Keeping it Honest The Essay Experts New Year’s “Ressaylutions” Update

Keeping it Honest The Essay Experts New Year’s â€Å"Ressaylutions† Update In January I reported on The Essay Expert’s New Year’s Resolutions (Ressaylutions). As human beings, we are not designed to keep our promises. I certainly am an expert at making resolutions and then forgetting about them, without ever acknowledging which promises I have – and haven’t – kept. Not this year! I’m taking a look to see how I’m doing, ten weeks after my resolutions were made. Ready? The Essay Experts New Year’s Ressaylutions were: 1. Convert my website to WordPress. This project is complete – sort of. My site is indeed operating now on a WordPress platform, and theoretically I have easy access to edit my pages in any way I want. I have run into some technical difficulties however. For instance, when I tried to edit a page, it made all kinds of changes I didn’t want it to make and â€Å"broke†the page. I received the following email today from the company that handled the conversion: â€Å"The problem of visually editing your page content, without causing the page to break, lies with the page template. I did indicate that the template is dated, with a lot of additional graphics embedded. If you ever switch to a more modern template that contains a whole lot less graphics internally you will be able to edit your content visually. The internal design of most of your pages work perfectly for static HTML type pages, but will require someone who is an HTML coder to add content to them. If the website owner wishes to do this, the editing will require some extra effort when editing anything visually.† Enough said. I’ve got my work cut out for me. As some of you know, my blog link also changed and created a hiccup in my blog postings last week. You might also notice that if you do a search in my blog, you get not only blog postings but all relevant parts of my website in the search results. This issue will be fixed later this week – when I will once again need to change my blog link due to a major â€Å"architecture change.† My apologies in advance for any strange blog digests you might receive next week as a result of this additional change! (P.S. I am thankful as I kvetch about my technical difficulties that I am safely landlocked in the Midwest, without any fears for my safety. My heart goes out to the victims of the tsunami in Japan who have much bigger things to worry about.) 2. Make it easier for my readers to choose the topic they want to read about (create 4 separate e-lists: a) Job Search (Resumes Cover Letters); b) College Admissions; c) LinkedIn Professional Writing; and d) Everything). AND 3. Create autoresponders. (Related to ressaylution #2.) This project is running close to schedule thanks to my incredible intern, Robin Reinke! She has prepared all the autoresponders and we’re continuing to move forward to create the lists. Stay tuned! 4. Guest blog. I haven’t written any specifically targeted guest blogs, though some of my existing articles have been published other places. I did deliver my webinar, How to Write a Killer LinkedIn Profile, for a group of Columbia University alumni and students, as well as for a group of people through ilostmyjob.com. Both events were a hit! I will also be on a blog radio show on March 22, Back in Force Productions, geared toward stay-at-home parents relaunching their careers. 5. Start an Artist’s Way group. I’ve been writing my morning pages every day (three pages a day of journaling), and though I’ve missed some mornings, I haven’t missed a single day. I haven’t been as good about creating Artist’s dates, which are dates with myself to do something fun and artistic. Mostly what has happened is that my priorities have changed since January. I’m surprising myself by finding creative expression through writing resumes and LinkedIn profiles! I am also singing in a newly forming funk/RB band! I’ll post clips when I have them! 6. Continue to write and share about writing issues, job search issues, and sometimes life issues that strike my fancy each week and that my readers care about. Yep I’ve been doing that. Covered topics from early admissions to parallel construction to LinkedIn news to greeting card grammar. Even got political. And now I’m getting honest. How are your New Year’s resolutions coming along? It’s a great exercise to check in and acknowledge where you’re making progress, where you’re stuck, where things have shifted. What do you see when you take a look at how the year is going?