Friday, 8 December 2017

Reflective Blog (Thing 13)

Another Reflective post, I’ll be blogging about what I’ve done the last month and Things 10, 11 & 12 including networking, collaborating and my World Wide Web presence.

Reflection Time

I find blogging enjoyable and cathartic.  It’s an easy way to get your ideas onto “paper” and a great way to get your message out.  With a small amount of computer skills and a couple of months practice it’s possible FOR ANYONE to have something that looks good.  I remember trying to create an online presence for my local Scrabble Club about 12 years ago, this was before the likes of Blogger, Wordpress and ready-made websites like Go-Daddy.  It was a nightmare and that was even before you tried to upload some images and change the font.  Everything was so fiddly and time consuming.  Today with the use of Blogger you’re up and running in minutes.

My previous reflection concentrated on the look of my blog and I’ve played around with it a little since then, my favourite addition being the recent posts widget (note to self, write a short blog on tweaking the appearance of a blog) -  

Recent Blog Widget

I was aware another reflective blog was imminent so I did a mini mid-season reflection after 77 days and posted about it HEREThis purely looked at the stats; I concluded that to reach more of an audience I needed to concentrate on creating good content and share it across my social media platforms.  A well known saying is “write what you know” so I mostly stuck to writing about Scrabble and wrote these 4 blogs;

Scrabble & Literacy Skills viewed 261 times - HERE 

Introducing Scrabble at your library viewed 264 times - HERE 

Starting a new Scrabble Club viewed 54 times - HERE 

And I went all out combining a blog about Dogs at Christmas and Scrabble viewed 250 - HERE  

A Dog is for Life, Just like Scrabble


These four blogs together got 829 views by 7th December.  That’s a great success. They were shared across Facebook, Twitter & Instagram amongst several pages including those dedicated to Scrabble, Libraries and the SPCA.  I’ve also trying to encourage more collaboration between the Rudai23 participants. 

Thing 10 was setting up a Facebook or Twitter, I had great fun resurrecting my old Twitter account and have started tweeting my blogs with great success.  The blog covering this task is HERE 


Thing 11 task was to work on my personal online presence; I’ve written a new bio and updated my online presence.  For years I’ve always been aware of my online presence and with the scary fact that half of all future employers check out your online presence before an interview, I’ve always kept it clean and professional.  There are no videos of me getting drunk and doing stupid things.  My blog covering this is HERE . I’ve just started my LinkedIn page so will be working on that over the next couple of weeks.  This will take a while as I want to fill in all the jobs I have done, experiences and skills I have.  I will also be joining with others I know or that have the same jobs, experiences or hobbies.  This kind of work takes a lot of time, fine-tuning your account.  I’m aiming to have this complete by the end of the year.

Things 10 & 11 have helped me develop my digital footprint and I am happy with what is “out-there”.  When I finish tweaking my LinkedIn account in the next couple of weeks this will complete my personal brand and when I get it to a stage I am happy with it I will work on connecting with as many people as possible and of course sharing it across my social media platforms.   I find working on something like LinkedIn cannot be rushed and cannot be done in one sitting.  You need to look at what others have done but I do love the part of going through your CV and jogging your memory about all the things you can do.  I have a consistent message and most importantly I’m happy there is nothing on the web that I am embarrassed about.  However, at the end of the day I will be working with Wexford County Council so my online presence doesn’t matter when it comes to job promotions and interviews.    

Thing 12 is all about Collaboration so I discussed how the Wexworlds team collaborates HERE. I’m looking forward to using a new event planning application next year whilst putting together Wexworlds 2018.  I've also begun reaching out to other bloggers.

My Blog Stats at 8th December 2017


The slowing down of the tasks has helped me work on my blog a little more and develop my online presence. It would have been much more difficult to get to where I am without easing up on the deadlines.  In conclusion, I’m really happy with where by blogging is going and my ever developing online presence.  My blog has now over 3350 views with a massive amount of that traffic coming from Facebook.  I will need to use Twitter and Instagram a little more in the future so all my eggs are not in the one basket and hope to help others shares their blogs too.  A great way to get a blog noticed is cross promotion between other bloggers so I will be looking for a few other bloggers to do this with.

That’s me done for now.

John The Captain Ryan   

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