A Little Progress

This was a strange weekend. First off, I ate too much, almost all on Sunday. We went out to eat after church with good friends, and had way too many chips and salsa. I actually ate a smaller entree than I normally do at this place, but the chips were too much. Then we had an evening gathering at church last night, a soup dinner. The event was our Alabaster offering, a twice a year offering for missions building projects. The soup was good (both bowls), the dessert was good, and the fellowship was good.

By the time I got home I felt bloated. I didn't feel like doing much of anything. We were having Internet connection troubles, and I re-booted the modem and router twice. While doing that, I started a virus scan on my computer. It's an ancient computer, and it wasn't done scanning an hour later. I took the time, after playing some mindless computer games, to file papers. I tend to let this go then file a bunch in a flurry of activity. I filed a few, then was down to those that defy being put in a preset category. By evening's end I had a bunch of those done.

But the big thing to report is that I got back to writing for Suite101.com. I posted two articles: one examining Robert Frost's poem "The Mountain"; and one talking about British loyalists in the period before the American Revolution. These two articles actually did fairly well with page views over the last three days. I had intended to write the second article about "The Mountain" on Sunday, but after eating so much wasn't up to it.

So, what's on for today? In the office I'll be archiving projects and copying time sheets. At noon I'll head out to the Crystal Bridges Museum construction site, where I'll be giving two talks this afternoon, to the Arkansas Floodplain Managers Association, about the floodplain issues we faced in designing the museum. Then tomorrow and Wednesday I'll attend the convention. I'll miss this morning's activities at the convention, but I have to get ready for my presentation.

Book Review - The Presidency of George Washington

This was not in my reading pile. However, after I finished Robertson's Harmony of the Gospels, I wasn't quite ready to tackle the next book in the pile, which is Steinbeck's East of Eden. But I had in the pile of books on the end table between Lynda's and my reading chairs a thin volume she picked up somewhere, The Presidency of George Washington, by Jack D. Warren, Jr.; The Mount Vernon Ladies Association, 2000, ISBN 0-931917-34-4. Warren is one of the major modern editors of George Washington's papers, which will run to twenty or so volumes when done. Actually, since that was written in 2000, that editing might be done by now, I'll have to check.

This book is a cross between scholarly and popular. Warren's work is almost all from original sources, both Washington's outgoing correspondence, and some incoming. Official state papers were another source, as were newspapers and pamphlets from the period.

I suppose I haven't read much about George Washington's presidency. I remember reading a book about the first Congress, which would have touched on it, but that was long ago. Washington's main task was to start the new nation off on a sound footing and hold it together. Fears of it splintering into multiple nations was real. The government under the Articles of Confederation was a disaster. Already sectionalism and partisanship were beginning, as the agrarian South and the commercial North distrusted each other, and the growing West distrusted them both. The national debt was sky high as a result of the revolutionary war. Some of the problems he had to face were:

• Establishing precedents for almost everything, and to do so in a way that befitted a representative republic, to downplay fears that the American experiment would fail and a monarchy would be the result, also in a way that made the nation respectable to the European monarchies.
• Establish sound government financial policies.
• Provide governance for the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains.
• Avoid being drawn in to the European war that started as a result of the French Revolution, which happened just a few months after he took office.
• Sooth over the conflict between his two most important cabinet members, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
• Establish the national capitol somewhere.
• Give his citizens reason for hope that they could truly govern themselves.

I think we tend to forget that the government established by our founding fathers in the Constitution, after trial and error, was a huge experiment. At that time no such government existed. The British parliamentary monarchy was much different government. Perhaps Washington's biggest task was simply to prove that the experimental government would not collapse. That it didn't collapse is shown, in Warren's words, to have been much the result of Washington's leadership in those crucial first eight years.

The book is only ninety-six pages of text, with four pages of end notes, two of suggested reading, and a decent index. The book reads longer than its pages, however. The margins are somewhat small, and few illustrations are used. The scholarly language does not lend itself to a long session of reading. I was able to get through a chapter a night, or at times only half a chapter--if I waited until too late in the evening when my brain couldn't handle it.

This one is a keeper. I'm not sure whether I will ever read it again, but it is a good reference book, and perhaps I could pull some articles from it, or use the footnotes and sources as springboards for additional research. If you run across it, get it and read it. You won't be sorry.

SEO: An Unfruitful Weekend Study

Due to my low revenues from my Suite101.com posts to date, I had little motivation to write articles for that content site this weekend. It seemed to me that blackberry picking would be more profitable (got about a quart). I wanted to push through the discouragement to write a poetry article and a history article. I even brought home some references from the office to maybe write a civil engineering article. Alas, on Friday evening I decided I really should 1) clean-up the articles already written for linking and images, and 2) do some research in SEO: search engine optimization.

The clean-up was easy. I found some public domain photos residing on the Internet, with the site giving permission to copy and use. And I added a bunch of links, internal and external to Suite 101, to my existing articles. I'm probably not done with that, but I'm close. On to SEO.

I found, however, that I couldn't deal effectively with SEO. I found plenty of references, but my mind was just not in it. I'd pull up a reference, and begin to read, but quickly said to myself, "Is this really necessary? How does this equate to advancing a career in creative writing? How will my ego, demeanor, and pocketbook be bettered by this? And how will this affect my creative writing? Will it diminish my other writing?" Not being able to answer, I kept shifting to mindless computer games--as if Minesweeper will better advance my second career.

By Sunday afternoon I had had enough. Since SEO wasn't working, I knuckled down and wrote two articles and posted them. One is the last in my series about Robert Frost's poem "Into My Own." The other is in my continuing series on the lead-up to the American Revolution, this one on some writing of Samuel Adams. These are probably not any better optimized for SEO than ones I posted earlier. They do, however, have links and images. And today I'm getting some hits for them.

This morning before work I was able to concentrate a little on SEO. I found some good training sites and copied and pasted them into a Word document, and printed a few pages. I think part of my problem is I still have not learned to read stuff on the web for comprehension. I need to learn that to save a tree or two, but I'm not there yet. So my reading material for the evening is in hand. I'm off to plan the next two engineering articles I'll write.