Self-improvement: Not What You Do But Why You Do

It's very important to realize before you do anything, the reason you're doing it. If it's not for a meaningful purpose, you probably should not be doing it. And you should always be truthful to yourself on the real reason why you're doing it.

It's often easy to trick your mind into thinking on one reason you're doing something when that really is not the real reason. Do not just stop at your mind; look at your heart and ask how you feel. Most of us are gifted with conscience within our hearts and more often than not that'll be the gate which can see our true reason rather than the reasons given by our complicated mind.

For instance, today, I was thinking that I should isolate myself again to try to get a lot of work done to make up for slacking off recently. This is what my mind was saying. But then I asked my heart and it said only one word "guilt". If my heart had said something like "triumph" or "expectation", that'll be different. But I cannot base this action on this feeling since I understand enough about myself that I can be easily distracted when I'm completely isolated. And I know that more "guilt" will be tacked on the present "guilt" because I'll be ignoring other obligations I need to do today if I just completely isolate myself. I'm just digging a larger hole for myself.

The heart is simple like that--emotions that can be expressed in one word can say more than any fancy reasoning needing a paragraph. And it typically is more honest than your mind but do both to confirm.

So to sum it up, two things to keep in mind as going through life:

1. Before doing any activity, ask yourself why you're doing it.

2. Know the real reason on why you're doing it by looking at both your mind and your heart. In other words, your reasoning and your emotion.

[IT] Effective Keywords for SEO

It seems these days that just about every business who has kept up with the technology of the days, i.e. Internet, has decided that a business website will be a good idea. But how do you ensure that people can find your website? This is where search engine optimization (SEO) is very important: how do you maximize the chance that your site will be listed near the top of the search list when someone searches for a product or service that your company offers?

Too often, people go with the obvious. Say, you sell jewelry online. The keywords "jewelry" or "bracelet" will make very poor choices for keywords precisely because they're so common. Unless you're a huge multinational corporation or just happen to own jewelry.com, you're unlikely to have anyone find you from a search on "jewelry".

To actually benefit, focus on more specific keywords that has less competition AND more relevance to your site. For instance, words like "Rolex watch" or "Tanzanian bracelets" will much more likely generate a better search result with your site listed.

If you want to come up with other good ideas for keywords or maybe even business expansion, the Google Wonder Wheel may be able to help. The Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then clicking "Wonder Wheel" under the filter options on the lefthand side. A visual representation of the way that Google groups together keywords is presented to you. This gives you an idea of what else potential customers are searching for that's related to your chosen keywords.

Self-improvement: Cycle of Thoughts and Moods

While wondering why I was feeling mildly depressed earlier, I had a mild epiphany. Negative moods like depression is definitely not a bad thing. In fact, I realize now that sometimes I like to be unhappy. Without these negative moods, how can I come to revelations like this one?

Moods are not meant to be controlled but they should be influenced to form right proportions.

One should not expect to be happy all the time but neither should one expect to be depressed all of the time. An excess of negative or positive moods surely limits one's experience and perspective. The trick is to attain the right proportion of all these feelings so that life can be experienced in its entirety without being blinded by overwhelming joy or overwhelmed by hopeless despair.

Moods cannot be controlled directly but thoughts can. And a consistent string of thoughts form the mood. So if one can direct the thoughts into a coherent picture, the mood naturally forms. The idea is to control one's thoughts.

How do one control one's thoughts? Besides just forcefully controlling one's thoughts (which may be very hard), there are multiple options to indirectly affect it as well. For me, these two work well:

1. Do things that are conducive to certain thoughts.

2. Go into environments that influence thoughts in a certain way.

For instance, if I want to feel depressed and alone, I'd like to find myself in an abandoned construction site on a wet cold day doing absolutely nothing but thinking. If I want to feel happy and sociable, I'll hold a party or talk to random people. If I want to feel imaginative and creative, I'll write my novel. If I want to feel focused and alert, I'll write some code or work on building something.

Many people have the notion that they have to feel a certain way to do something. But it's really a cyclic approach. One can do something because one feels a certain way. On the other hand though, if one does not like how one feels at the moment, why not do something or go somewhere to change one's thoughts so as to change one's mood?

[IT] CSS Zen Garden

While I was at Half Price Books last week I ran across a book called "The Zen of CSS Design". The main author, Dave Shea, is a graphic designer, and cultivator of the CSS Zen garden. What is the CSS Zen garden? It started in May 8, 2003, to as Dave puts it "change how people perceive Web design, and somewhere along the way it ended up an international phenomenon".

The site at http://www.csszengarden.com/is meant to demonstrate the visual power of CSS-based design. On the site, you can select different CSS styles which changes the entire look of the site. These are submitted by various designers around the world using the same base HTML. All the CSS style sheets on the site are also perfectly downloadable. Just type in something like:

http://csszengarden.com/209/209.css

to download the 209th style sheet. Dave also has his own website at

http://www.mezzoblue.com/

which gets updated every other month or so with a graphics or web design tip. So check it out!

[IT] Facebook Automatic Selecter

Today while I was surfing around facebook like all young people do, I came across an annoying issue: Facebook doesn't allow me to select all my friends when I'm trying to suggest friends to someone new on Facebook. I have to manually click each one which is time-consuming and boring.

Naturally, there was a better way. I looked it up and saw a posting on facebook discussing this exact issue. Just paste this line of code into the address bar of your browser (where you type the URL), and your friends are automatically selected:

javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

If you're not as technically minded, you can go on your merry way and just use the code. I wanted to understand what it meant though. So to put it in more readable form:

elms = document.getElementByID('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');

for (var fid in elms) {

if (typeof elms[fid] === 'object') {

fs.click(elms[fid]);

}

}

With knowledge of DOM (Document Object Model) scripting and JavaScript, this is quite comprehensible. Let me write it step-by-step anyway though:

1. Assign the array variable 'elms' to be the array of elements (formally called collection) that is the listed items contained within the div tag named 'friends'. In this case, all the list elements are apparently objects.

2. Loop through all elements in the array 'elms'. For each loop, check whether the element is the type of data known as an object.

3. If so, activate the object called 'fs' to do the method 'click' on the 'fid'th element of the array 'elms'. Apparently, this method just selects the object for you which is the same method that is activated when you do a mouse click.

There are probably some other cool features that you can do to facebook. I'll keep my eyes peeled for some other places where code can come in handy.