Tag Archives: L.A.

My Evaluation of My Blog

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Over the past school year and the ten weeks of the Student Blogging Challenge, I have done a lot of blogging. I have written about various topics and issues. Now, that the time for the Student Blogging Challenge is almost up, I will evaluate my blog.

Since March and the start of the SBC, I have written 14 blog posts on a variety of topics. 7 posts, were for the SBC and school, but the other 7 were based on my own interests. There were also lots of blog posts before March that I wrote. Of these blogs, my most popular blogs were the Update On the Chickens post and The Feliks Zemdegs post. These were viewed and commented on the most.

Here are some statistics from my blog. I have had 145 visitors! I never expected to have so many people seeing my blog and I was very happy about this. I also had four different countries being The U.S, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. I was really happy to see the diversity. For comments, I had 13 comments not including my responses to comments. I liked seeing people liking my work, but also giving my constructive criticism or asking questions. Again, I also loved seeing diversity in the comments from different parts of the world. The most popular post comment wise was definitely The Update on the Chickens Blog Post(Link up above). It got eight comments!

I have been focusing at lot on my blog and visitors. Now, I’m going to talk about me visiting and commenting on other blogs. To start I visited and/or commented on blogs from, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Norway, and America. Wow, that’s a lot of countries! It was great to see ideas, opinions, and posts from people all around the world. Also, I loved visiting other blogs. Almost everyday, I would visit on at least 2 or 3 blogs. Like I said, I loved to see different posts around the world. In total, I visited roughly, 150, to 200 blogs.

Now, lets come back to my blog. I tried to make my appearance and widgets very welcoming and user friendly. I also made sure it was mobile friendly. I did this because it will deter readers if your blog is really messy and non user friendly. I have 13 widgets, most of which are to help people find their way around the blog and find posts they like. Some examples; I had a list of categories and tags. I also had archives to find blogs and other things similar to this. But, I also just had some fun ones like a flag counter, avatar, and blog buddies around the world. Speaking of which I have 5 links to other blogs all from different countries. I also had links to class blogs and the SBC.

My blog. Screen Shot taken by me.

An Audit by My mom:

I asked my mom to do an audit of my blog and asked her the following questions.

What were your first impressions of this blog?
What captured your attention?
What distracted you on the blog?
What suggestions can you give me to improve my blog?

These were her answers.

My mom was impressed by the amount of posts and visitors for my blog. She thought that the layout was very clean and she liked my avatar. My avatar and my titles caught my mom’s attention and she thought they were really engaging. She also thought that the tag cloud was a little distracting on my side bar and maybe could be minimized or taken away. My mom’s final thoughts and suggestions were that maybe I could add more pictures to my posts.

In conclusion, I feel pretty good about my blog. I could maybe have made a little bit more of a prettier theme and had some longer posts (Although recent ones are longer). But, I feel like my blog is mostly good. I really appreciate all of you who have visited my blog, commented, and put me on their blogrolls because it really motivates me to keep going and keep writing.

-Happy Blogging,

Ben

An Empathy Experience

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For the past few weeks in LA class, my class has been reading the book, A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park. This book is separated into two parts, one, about a boy named Salva who is an internally displaced person who later became a refugee in Southern Sudan, 1985. The second part is about a girl named Nya (Knee-Ya) and about her troubles in 2008 to get clean water. Our class did a project which was an empathy experience to put ourselves in their shoes.

My project was mostly related to Nya, and involved limited water and walking while holding water. I walked around my yard for 20 minutes while carrying a bucket of two gallons of water. I also walked around barefoot while doing this. Then, if it was too heavy, I would have to drop some. (I did have to!) What I had left was what I had to drink AND use for the day.

Me walking around my yard carrying the water barefoot. -Photos taken by my dad.

Before the project, I was thinking, “This is going to be a piece of cake! No problemo.” Let me just say that is not how it went. At first, I could barely get the bucket off the ground. I eventually did but after that it just got harder and harder. I did end up having to drop some which made it a little easier but, if I dumped too much, I wouldn’t have enough water for the day. It wasn’t too hard for the day, although it was very tempting to just go get an ice cold glass of water from the fridge.

This project really made me look at the big picture. I did this for a day, but I could barely imagine, doing this every day, for the rest of my life. But people do have to do this every day. Every day, people get water for hours, preventing them from doing other things like getting an education. It really made me appreciate having running water for showers, brushing, drinking, and so much more. And I just don’t know how I could do this every day.