The Mosher Pit

Couple of quick notes that readers who follow me in other social media spaces are probably already aware of:

1. My son turned 16 at the beginning of the month. Here we are celebrating it in Philly the weekend before:

2. I got an A in my organizational theory and behavior class. Can’t say I expected it, because I felt like my final project could have been stronger, but being my first time back in school in several years and in a completely different program than my undergrad prepared me for, I’m pleased. Next semester, I’m vacillating over whether to take nonprofit management or association management, as well as taking my intro to public admin class that I wasn’t able to get into this semester.

3. I’m on hiatus from active duty at the Episcopal Cafe for the foreseeable future. It was getting more and more difficult for me to stay abreast of news in the church what with all the other things on my plate these days, plus I want to become more active in my parish with the intent that I will stop being treated like a new person. I do continue to moderate its facebook and twitter spaces, however.

4. My big christmas project is called “housecleaning.” I know most people do it in the spring but I’m rolling out a new household management system in honor of what you might call a new year’s resolution.

5. Plus I’m down a total of 13 pounds, I’m happy to say, since October.

Posted in Faith, Getting Organized, Life, Weight Loss by: Helen
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Twitter has become the social networking site where I’ve made the most new acquaintances. Many of them are authors of blogs I had subscribed to but was struggling to keep up with, and more notably tended toward the A-list in the socialmediasphere.

I only started tweeting regularly when I went to AFCEA Solutions on behalf of Signal Magazine, where I’m new media editor. I soon after shifted the work-related tweets to @signalmag while keeping my personal but very public tweets at @helenmosher.  After only three weeks using twitter, traffic to my blog has quadrupled. Granted, part of that is the amount of traffic that’s showing up looking for Scrabulous secrets, but much of it has been the twitter audience that I’m cultivating, slowly.

If you were to comb through the archives of my blog, you’d see that I haven’t always been a social media strategist, and much of this blog serves as an interactive memoir, spiritual journal, and clip file archive (I was a feature-writing journalist for almost a decade, with stints as a music critic, university microphone, and financial services editor). While Twitter’s been down, I’ve made the archives a bit easier to page through by reacquainting myself with the Wordpress loop and creating my archives to run as full posts. The way I see it, if you are browsing my archives and only get titles, you might miss out on a post you might enjoy. If you are browsing my archives and only get excerpts, you’re certainly going to miss some of the punch lines. Fewer clicks to save your sanity and mine.

So browse away. I’d suggest using the category browse rather than the date browse, simply because there are entire swaths of time I talk about one topic seemingly to the exclusion of any other. This is partly a result of migrating content from something like 12 different blogs and journals as I vacillated over where I was going to wind up on the web. Over time, I hope to have these archives more fully populated; they go back to 1998 at least and I may have some material from before that.

Thanks for stopping by, and lo, I’ve already killed 60 of those minutes that Twitter is down. What are you doing while Twitter is down? Blogging? Sleeping? Reconnecting with family members you haven’t seen in years?

Posted in About This Blog, Getting Organized, Social Media by: Helen
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I’ve rearranged my feedreader so that i have an a-list (read daily), a b-list (read weekly) and a c-list (read when I have time). it’s made it so much easier for me to keep up.

I have a separate category for the blogs I work for, which will help me stay up to date with them.

And a third category for the blogs that don’t have much to do with faith, because that’s what I primarily use the hhthompson google reader for.

On an irrelevant note, I registered a new gmail account today, in my married name. Even though it’s still a good six months out, just wanted to get it before some other helen mosher goes, I want a gmail account! like all the helen thompsons did.

cat news: the stray that’s definitely adopted me, whom I call Rocket, goes to the vet tomorrow for a physical and to schedule his boybitectomy. i am now officially a 3-cat household, which probably means i’m a crazy cat lady. the cats sure are crazy, anyway.

Posted in Getting Organized, Pets by: Helen
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I’ve discovered the joy of Google reader, which makes reading blog feeds just as easy as reading my livejournal friends list, and much easier to filter.

now if i could just persuade Google News to take Virtue Online off the news feeds, since the Onion is a more trustworthy news source, life would be grand. I’m quite sure its million of hits is (a) the xml page getting pinged constantly and (b) people accidentally thinking it’s legitimate news about the Episcopal Church clicking via Google News.

Anyhow, if you’ve never used Google reader, it’s pretty easy if you already have a Google account. Login, and then click this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/helenmosher
You’ll have the choice of adding it to your homepage or to Google reader.

Group your feeds by clicking on “feed settings” in the top right corner. You can rename the feed, or add it to a folder. The folder will appear on the lefthand side of the screen. When you add multiple blog feeds to one folder, you can just click on the folder and read back through the posts like an LJ friends list!

I LOVE this tool. I’m finally able to keep up with my nonLJ friends!

Posted in Getting Organized, New Media by: Helen
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FlyLady.net

I think I’m going to Fly.

Posted in Getting Organized, Link of the Day by: Helen
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You know, if this one was local I'd give her a call.

Actually, I should mention, she contacted me for a story I'm working
on. All hail PRNewswire, but I thought I'd pass along the site because
for those of us 214ers, it's kinda neat to see you can make a living
at this.

http://www.clutterqueen.com/

Posted in Getting Organized, Random by: Helen
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I got home about 45 minutes earlier than I have in recent memory. I came home to a dark apartment.

When I turned on the light, I barely recognized the place. D. has cleaned it stem to stern.

Someone recently said something in his journal about how he was lucky to have a woman like me. There’s nothing luck about it: I’m lucky that he chose me.

I am so eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee over this dude. Yeah,we’re in kind of a rough spot and things are pretty friggin’ tight right now, but somehow the joy just keeps tumbling in.

Posted in !!!!!, Family, Getting Organized by: Helen
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