Heart Like a Dog

The Good, the Bad, and the Oh My God of living with dogs!

2013 Goals

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Since we’re already into the middle of January I thought it might be a good time to lay out my goals for the upcoming year.

I’m calling them goals, but in essence they’re more like guidelines, because this year I’m allowing my goals to be flexible and I’m not beating myself up if I don’t meet them.

You may need to remind me of this at some point if I start to have a melt down.

Blogging

I think my blogging goals will always be to post every day.  Granted some posts may be longer than others, but for me I need the discipline of posting every day.

I’d like to have more of my sense of humor show in my posts. Most of you don’t know this, but I’m actually fairly funny in real life.  For some reason I can’t seem to let it shine through in my posts.

A person can be serious AND funny right?  Or would that just be seriously funny?

Twitter

Oh Twitter, I want to love you, I really do.  I want to be able to use you, but what do you say on Twitter?  My niece who is quite the Twitterer, says it’s just like having a conversation, you think of something and you tweet it.

Yes, it’s true I do occasionally retweet a blog post, but for the most part, I don’t use it.

This year (like last year) I hope to learn how to tweet effectively.

I think for now, I might just stalk a couple of you on Twitter.

Other social media platforms.

There are so many social media platforms out there right now, that I honestly cannot keep up.  So for now what I intend on doing is I will strive to post at least once a week on Pinterest, I’ll check in on Triberr and see if I can figure that out.

Is there anything else that you are using that you think i need to know about?  If so, please let me know.

Writing

I still have a goal to get paid for writing, this is something I’ll be working on.

I’d also like to finish at least one of the two books I’ve started.  I actually like the book I wrote in November (during the NaNoWriMo challenge) better than I like the first one.  The problem is I over-dosed on it in November so once the challenge was over, I pulled the thumb drive and haven’t touched it since.

This year, I’d like to work on it a bit more, maybe get it to the stage where I can submit it.

Sampson and Delilah

IMG_3315

My goals for them will never change.  It will always be to give them the very best life I possibly can, to love and cherish them and enjoy the time we’ve been given.

Do you set goals for your blog, or yourself?  How do you measure whether they are successful or not?  Do you have any tips or goals you’d like to share?

Nine Little Monkeys

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Nine little monkeys jumping on the bed, one fell off and then he said, “Hey Heart Like A Dog, here are your yearly stats from wordpress.

Well okay, I may have embellished that a little, my point is those little WordPress monkeys who were hard at work figuring out everyone’s statistics (and sending them out) finally got around to calculating mine.

Who compares a blog to the Cannes Film Festival?

Oh, the wordpress monkeys that’s who.

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 20,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals.

In 2012, there were 211 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 267 posts.

The busiest day of the year was November 23rd with 1,444 views. The most popular post that day was Dogs of Blogville Calendar Contest.

If this blog was Fatal Attraction…

Those little monkeys must have been watching movies while they were calculating my stats, I see lots of movie references in this report.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2012.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for heart like a dog, hurricane delilah, jodi stone, heartlikeadog.com, and heartlikeadog. (I wonder how many of these searches were mine?)

Where did they come from?

73 countries in all!  Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & Canada were not far behind.

Glad to see they’re off the film theme.

Who were they?

Your most commented on post in 2012 was Dogs of Blogville Calendar Contest

These were your 5 most active commenters:

I really already knew this.  🙂 You guys are so awesome.

Many thanks to all of you who shared this journey with us and for all of you who shared and commented.  I hope you’ll hang around and see where the 2013 ride takes us.  Tomorrow I’ll look at the goals I set for myself last year and set some goals for this coming year as well.

In keeping with the movie theme the monkeys set out for me:

That’s a wrap.

Co-Hosted Follow-Up Friday

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Welcome to this week’s edition of co-hosted Follow-up Friday Blog Hop.

Follow-Up Friday Blog Hop

Follow-Up Friday

 

My co-hostess this week is someone I admire very much.  She adopted a shy, fearful dog and found out she has some reactivity issues.  Some people would give up on dog like Bella, but not Leslie and Jan.  They’ve found an agility class for reactive dogs and have met with behavioral specialists to find a way to help Bella.  Leslie courageously shares their story on her blog.

Many thanks to Leslie from Bringing Up Bella, for co-hosting the FUF blog hop. The blog hop that let’s you wrap up your week and leads you right into the weekend.

Trail Blazers – Author’s Note

The snow we got was the light and fluffy kind.  All you snow connoisseurs will know, the light, fluffy snow is just as bad (if not worse) than the heavy wet snow.

While I could only manage one loop around, the dogs got plenty of running time.  I however felt like I’d worked out in the gym for about an hour.

Snow

That is hard work!

I. Kid. You. Not.

The Dog Squad – Update

Can you say, open mouth, insert foot?

It was supposed to be a fun post mainly designed to get some followers on Pinterest.  It worked, I now have 16 Pinterest followers, but at first I don’t think it came off quite the way the post was intended.

Initially I started reading the comments and I thought, WHOA, that’s not how I meant it at all.  I thought maybe I better go in and update the post to try to make it a bit clearer.  When I signed into my dashboard there was a comment in the spam folder from Yvonne DiVita.

OMG.  Yvonne DiVita read my blog.

I started to hyperventilate.  Where’s a paper bag when you need one?

But, I caught my breath, updated the post and calmed down a bit.

My friend Cokie wrote this in the comments:

“you thought it looked like the cat people worked it with their wardrobe more than the dog people at BlogPaws, which I think is a fair statement in that I remember seeing more fanciful cat ears, cat prints, cat glasses, cat earrings and cat jewelry in general, than dog ears, dog glasses and dog earrings… Just sayin’ =^..^=”

Thank you Cokie.  That is exactly what I meant.

Pet Blogger Challenge – Author’s Note

What a great, thought-provoking challenge.  I’ve barely gotten into reading the posts (last I looked there were over 80 participants) but I’m already learning so much from all of you.

Great job to all who participated and thanks so much to Amy, from Go Pet Friendly for hosting this blog hop. I really look forward to participating again next year.

Speaking of blog hops, this wraps it up for me.  Many thanks to Leslie from Bringing Up Bella for sharing the co-hosting duties.

This is the Follow-Up Friday Blog hop,



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