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Goodbye (-Death)rant.net! I'm Moving On To Two Other Blogs.

(-Death)rant.net, Blogging, Personal Stuff, Resources 4 Responses »
May 122011

Sunset with dark cloudsMy time with this blog had been turbulent, troublesome, interesting, and exciting. I started it as an unconventional method to deal with my depression and voice my thoughts about plenty of different topics. It always has been a pretty small blog, and I wasn’t eager to promote it to a larger audience. Now, that decision has taken me a lot of time, but I plan to discontinue writing on this blog.

Why Will I Abandon Deathrant.net?

Deathrant.net has several downsides, like

  • It has its own domain, but it’s only a .net domain, which is second-rate.
  • The name Deathrant.net is negative, confusing, and not too much connected with the content of the blog. If I had always stayed depressed, the name would have been appropriate, but now it’s more of a burden than anything else.
  • As a chaotic personal blog it doesn’t have a clear topic, other than the things I’m generally interested in.

For those reasons, I wasn’t eager to try turning (-Death)rant.net into a really big blog. Now, its main purpose is to display my own progression from a depressed mathematics student to an aspiring and optimistic personal development blogger. As that, it still have some value, so I won’t delete it.

Become Unrestricted: My New Personal Development Blog

Over the last months I tried improving my blogging style, and I think I have succeeded at least in part. I will use what I’ve learned to create a new self-improvement and personal development blog on BecomeUnrestricted.com. Of course, I hope to get better at writing in the future.

In fact, I planned to start that blog on 2011-06-02 (Ascension Day), but I was getting more and more the feeling that this delay was just restricting me in my creativity and freedom. Initially, I wanted such a late release to learn a lot about blogging in the meantime. And a lot I have learned, indeed.

With Become Unrestricted I want to take a more structured, systematic, scientific, and philosophic approach to personal development. I’m eager to turn that blog into a rich and valuable resource of self-improvement and personal development matters. I feel that my talents are best used for this important task, and I really sense that this is the right path for me.

Perhaps I could be even more excited and let my excitement show in my writing, but on the one hand I still suffer from Candida – The One Cause Of My Health Problems. And on the other hand, I’m still not as good at writing and spreading my enthusiasm as Jonathan Mead in his blog Illuminated Mind.

Radivis.com: My New Home As A Thinker And Writer

There’s another blog that I’ve registered this year: Radivis.com. At first, I wanted to let it be a dedicated platform for my fiction writing and my philosophical musings. But the name of the domain makes it a good place for my more general observations and ideas, which I used to write down here at (-Death)rant.net.

It’s not hard to notice that I have been inactive on Radivis.com for quite a while. The reason for that was that I wasn’t making very much progress at writing. Instead, I started learning to plan and structure my writing more professionally. The book Writing Fiction For Dummies by Randy Ingmarson and Peter Economy helped me a lot at that.

Unfortunately, I have still problems to motivate myself to work on my science fiction projects. It’s not that they aren’t exciting, but almost always it takes a huge effort to work on them, as they are really complex projects. Being organized very well seems to be pretty important to me. Thankfully, I’m getting better at that.

So, What’s Next?

My focus for the next months is to turn Become Unrestricted into a great resource for personal development ideas. Meanwhile Radivis.net will be the platform for those of my thoughts which reach for a wonderful technological and social future. The distinction between both blogs might not be 100% sharp, but at least both of them have their own characteristic topics.

While Radivis.com is for radical visions about the global future, Become Unrestricted is more practical and aims to provide great personal development and self-improvement resources. So, you will have the choice what you want to read, instead of being confronted with a wild mixture here on (-Death)rant.net.

Make sure to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blog(s) you are interested in. Then you can read my posts with Google Reader for example. That way you will always be informed about my updates without having to visit my site(s) directly.

Posted by RadiVis at 23:48 Tagged with: , , , ,

Big Blogging Mistake: Avoid Just In Time Writing

Blogging, Personal Stuff 2 Responses »
Apr 252011

HourglassLet’s assume you have a blog and read about the suggestion to blog on a regular schedule. Yeah, readers like regular schedules, but there’s a serious downside to them: You need to produce enough valuable content to come up with a new post every time your posting schedule dictates it.

Ideally, you would produce a lot of content in advance, so you just need to upload your already finished posts. But what if you have run out of already finished content or have trouble writing posts in advance? Then you need to write your posts just in time.

I have done that over the last month and it had worked out relatively well. But there was the problem that I tried writing long and great articles, but have run out of time to complete them in time. Oops!

That’s why you need to avoid writing posts just in time!

You see? If you can’t finish a great post in time, and you still want to stick to your blogging schedule, and have no already finished articles to post, then you need to do something else: Come up with a filler post that isn’t great, but can be completed quickly.

Filler content is not cool. It’s not terribly helpful and you feel bad for resorting to that strategy. You think it’s better than posting nothing, and you might be right. But it’s still not a good strategy. If you can’t create the content in time, then you simply need more time!

There are two ways to get more time:

  1. Put more time into blogging.
  2. Change your blogging schedule, so that you have more time for writing each article.

Of course you can also do both at once. If you do that, you can also prepare more content in advance, which will make your blogging operation run even smoother.

Maybe you wondered whether this post is a filler, too. Yes, it is. Why do you think I’m writing about this problem? I’m suffering from it myself. Well, basically that means I have to come up with a potential solution for a problem. I haven’t tested the suggestions in this post, but at least they sound reasonable.

Writing about problems that you have already solved is much more valuable for readers, because they are given advice that really works in reality. See? This post is a good example for that. If you have the problem I’m writing about, you might not be sure whether my advice is good, because I haven’t solved that problem already.

But at least, this post is a perfect example for the trouble that results from finishing a post just in time:

  • This post is too short and doesn’t provide a lot of valuable information, because I’ve only taken about 35 Minutes to make this post.
  • Proofreading takes a lot of time, so I haven’t done that for this post.
  • It’s less inspiring than it could be.
  • It’s not well structured.
  • It doesn’t fit into the general theme of this blog.
  • The overall quality of this post isn’t really great.
  • I feel bad about marketing it, so I just don’t do that.

Maybe you wonder whether I have also written other filler posts here. Yes, I have. Take a look at these posts – and compare them to my other recent articles:

  1. Speed-Post: News and Thoughts
  2. Sources of Inspiration
  3. Aura: An Open Content System Idea

Do you notice a difference? This is not a rhetorical question, I’m really curious. Perhaps those posts were not the worst I’ve ever written, but I still think there’s a real difference in quality (and word quantity) between those filler posts and the posts I’ve taken more time to write. Or do you disagree with me?

Posted by RadiVis at 18:07 Tagged with: , ,

World Improvement Plan: Mind Exaltation

Blogging, Personal Stuff No Responses »
Mar 282011
Light Spring by christmasstockimages.com
Light Spring by christmasstockimages.com (CC-BY)

So, now that I discontinue my mathematics and physics studies, what comes next? Looks like I need to come up with some good plan how to improve the world, and still earn some money to fulfill my demands. After some minutes of thinking about how to name my approach, I came up with the name Mind Exaltation, which neatly summarizes what I want to do. To improve the world, we need to improve our minds. In the posts “Capability Criticality: We Are Just As Good, Benevolent and Rational As Our Skills Permit.” and “Capability Augmentation Will Solve All Our Problems!” I’ve explained why it is so important to improve our minds: It enables us to get better in any sense.

The Mind Exaltation plan involves two projects: Radivis.com and the personal development site project, which has no fixed name yet. On Radivis.com I present my science fiction stories and the philosophical concepts that are exemplified in those stories. On the personal development site I will present articles, like those long ones which I presented here on deathrant.net during the last month.

Radivis.com
That site is for my science fiction stories and the philosophical ideas behind it. Currently it’s just a blog with some quite unfinished stories, but it would be no problem for me to add a forum and a wiki. Currently I’m working on Exaltation Dominance, which is a story about a rapid and radical total transformation of our world. Exaltation Dominance is a bit crazy, but it’s based on a relatively simple underlying idea. If you really want to know it, just contact me directly and I will tell you more.

Now, that I decided to spend much more time on that project, I installed some programs which help me to handle the project more effectively:

  • Storybook is a software for organizing the plot, scenes, characters, location and ideas.
  • LyX is a LaTeX-based document processor which offers high-level typography.
  • Jutoh is for making ebooks.

All these programs are freeware (at least in the basic version) and available for various operating systems. Up to now, I just used Google Docs (and Google Wave before that) to write my stories. That had the advantage that my stories were in the cloud, but I didn’t really make a lot use of that advantage.

How do those stories improve the world?
Look, the basic ideas are these:

  • Visionary Inspiration: I write about interesting future scenarios and hope that readers think “Oh, cool, I’ll do/create something like that in real life.”
  • Mind Expansion: When I first came across the ideas in my stories they really freaked me out! But now I am relatively comfortable with them. In any case, they killed some parts of my naivety and changed my view on the world around me. If you read my stories the same could happen to you.

At least my stories come down to being thought provoking stuff. As a newly self-proclaimed writer one of my first priorities is to improve my writing skills. Does anyone have a good suggestion where I can get them from?

Personal Development Site Project
My dramatic recent progress, the realization of Capability Criticality, and some inspiration from various blogs convinced me that it would be an awesome project to make a personal development site which explains all the techniques I used to make that progress and more. But what would make my site different than other personal development blogs?

  • My site would have a basis in some of my philosophical ideas. Philosophy does have some nice applications to personal development – just ask the Stoics.
  • I like to approach the problem in a more systematic fashion. Currently I use some kind of self-management system to keep me productive and balanced. Also, I want to put some emphasis on methods which are empirically shown to work – in the sense that studies or quantitative personal experiments have shown that they were effective.
  • Science is the way to go. Readers are encouraged to become DIY personal development scientists who can make private experiments and apply the scientific method directly.
  • Gamification (there’s a blog about that) and quantification are used as central elements.
  • As transhumanist I try using the best technologies to get the best possible results.

I think those are enough good reasons for adding another great personal development to the bloggosphere.

The details of branding and the technical implementation of the project aren’t completely determined, yet. I have used this blog as training platform over the last weeks, which explains some of the recent changes. So, I will probably stick to WordPress, as it is usually considered as one of the best solutions. And since I also use WordPress for Radivis.com, it would add to the consistency of my projects.

Need Feedback!
If you want to support me, and help me to build a really good site, you can already start writing some comments about what you like about my recent posts and what could be improved. Even if I am not a complete beginner, I am not a pro blogger, yet. If you notice something that’s rather wrong here, please feel free to point it out. Thanks! :) You are also encouraged to voice specific wishes what you want to read about. Certainly, I’m not running out of ideas, but getting more good ideas never hurts (if you know how to manage them, that is).

Posted by RadiVis at 16:54 Tagged with: , , , ,
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