Day 4:  Identify Your Audience

Help, please!

Day 5:  Love Your Theme

The “theme” is the basic look of the blog/website.  WordPress has hundreds to choose from – different fonts for text, different layouts for pictures, more different options than I can wrap my head around.  I’ve spent time trying out different themes.  And have settled back on the one I chose when I started.  Maybe I’m just boring.

Day 6:  Make an irresistible “About” Page

Somewhere along the way of playing with themes, I managed to lose my “About” page.  While poking around for this assignment I found it, restored it, and edited it.  It’s still not irresistible.  Maybe I’ll come back to it sooner rather than later.

Day 7:  Add a Custom Header Image

I changed my header image just a few hours before getting the assignment!  I think it’s set up to randomly display a series of photos I took at Missouri Botanical Gardens five or more years ago.  But I have no idea how often the image will change – assuming it does change.  At any rate you’ll see a portion of a flower!

The assignment on day 3 of Blogging University is to “Visit the Neighbors.”  In other words, I am supposed to go snooping around the blogosphere to find a blogger (or five) to follow.

Finding a new – at least new to you – blog is a simple search.  Simple, that it, if you can figure out what keyword to use.  There are more possibilities than the day is long: faith, Christianity, religion, mathematics, clergywomen, quilting.  More entries show up than you can imagine.  And before you know it you’ve wasted an hour or found a new source of inspiration.

The second assignment at Blogging University is to “update your title and tagline.”

Seriously?  I worked really hard four years* ago to come up with the title Another LQQK.  What I know now that I didn’t know then is that the Title of the blog does not have to be the same as the blog’s web address.  It might have been better to use my name for the web address.  In the spirit of the doing the assignment I changed the title to Another LQQK by Rev. TLC.

The QQ instead of an OO in the title is because someone else had already claimed the “another look” website with “look” spelled properly.  And two capital q’s sort of look like eyes.  It doesn’t look as neat in lower case:  another lqqk.  But I like it.  If you want to know something about the meaning of the title, go to my Home (previously About) page.

The tagline used to be “Taking time to look again.”  I’ve changed it (see the words below the Title at the top of the page) per the assignment.  Clearly taglines are not my forte.  What would you suggest?

*Yes, it was four years ago that I first thought about blogging.  But I got distracted.  First by a very part time pastor gig to go with the very part time tutoring I had been doing.  Then I became an Interim Pastor.  

I’ve signed up for Blogging University.  It’s online.  It’s free.  And it’s got daily assignments for 14 days.  First up:  a “who I am and why I’m here” post, with questions to get me started.

• Why are you blogging publicly instead of keeping a diary?
  • Accountability.  My husband has been encouraging me to write for years.  My dad thinks I should be writing stories about my work.  A friend/mentor has encouraged me to write daily.  If I don’t do it publicly I probably won’t get around to doing it regularly.

• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
  • Faith.  I am a Christian striving to live faithfully with kindness and compassion in the 21st century.  I am glad to learn from people of other faith traditions and trust there is more than one way to the Divine.
  • Bible.  I am an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ with a strong commitment to reading scripture seriously but not literally.
  • Nature.  Observations from my (nearly) daily walk.
  • Quilting.  Thoughts on cutting up fabric to create something new.
  • Books?  Maybe.  I’ve been an avid reader since childhood.
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
  • Wonderers and wanderers, seekers and doubters, creators and questioners, and everyday nature watchers.
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what do you hope to accomplish?
  • Hmmmm….I’ll have to think about that.

My parents, siblings, extended family and all who knew me before I married call me Teri.  My nephews and nieces call me Aunt Teri.  Since 1994 colleagues, classmates, and new friends call me Teressa.   Parishioners have called me all kinds of things but children tend to call me Pastor T.