How to write an effective blog

Everyone can blog, but not many are read and commended by people. Here’s some help to writing blogs which will sustain your thunder.

The Title
Think about your topic, translate that into a few good words for the title and you are good to go. Titles help in shaping your blog-post keeping it to-the-point as well as helping to engage the audience. Try using 5W1H, Who, What, Where, How and When, and employ adequate adjectives, incorporating humor and a twist of drama.

The Lead Paragraph
By this I mean the starting paragraph where you can always include an anecdote relating to the topic or asking a question which would get the readers thinking. Also making shorter paragraphs would help in making it look less daunting.

Visuals
One always wonders why scandalous tabloids always have great sales ratings and the answer to that is ‘pictures’. The more visuals you incorporate in your post, the better. By that I don’t mean I encourage you blatantly covering your blog with random pictures. Go find a suitable photo at Flickr, Creative Commons; should do the trick.

Also, add ALT TAGS on the images so search engines can find it easily and faster. To do this,
• go to EDIT HTML portion of your "Create New Post"
• look for
• change it to

Structure
Use the “strong” tag to separate segments throughout the post so that
• it gives your eyes a way to skim,
• it breaks up the post, and
• it rolls into an easy summary.
Using bullets also give your eyes something to do.

Gimmicks
And last of all, using track-backs, linking other relative articles and tags are great ways to keep your blog on the search engine and easy to monitor for the readers. Add widgets, and social media icons for easy bookmarks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and .delicious. Join the buzz!

Blog - Who?

The word ‘blog’ is the abbreviated form of ‘web log’. What you do here is that you write or post about absolutely anything you like; it’s an online journal. Starting from your pesky darwan to Bush’s recent shoe fetish - anything which strikes your fancy.

Blogs help you upload photos, videos and stream links along with allowing comment setting options for visitors; all of these you can control through settings. Privacy options help you in going public, or not.

If you are blessed with some knowledge of HTML, then you can make a few changes to your page the way you want to, if not, that’s okay too since all blogging communities offer you designs and layouts.

Now another aspect of blogging one should consider is that it is the honcho of all tools when it comes to citizen journalism. So if you are planning to start a blog to create awareness or make it remotely political, you will need a lot of traffic - the number of hits your blog receives, i.e., the number of people who view your blog.

To do this effectively subscribe for RSS feeds from news agencies and register your blog at communities such as Technorati, Global Voices, Desi Blogs, Bloglines, Blog Catalog, etc.

To keep track of your traffic score you can use a petite map available at Feeedjit. A few places to start blogging in:
www.wordpress.com
www.blogger.com


How a blog is NOT like a diary:
• You do not have to shuffle through pages to got to previous entries; just look at the archive.
• Your blog can play your favorite tunes whereas your diary only cherishes the tune ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel.

And before I forget, there are places that will pay to get you to blog (www.GroundReport.com).

Kooky Thoughts of a Cookie Man

This is one of my favorite articles published in The New Yorker by one of my most-admired directors, Woody Allen.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/03/060703sh_shouts

Thus Ate Zarathustra

There’s nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century duelling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book” existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin. Selections follow.

Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the Athenians, and in a lost play by Aeschylus Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit.

It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem in scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the Ethics he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.

As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat.

No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares, it’s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads—at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he believed that God existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.

Is there a relationship between a healthy regimen and creative genius? We need only look at the composer Richard Wagner and see what he puts away. French fries, grilled cheese, nachos—Christ, there’s no limit to the man’s appetite, and yet his music is sublime. Cosima, his wife, goes pretty good, too, but at least she runs every day. In a scene cut from the “Ring” cycle, Siegfried decides to dine out with the Rhine maidens and in heroic fashion consumes an ox, two dozen fowl, several wheels of cheese, and fifteen kegs of beer. Then the check comes and he’s short. The point here is that in life one is entitled to a side dish of either coleslaw or potato salad, and the choice must be made in terror, with the knowledge that not only is our time on earth limited but most kitchens close at ten.

The existential catastrophe for Schopenhauer was not so much eating as munching. Schopenhauer railed against the aimless nibbling of peanuts and potato chips while one engaged in other activities. Once munching has begun, Schopenhauer held, the human will cannot resist further munching, and the result is a universe with crumbs over everything. No less misguided was Kant, who proposed that we order lunch in such a manner that if everybody ordered the same thing the world would function in a moral way. The problem Kant didn’t foresee is that if everyone orders the same dish there will be squabbling in the kitchen over who gets the last branzino. “Order like you are ordering for every human being on earth,” Kant advises, but what if the man next to you doesn’t eat guacamole? In the end, of course, there are no moral foods—unless we count soft-boiled eggs.

To sum up: apart from my own Beyond Good and Evil Flapjacks and Will to Power Salad Dressing, of the truly great recipes that have changed Western ideas Hegel’s Chicken Pot Pie was the first to employ leftovers with meaningful political implications. Spinoza’s Stir-Fried Shrimp and Vegetables can be enjoyed by atheists and agnostics alike, while a little-known recipe of Hobbes’s for Barbecued Baby-Back Ribs remains an intellectual conundrum. The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off—which is not the case with Kant’s “Tractatus on Starches.”

Breakfast
Orange juice
2 strips of bacon
Profiteroles
Baked clams
Toast, herbal tea

The juice of the orange is the very being of the orange made manifest, and by this I mean its true nature, and that which gives it its “orangeness” and keeps it from tasting like, say, a poached salmon or grits. To the devout, the notion of anything but cereal for breakfast produces anxiety and dread, but with the death of God anything is permitted, and profiteroles and clams may be eaten at will, and even buffalo wings.

1 bowl of spaghetti, with tomato and basil
White bread
Mashed potatoes
Sacher Torte

The powerful will always lunch on rich foods, well seasoned with heavy sauces, while the weak peck away at wheat germ and tofu, convinced that their suffering will earn them a reward in an afterlife where grilled lamb chops are all the rage. But if the afterlife is, as I assert, an eternal recurrence of this life, then the meek must dine in perpetuity on low carbs and broiled chicken with the skin removed.

Dinner
Steak or sausages
Hash-brown potatoes
Lobster thermidor
Ice cream with whipped cream or layer cake

This is a meal for the Superman. Let those who are riddled with angst over high triglycerides and trans fats eat to please their pastor or nutritionist, but the Superman knows that marbleized meat and creamy cheeses with rich desserts and, oh, yes, lots of fried stuff is what Dionysus would eat—if it weren’t for his reflux problem.

Aphorisms
Epistemology renders dieting moot. If nothing exists except in my mind, not only can I order anything; the service will be impeccable.
Man is the only creature who ever stiffs a waiter.

Ilham

tum mere pās hote ho goyā

jab koi dūsrā nahīñ hotā

As if you are with me, just when,

There is no one around me.

-Momin

na(h) thā kuchh to khudā thā, kuch na(h) hotā to khudā hotā

duboyā mujh ko hone ne, na(h) hotā maiñ to kyā hotā

When there was nothing, there was God; had there been

nothing, God would still have been.

Drowned because I existed, how would it have mattered if I

did not exist?

-Mirza Ġhālib

History

Another day, another trip; this is the life! My sentiments exactly as I headed towards the National Museum on a crisp Saturday morning. My thoughts hovered upon the absence of my much-awaited morning tea followed by a general speculation as to why I had worn socks on a day which demanded less than a light pashmina.

The CNG cut through the eight a.m. air like a butcher’s knife, and in no time, I found myself standing outside the gates of my destination. My eyes welcomed the sights of some of the girls in my class, and as we waited for our other comrades to arrive, the sun blazed and glittered in the sky.

Food for thought: The sky has no color, nor does water, but still we see them in shades of rainbow: Nature’s illusion at its utmost.

***

We flocked towards the Museum like sheep and were met by our class lecturer Asst. Prof. Dr. Shahnaj, who in turn introduced us to our guide for the day, Dr. Nilu Shamsur Nahar, an enthusiast on all things ‘desi’, an egalitarian and a patriot. It was no surprise that I instantly took a fast liking to her, and tried to concentrate on her words instead of letting my mind indulge in voracious thoughts of gluttony. She briefed us about the Museum, which was founded in 1913, making it almost a hundred years old, had 46 galleries.

Note: First Museum in Bangladesh: Rajshahi Barendra Research Museum (1909).

***

We were herded towards the stairs and taken to the second floor and into the room containing the map of Bangladesh. Together between Maam and Dr. Nilu, they pointed out various regions with abundant (?) existing indigenous components. We strolled into the following gallery of corals, a giant slab of fossil wood approximately 2.5 million years old and different mineral samples. The room reminded me of science classes back in fifth grade where we had to bring in samples of barley and wheat and pretend to be interested in gawking at them.

Food for thought: Fine white clay found in northern regions of Bangladesh produces exquisite porcelain. Ample amounts of coals, limestone and hard-rock beds to be found around the country. Interestingly enough, outsiders seem to be coming in here and taking them away while we, materialistic Bengalis, stand aside and let them have their way due to the small monetary compensation they provide. Months later we seem to be buying goods from the same outsiders who had once come into our country and extracted our raw materials and had produced their finished goods, thus, paying for things which were, in fact, ours to keep and use.

Note: We are a stupid nation; excuse the crudity.

Next we glanced at crop, cereal and spice samples, hurrying on to flora and fauna, and into the clutches of the animal kingdom. A minor fast forward brought us to the fish palace which, I must add, held a gigantic skeleton of a mammoth-like fish.

Food for thought: Interestingly enough, the swordfish, apparently prone to mammal-like properties feeds its babies with a fine liquid it carries, milk, and yet, it is still just a fish.

Note: Our national flower is the white water lily, not any water lily. Dr. Nilu made it a translucent point of how she expected school children not to know the correct answer to this query. Something tells me that she derived a subtle yet malicious pleasure in being informed about our insolent ignorance.

***

Enter ye, into the boat shindig. Displaying boats with the slightest link to our country, the gallery held the air of grandeur and heritage. You could almost picture the people involved in this craft. We strolled from object to object as a slight hint of a prestigious lineage crept into our egos. Visiting galleries exhibiting local wares, nakshi kathas, clay pottery, coins, dolls and sports the cultures of the various tribes scattered around the country, we came to the gallery of local musical instruments.

Astounded, I yearned to learn how to play all of them starting from the ek tara to the flute.

Of course this was followed by three of my personal favorite galleries: the gallery containing all sorts of religious and ritual objects, the gallery of ancient writings (Pandulipi), and the two galleries of local and international arts.

Food for thought: Buddhism has six gods and goddesses. This was conflicting since I had always thought it to be a Monotheist religion it anything, and one, which preaches humility and peace as far as my knowledge goes. A cutaway thought – Lord Krishna is depicted as black just like the sky. It was probably to signify His Eternal depth and transparency; air, water, infinite.

Note: Must start painting again; the trip was inspirational at the least. Also, one of the gods displayed had a fish tail, like that of a merman. I must find out the significance. Also, I need to go to the galleries displaying religious and ritual objects again for my own peace of mind.

***

The visit was a short one; only two hours. And yet, I found it amusing that I had been given a considerable amount of input into the lives of the people who had inhabited this land which we now claim as our country. Maam had remarked that patriotism arose from colonization, and this struck a chord somewhere. Come to think of it, if patriotism exists in its true form, then it would make humanitarians and egalitarians patriots as well.

Same hat, different person.

Comical since that is exactly what we have been doing in all aspects of life calling an object by multiple names and claiming one was more correct over the other like water, jol and pani, per say.

***