Challenge Yourself!

Thanksgiving makes me think of pie. Actually, it makes me bake pie. I’m the baker in my family, and Thanksgiving is when I’m really called for duty. This is because I have all of my mother’s pie recipes, plus one that I made up myself with inspiration from my mother’s “Mystery Jelly” recipe (yep, that’s what she called it). Also, I have my mother’s pie crust recipe. I’ll tell you the secret later. In any case, I have become the pie baker. (Right now, the first of at least four Thanksgiving pies is in the oven: pecan. Pumpkin and fruit pies yet to come).

pumpkin pie

The pie I didn't enter (a little too brown on the top)

So I’m thinking about pie. And believe it or not, that is making me think about bravery. Here’s why: Continue reading

What “Cheers” can Teach You About Online Communities

Quote

I can’t get the theme song from “Cheers” out of my head today. My son has started watching the show in reruns (Netflix streaming is an amazing thing, especially paired with a Roku box), so I’ve been hearing that theme song a lot lately:

“Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.”

This got me started thinking about communities, and especially online communities. And I think perhaps the “Cheers” writers and song lyricist hit on something of a universal truth about community. Community, in any form — online or in person; in a bar or college dorm, or at a meeting or conference — is about making people feel welcome. A community is a place where people know and recognize each other, and rely on and support each other. Continue reading

3 Questions to Answer Before Building a Mobile App

About a week ago, I checked in on my friend Kiki L’italien’s newly redesigned blog and saw a sweet little hand-drawn cartoon with just a one-sentence post: “Turn this photo into a blog post.” The drawing showed a woman balancing two things in her two hands: “existing budget” and “mobile app.”

balance mobile needs with existing budget

Posted with permission from Kiki L’italien

I took this as a challenge to fellow bloggers to consider this topic and weigh in via their own blogs. Since I’d been thinking for a while about starting a blog, this was my call to action: Get this blog started, and answer Kiki’s challenge. As it turns out, I went back to Kiki’s blog a few days ago and found that the one-sentence “challenge” had been removed, and a short post on the subject of mobile apps had replaced it; what I had thought was Kiki’s call-to-action to other bloggers was, in fact, a note to herself. But by then, it was too late to stop me. So here are my thoughts on the same topic.


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