Famous Friday: Planet3rry

This is the first in a series of Friday blog postings where I will attempt to make someone famous. I will do a review each week (if I remember) on Fridays of a blog that I enjoy reading.

This week’s Famous Friday pick is Terry at Planet3rry. Terry is a regular commenter here at MTS. I first heard about his blog through the Phedippidations podcast. Terry’s blog mostly focuses on his running, but like MTS, there is just about everything there. You might even get a look into how efficiently kids can paint each other with markers.

He participates in PhotoHunters, which is a weekly blog posting of a theme through pictures.

Jump on over to www.planet3rry.com and leave a few comments for Terry.

Sore legs

Monday I had a good speed workout. I am still without my track though. I am not sure why the track is not open, but it is getting on my nerves. It is not like I have been running there a long time, but I got used to being able to do speed work on it. Now that I don’t have it available to me, it is irritating. School should have started this week, maybe it will be open next week.

Yesterday, my off day from running, I did a pretty good weight workout. I just have a set of dumbbells, but they give me a pretty good workout anyway. I have not been working the weights as often as I should recently. Yesterday I did some leg work too. Today I am pretty sore all over. My legs were not too bad when I woke up this morning though.

That was then, this is now.

I had a 3 mile tempo run this morning. I did my 1 mile warm up at my desired pace (10:30) and then picked up the pace considerably for my tempo run. I measured that out in kilometers instead of miles. I hit my Km. splits at: 5:46  5:41  5:44  5:45  5:43. My target range was between 5:40 and 5:54 per Km. (or 9:07 to 9:30 miles). I did very well and am pleased.

The first Km. was the slowest and could have to do with the pack of 7 dogs that I had to run through this morning. I really slowed down and tried not to appear aggressive. I guess they bought it. None of them tried to chase me. They just barked.

Towards the end of the second kilometer, I was thinking that I would not be able to make it to 4 at that pace, but I decided to try. When I did finally get to 4 I gave myself permission to slow down just so that I could finish the run. I guess I didn’t listen to myself and slow down any.

But now my legs are really sore. I have a 4 mile recovery run for tomorrow. Good thing that my recovery pace is about as fast as my grand-mother can walk.

Discover Spanish With Us

I am pleased to announce the new website! It is still a work in progress, but we have started putting some content on there to get it moving.

Discover Spanish With Us is an English speaker’s perspective of the Spanish language. It is not an attempt to be scholarly or theoretical. What my wife and I are trying to share there are some observations we have made as we’ve learned–and are learning every day–about Spanish.

One of the words that recently struck me as interesting is the use of the word “discover in Spanish. It is not just to find something, but it carries with it the meaning of pulling something apart or uncovering it…investigating. While the English word can be used this way, it is a very common usage in Spanish.

Here is a short excerpt from the entry to the word descubrir/discover:

I first encountered this word used this way in the story of the Bible when four men brought their paralytic friend to Jesus. They were unable to enter the house through traditional means and resorted to discover (uncover) the roof of the house. Here is the wording from Mark 2:4 in the Spanish Bible.

Y como no podían acercarse a él a causa de la multitud, descubrieron el techo de donde estaba…

In the English the word used is uncovered.

Thus was born the idea to share our discoveries, investigations or pulling apart of Spanish words with the world.

If you want to learn some new vocabulary or have an interest in words and their meanings, then jump on over to Discover Spanish With Us and look around. Please leave a comment if you have something to add to the discussion. I am sure it will become a thriving community of like minded students.

Astronomy news and reviews

Astromart.com is a website that has astronomy equipment reviews as well as a classified section where people can list their un-needed equipment for sale. Their main page is a jumping off point to get into the meat of the site.

Their news section is full of current news. The latest story (at this time) is a story about the total lunar eclipse that happened last night? Did you see it? My wife woke me up at 4:45 to show me the view. There was just a sliver of the moon showing brightly. The rest you could still see, but was grayed out.

In the reviews section of the site they have digital camera reviews showing how to get better pictures from certain cameras through your telescope. There are also reviews for different astronomy equipment.

Don’t forget to check out their classifieds section. They have almost 1000 items listed for sale. There are not too many items available in their auctions section though.

[This is a sponsored post.]

Better Google ranking

A couple of months back I gave a list of podcasts that I broke down into 5 Podcast Categories. That posting was inspired by a group writing project that was being sponsored by Darren at ProBlogger.net. It garnered a lot of links back to My Thought Spot. So much so that my Google page ranking went from 2 to 4. For those who may not understand that, it basically means that Google now sees MTS as an important website when returning search results. If you do a search for something that I have blogged, I am more likely to show up towards the top of all the search results.

This month Darren is hosting another writing project that has the theme of blogging tips. This will probably generate a lot of links back to My Thought Spot. This is a good thing since Google ranking is based on the links you have coming into your blog. Those links can be external coming in, or internal links to your own pages.

With group writing projects you are able to get a good number of incoming links. If these links come from other highly ranked blogs, that adds authority in the algorithm which can bode very well for you.

Therefore, the two main factors to rising in Google rankings is to have many links coming into your blog and then have those links be from highly ranked sites.

There are many other factors as well, but those are the two big ones.

One thing I have seen that shows a lack of understanding in how the web works is that I have read many pages that talk about people or websites, but do not give links to those sites. A link to the main page is all it takes, though a link to a specific post or page at the linked site is always more preferable (also if they have trackbacks/pingbacks turned on, you will get a link back to your site just for deep linking to a specific post.)

Get out there and link to other sites and spread the joy of helping others move up in the rankings. They may return the favor by linking back to you. If not, someone else will.