Marc Norris

I just want to wish all my readers a good morning from my home in Conquest, Saskatchewan, Canada.  Chances are that you have never heard of the town that I am living in, but that is okay – I’ll fill you in on the details.

You see, we just bought a house here back in September of 2008, so this town is new to us.  Our home that we lived in before in Saskatoon was being moved to make way for new commercial buildings, so we were left with the choice of either finding a place in Saskatoon (where rental was going to be our only option as the housing market was overpriced), or buy a house somewhere else.  Since I worked at home, all I needed was a community that had high speed Internet – which most places in Saskatchewan have.

After a lot of house hunting, we ended up buying this house in Conquest.  It was a big change as I grew up in  the city and I was really worried that living in a small town wouldn’t work for me.  We moved from a city of about 300,000 people to a town of about 170 – big difference!

But what I didn’t realize was that it would grow on me.  Honestly, I was at the point in my life where I was getting tired of the rush of the city and I just needed to slow down my life – so in the end, I think it was a good choice.

There is just something magical about waking up to a beautiful sight each morning, going to sleep in the dark (unlike the city where it is always bright), and living in a place that is quiet (something I still can’t get over, though I really don’t miss the constant noise from the city).  I also love that the people are friendly out here and take the time to talk to you – something you will never see in the city.

I hope you all have a great day, wherever you are in the world, and I hope to see you back at my blog tomorrow – thanks for reading

Though it has been awhile since I wrote anything here (like 2 days   ), I have actually been working on other things – most notably doing a little website promotion.

Specifically, I have been working on blog commenting which does take a little time.  I am making the point to read the blog posts so that I can make a constructive comment.  I have been reading a lot today, and have learned quite a bit, but there is one thing that I have really noticed:

Most people are not blogging constantly.

I admit that I am in that boat too, but there are a lot of people that haven’t even made one blog post this year – which is unacceptable.  Not only does this mean that they will see a reduction in traffic, but what makes it worse is that their sites could totally go stagnate and lose all their search engine rankings.

After learning my mistake last year with my main site, I have been making an effort to at least blog once per month, but hopefully I will be able to do more than that – I guess time will tell.

If you hadn’t noticed, this blog is using the default theme and that pretty much sucks.  There is just something about looking like the five billion other blogs out there that bothers me – I am my own person, so it is time to do something different.

So, today, I will be installing a new theme, doing a little customizing and making this site look pretty – I think it is about time.  Hopefully, I can come up with something good – just take a look at it later today.

UPDATE on January 25: Well, it took longer than expected to get a new theme up, but I am in the process of tweaking the new theme for the site. I think it does look a little better, and though it does need some work, I think it will work out fine.

Hopefully the tweaking won’t take too long – I am trying out a new tool to make it work.

If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been blogging on a consistent basis.  Part of this problem is due to the fact that once I go downstairs to work, I usually get distracted and blogging is the last thing on my mind.  But the result of this is that my blog, traffic, and readers all suffer – if there is nothing new to read, why would you come back, right?

So, I have decided to try this week to sit down before I go downstairs at the kitchen table and blog on my wife’s laptop.  There is no specialized software on here, just the basics, so there is little distraction for me to do other things besides blogging.

I guess I’ll have to see how it goes, but so far, this is the second blog post I have written today (I have about three blogs to write on that I should be doing consistently), so I guess I have made progress already.

I’ll give it a week and we’ll see how it is going – I am expecting some good results.