Figuring it Out

No cheerful quote today, no inspirational post, just some thoughts.  Many years ago, well just over 6, a wonderful friend and I were talking about how blah our lives were.  She had made a decision to post one positive thought a day in her live journal for a month.  I decided to take it one step further and create a live journal community called Think Positive 30. For a while, it was really cool. We were posting, and then Live Journal made us a spotlight community and the community EXPLODED. People were posting left and right. It was great, but a bit overwhelming because I was determined to respond to every post. From there came a very poor website with very little content. Over time, content was added and deleted and the website got a little more organized thanks to WordPress. I also added a mailing list which allowed people to receive a “Daily Positive Thought” via email. It was quite nice. There were a few people on the mailing list, and I got up every morning and emailed the thought via a free program provided by my web host called PHPList.

The list started growing, and while this was great, the volumn of mail being sent out during peak hours made my hosting company kind of cranky (something about bandwith or such, I’m not reall sure) and I was in a quandry. A very kind friend of mine did that thing he does (it could be voodoo, but I think it was more along the lines of programming) and set things up so that the list would go out automatically, during the non-peak hours, thus making me happy, and more importantly, my web hosting company happy.

Well things happen, and the phplist thing was upgraded, which was great, but it wiped out all the programming my friend did to make it run overnight. This meant I was getting up at 1:00 in the morning to set the list to run manually, and it also meant I had to leave my computer running all night so the mail would go out. I’m not going to lie, this got old quickly because I need my sleep, uninterrupted sleep, and I wasn’t getting it. In the end, I made the hard decision to disband the mailing list and just post the Daily Positive Thought here on the website.

There was a huge problem with this. I hardly ever seem to get it done. I post it on twitter, but there, I’m limited to thoughts that are 140 characters or less. I want to do more. I love sharing postivie thoughts, and inspirational posts, but I need to figure out what exactly how I want to do this. I’m going to be honest here, it’s never going to be perfect, no matter what because I’m NOT a perfect person, in fact, I’m kind of lazy, and I lose focus easily. I also have a life, I have a job, and I have a family and those things take time. I try, but I’m not perfect and I am never going to even get close to perfect.

So thanks for sticking with Think Positive 30 while I figure out how I want to do things. I have lots of dreams and visions for this whole thing, as many of you know. I even want there to be a book, but that lazy, and loss of focus thing keeps coming in to play there 🙂 Who knows, maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t (the book I mean) but I WILL figure out the best way to get the thinking positive message out there. I believe that it is far too important to give up on. Remember, we all know that life isn’t always wonderful, and we can’t control the things that are going on around us, but the one thing we can control is how we view those things. I choose to find the good and look for the positive, and I hope you will too.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Ellyn

    Use a 3rd party AUTORESPONDER, such as AWeber or GetResponse.

    As the name states, an autoresponder allows you to set up a series of emails that will automatically get sent to your list of subscribers. The delivery of the emails are handled by the autoresponder company; your webhosting company is not affected.

    I’m surprised no one suggested the use of an autoresponder when you stopped using PHPList 😉

  2. admin

    Ellyn – it has been suggested, but the one’s I’ve found cost money – and that’s something that I don’t want to do. I can’t afford to pay to send out the positive thoughts, and I don’t want to ask for money from people who subscribe. If you happen to know of a decent one that is free, please please please pass it along 🙂

    Tracie

  3. Ellyn

    ListWire (listwire dot com) is a free one. Check it out and see if it will fit your needs. 🙂

  4. admin

    I will – thank you so much

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