weeks ago with participants in LA, NYC, Portland, Florida, and Maryland!
Thanks again to everyone (near and far) who has helped to encourage and get the budding Los Angeles IndieWeb community off the ground this year.
#100DaysOfIndieWeb
At the onset of the meetup, we spent a few minutes discussing the concept of #100DaysOfIndieWeb which Aaron Parecki has a great head start on already. (BTW, Happy Birthday Aaron!)
Though I’m not personally ready to go all in on #100DaysOfIndieWeb, I am on the verge of committing to 100 Days of Book Donations to Little Free Libraries (or the potentially easier and just as effective 100 Book Donations) particularly as I managed to do 31 days of donations last January.
I’m also seriously considering 100 days of closing tabs which has always been a real problem for me in the past. 100 days of posts also seems relatively interesting as well as doable. 100 days of deleting email toward inbox zero could be useful too.
Building
Following a productive quiet writing hour, we did a quick round of introductions and a short demo or two. Given our group size/composition, we split up and delved right into some building and helping each other out.
I helped newcomer Jeffrey Stewart begin to build a WordPress site on a temporary host which he can later to a personal domain name he’d bought a while back and had resolved to begin using. He’s been siloing his content primarily on Facebook for a long time now, but wanted more freedom and flexibility than Facebook allows. In particular he’s looking forward to a better platform for longer form content as well as better/richer interactions.
In under two hours, we managed to get a pretty significant start on his site including rel=”me” links to his current social media presences. We also set up and configured several IndieWeb related plugins courtesy of the Indieweb plugin to allow for Webmentions as well as future syndication capabilities. With just a few hours of work, I suspect he’ll not only be able to put together his first post and syndicate it to several silos, but he’ll be receiving his first webmentions and backfeed via Brid.gy.
Meanwhile, Angelo Gladding managed to simultaneously work on not only his own site, but assist Thaine Allison with one of his itches. Several years ago Thaine had built a website in HTML3, but he wanted to update it to deal with the demise of Flash and make it more mobile friendly. Despite some difficulty accessing his site due to issues with hosting, they made some reasonable progress.
No photo (Sorry Tantek…)
We all got so wrapped up in what we were working on and discussing, we completely forgot to take a break to get a group photo. In fact, I sadly didn’t think about it until I was in the car and halfway home. I even forgot to “check in” and POSSE a copy to FourSquare, which is pretty uncommon for me lately.
At least this is an area on which we can improve on for our 2017 resolutions...
Happy New Year Everyone!
Chris Aldrich is reading “My 2017-01-01 #IndieWeb Commitment: Own All My RSVPs To Public Events” by Tantek Çelik
My commitment for 2017 is to always, 100% of the time, post RSVPs to public events on my own site first, and only secondarily (manually if I must) RSVP to silo (social media) event URLs. What’s your 2017-01-01 #indieweb commitment?