Sunset blogging

This week’s speedlink kicks off with Paul Gannon explaining why your blog shouldn’t have a homepage. He disagrees with the many blogging professionals who say that your homepage acts like a storefront meant to entice customers through the door. A visitor reading your homepage is already in the store and your job now is to close the sale with a landing page instead. Give them what they want.

Continuing on the topic of blogging, Todd LeFurgey has noticed that many of the folks in his “writer’s circle” have stopped blogging and some of them “have even deleted their blogs entirely.” I’ve also noticed that many of my blogging friends from when Beyond the Rhetoric kicked off several years ago are no longer around and some of them hardly maintain an online presence anymore either. It’s easy to get started; it’s much more challenging to stick with it.

Times change. Some people abandoned traditional blogging in favor of Tumblr and social media, for instance. And as Ray Ebersole points out, the world of education is constantly changing too. Whereas many of us were taught to memorize our sums and multiplication tables, many children are now being taught mathematics with Common Core Standards instead. The idea is that they become better able to figure things out rather than simply relying on rote memorization.

On a tastier note, May Pang had the opportunity to try some of the new soups from Happy Planet while hanging out at The Dirty Apron Cooking School last month. I know Happy Planet as much more of a juice company, but the same fundamental philosophy certainly applies to tasty, hearty soups too. The ingredients are all natural and there are no added preservatives.

It may not be quite as sexy as the new Tesla that Elon Musk just unveiled, but it’s much more within reach for the average commuter. Eric Novak recently took the all-electric Kia Soul EV around for a spin and he has the video to prove it. It certainly seems like an interesting vehicle for booting around the city.