#i need to export my blog into my journal for real

[blastburnt]

maybe trying out some eye makeup will be good for me

[thatsridicarus]

Gonna say something about Soup.io real quick

Ok maybe not-so-real-quick. Hooboy. Where do I even begin?

It was my LIFE for a significantly long time. It was my anti-Tumblr before I even got a Tumblr. It was a safe haven to upload things I don't really wanna share with my friends.

Starting from the early 2010s I've been trying A LOT of alternatives for popular sites, some are thankfully stable, most of them aren't. For the longest time I thought Soup was one of the most stable sites I could rely on & it did prove me right for many years. Like, whenever an alternative site failed on me I'll always store a backup of whatever important posts I have there on Soup.

Yfrog died? Off to Soup.

Twitwall died? Back 'em dreamjournal entries up in Soup.

FYI  I used to dump all my dream journal entries in the (now defunct) text auto-imports from Twitter, Jaiku, Ask.fm, etc. And it also works as a bookmarking site when all the bookmarking sites I've tried failed on me everytime.

Speaking of the anti-Tumblr part, I was pretty proud to own a Soup blog in place of a Tumblr blog & I would repost all the memes & stuff from my friends' Tumblr blog into Soup. (It was a hassle of course but I didn't even care). But the one thing I got a kick out of was copying other people's Tumblr fanart & turn them into Soup, since I thought nobody would care or even notice. To me this felt kinda robin-hood-ish, taking the love & attention of one perceived popular website & giving it to its less popular alternative. Back then I was still doing finals in university, & turning all those blues into reds lifted & kept my spirits up.

After graduating from university I moved on to actually making original fanart for Soup in the meantime, while still looking for jobs back then. A few of those fanart got featured in their ads & the developers liked it so much they sent me a Soup t-shirt & a tank top as a thank you gift which I still wore today. The thought of them sending shirts from across the globe all the way here is totally unexpected. Count this as an early birthday present (cuz it was days before my birthday) and to this day I still can't thank them enough for it.

Weird cuz in the previous year, just for fun, I photoshopped this Soup logo on a red shirt I already have, hoping I could have a Soup shirt for real. My prayers have been answered.

In a way, Soup also gave me room for experimenting in blog customization. In the early days I'd go around trying to copy my friends' blogs' looks (they're mostly on Tumblr & Blogger with multitudes of themes & Soup has like 4 other themes besides the default) & since I only know simple HTML & CSS & not much beyond that, I had to view the source page of these other blogs & tried seeing what codes can make certain pics float, or cursors change, or the likes.

There was one time when I actually made the cursor on my blog change, but I still couldn't nail the layouts like those other tumblr/blogger/wordpress/livejournal blogs. In the end, changing the background images is good enough... until Notasecondtowaste introduced Souperstyles to all of us, with lots of customized themes & even more customizable CSS-es. Also also that one time someone made a grid look for their Soup, that happened too, & that got me drawing this comic.

After getting my own Tumblr 2 years after I got my Soup, I went full matchy-matchy on both blogs in case one or the other screws up or something, then I'll still have backup on the other. Who would've guessed Soup was the first to die, after all these years. Gotta say I'm lucky I didn't really need to export my Soup content much following the site's demise, as besides my artworks, music & memes simultaneously posted on tumblr, my chat screencaps & dreamjournals are safe somewhere else.

There’s still some things I don’t quite like about Soup though, like how it doesn’t allow multiple images in a post (they used to, though, using automatic imports we can make a gallery from all the images we selected, not anymore). Also there’s not a lot of fandom comunities in Soup too, especially with my fandoms (the blame’s on me & not the website) thats why I was glad when I found out group blogs for Doctor Who, My Chemical Romance, 30 Seconds To Mars & comic enthusiasts exist in Soup.

Despite all that, Soup still wins me over with its versatility.

To me, Soup is a place where I can be alone & yet still interact with other people. Completely different people from my usual online friends I have in other social media. All the other alternative social sites I've tried don't really have a significant amount of active users, thus using those sites still feels kinda lonely without all the reactions. In Soup they’ll still react & repost your posts into groups & stuff.

Recently I’ve tried Soup clones popping out before Soup’s death, like Loforo, & earlier last year, Newtumbl. They’re light, they’re alright, though they still don’t really feel like Soup. But hey I’m sticking around Loforo for now, it’s still improving & introducing new features.

I'm really gonna miss Soup.io. Thnks fr th mmrs.

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[1998tales]

26 APRIL 2020

12:29AM

I made a Livejournal because I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to share my first entry. I’ll be crossposting from this tumblr to the livejournal too.

https://redcandle1588.livejournal.com/ - Feel free to add me as a friend there if you want.

   An Introduction and Nostalgia Trip    

I'm not sure what to write here. I am a mid-30s woman who has returned to LJ after being off this website since probably 2005. It's weird how you obsess over these communities and love them so much, but one day you don't login and forget you were ever interested. I remember on my old LJ that I never made a post though. I was never consistent at ever keeping a blog, though I've tried on different platforms about a dozen times. I don't recall making any specific friends either. In fact, I can't remember my old username, but I'm sure it has been purged.

I was always interested in t.A.T.u., Tegan and Sara, and Heavenly Creatures. Perhaps I was part of an Agatha Christie community as well. It was so much fun talking to people who shared your same interests. We shared LJ icons, AIM icons (oh how I miss AIM), etc. We obsessed over every detail of the Parker-Hulme case. I remember taking the time to scan every page of a play because it was hard for the average fan to get a copy. (I wonder if that's still floating around on someone's hard drive today.

We shared demos of t.A.T.u. and whole concert bootlegs of Tegan and Sara that I still have on CD-Rs somewhere. We told each other secrets that we wouldn't share with anyone else. We discovered ourselves, shared our lives, but no one needed to see your photo. No one needed to hear your voice. We didn't do it for clout. There was no money involved either. Simpler times.

I feel like that Pepperidge Farm meme and someone much younger will call me a Boomer. I don't mind though. I'm glad that I experienced this at its height. I wish I had a more concrete record of the time I spent on here (& one for offline memories too, but I destroyed my journals in my late 20s).

I never knew that I would still be a fan of certain people almost 20 years on. I still have t.A.T.u. on the brain. I buy every mp3 they release. I'm still collecting old CDs and vinyls. Some people have even offered to buy my whole collection. I've seen Tegan and Sara in concert twice. I don't watch Heavenly Creatures very often, but I'll probably do that tonight since I'm thinking about them. I want to review all books related to them on this blog. I was so obsessed with that movie that I even bought the two Biggles books that Pauline and Julia read in the book.

Anyway, I'm babbling. I will say honestly that I am disappointed in how I never developed as a person. I'm stunted. I never got to experience the usual milestones that other people do. I'm working on changing that before it's too late. Perhaps it's already too late. But I'm going to put in the old college try this year.

About thirty minutes ago, I started a fast. It will last thirty-six hours. I've only ever went twenty-four hours without food.

I keep a tumblr as well at: http://1998tales.tumblr.com. I've been keeping a daily log there since January. It's the first time that I've ever become consistent with anything.

I think I'm going to post this entry there as well. Maybe I'll write the same post for both starting tomorrow.

3:50AM

I can’t sleep. I just weighed myself and I weigh 230.6lbs/104.59kg. Wow. Fat.

12:52PM

I’m over thirteen hours into my fast now. I don’t feel hungry. I’m drinking a Bang energy drink in the flavor rainbow unicorn. I’ve decided that my livejournal will be more for talking about nostalgia, books, movies, music, etc. Maybe it will motivate me to read.

I’ve decided that I’ll link the Livejournal entries in their own post. At the end of the year, I can export my livejournal and make them into a PDF. I’ll figure it out later on. I had wanted to post all the entries here, but I think that defeats the purpose of having a separate blog.

5:04PM

I’m over 17 and a half hours into my fast. I don’t feel overwhelmingly hungry yet. I do feel very tired. It will probably be easy to go to sleep tonight. I’ve packed a very good lunch for tomorrow. I will be so glad to have something good to eat at noon. I’m taking flavored water as well.

6:31PM

I was so disappointed to see that I had a fee earlier for $149.00. It’s once a year and I completely forgot about it. I was getting so excited about being able to save more money this month. I’m only able to save about $300.00 right now. I know that sounds horrible, but I don’t  make a lot of money. This month even with my makeup purchases, I was able to get to $500.00. Now, I will have saved $351.00. Also, I’m saving my coronavirus relief check which was $1,200.00. So for this month, unless something comes up, I’ll be putting back $1,551.00. I’m very grateful that I can do this. I’m just disappointed that I didn’t remember about the fee otherwise I would have skipped the Sephora sale which cost me about $40.00 even on discount.

I’ll try harder next month.

I found this exercise challenge earlier:

https://www.shape.com/fitness/workouts/30-day-squat-challenge-will-totally-transform-your-butt

I don’t have any high expectations for it, but I want to try something for 30 days straight. I started today and it wasn’t too bad to do.

7:13PM

I am starting to feel hungry now. It’s kind of sad how I rarely feel hungry due to massive over-eating. This reminds me of how little I should probably be eating. I don’t feel dizzy or sick. I know that tomorrow I’ll be able to make it to noon without a problem.

I think the real issue for me is getting stressed out at work and using food to feel better. Or coming home and feeling bad about myself and getting food multiple times.

9:23PM

I still feel normal. I don’t feel hungry now. I’m going to try going to sleep in a few minutes. 

[zak-animation]

Overview As I did previously, I wanted to put a focus on specific projects this week. My main aim was to complete the first draft of my essay in preparation for our individual tutorial and focus on my stop motion developments. Fortunately, I was able to do just this: completing the first draft of my essay over the weekend and hiring out the stop motion studio in my own time to produce a few stop motion tests. Like last week, though, this did mean that I was not able to make any real progress on the digital metamorphosis and animated sketchbook assignment. This was to be expected, as it has allowed me to be ahead of the curve regarding the essay, and given me the opportunity to develop my own stop motion animation sequences beyond the expectations of the brief.

Having completed all of the Digital 3D and stop motion tasks, my priority next week will be on catching up with my other assignments. My plan is to have completed editing my essay, finished my digital metamorphosis task up to a point that I am happy with it and filled a single sketchbook by the end of next week. Given the fact that we will be briefed on our next project, explore acting through a performance workshop and a storyboarding masterclass - this may be a difficult balance. However, we also are given another week before hand in, which will be another opportunity to catch up with these two projects.

Something I am looking forward to, however, is our mid-unit review. An individual tutorial spanning around fifteen minutes, this is an opportunity to me to receive individual feedback on my work and an overall reflection of my progress so far. Personally, I feel like I am putting in more effort and work into both my practical responses and blog maintenance in comparison to the first unit - and it will be interesting to see if my tutors agree. This will allow me points to develop and improve upon, and receive a general critique of my current working practice.

Narrative Research Having completed extensive research into my chosen film last week, this week I have been able to begin work on the drafting process. Over the span of two intensive days, I was able to complete a first draft of my essay in preparation for our individual tutorial. My initial draft, however, was ultimately too encompassing and broad: a five thousand word study into Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, exploring both the theoretical and practical approaches the filmmakers took to complete the final film. This was collating all of the research I’d found in the process, and from here my focus was on cutting down the word count to the required limit of 1500 words.

In the process, I ended up cutting the plot analysis of the film and my investigation into the idea of Spider-Man as a character. As a choice, the film offers a range of analytical discussion opportunities, but it’s important to remember to decide on a singular line of inquiry for this essay. With all my research mainly exploring the film’s experimental approach to CG animation, I shifted the focus of my investigation to purely looking at how the film presents its plot: how the creators adapted an alternative approach to animated filmmaking through graphic printing techniques and adding a hand-rendered touch to every frame.

My independent tutorial suggested that my writing was successful and engaging, however, it is seriously over the word count and, like last time, I need to focus on a more academic way of writing. The strength of my essay comes from the depth of detail in the film’s animation and visual language process, and use of academic ideas such as the ‘carnivalesque’ and the various writings of Paul Wells. With terms such as ‘takes the concept and runs with it’, however, my writing nature is much more suited to that of journalism or sensationalist writing styles. This was an area that I needed to improve upon, and whilst it is less prevalent in my newest essay - it’s still a problem. With this in mind, I’ve continued to edit my essay and taken away any superfluous words, exaggerated phrases, and an invasive journalistic tone. A major element of this was my initial question, describing the film’s visual language as ‘entirely new’. On my tutor’s advice, this has now changed to ‘alternative and experimental’ taking the academic language from the original questions outlined in the brief and applying it to my own investigation.

Having completed a draft of the essay, next week I will begin work on the citation and reference process. My essay benefits from a range of sources, and I will need to reference each of these properly to fulfill the requirements of the brief. I’m expecting this to be a time-consuming task and will continue to cut the word count down in the process. As a whole, I’m at a good point in the project with my essay and hope to complete the assignment with plenty of time before the submission date.

Animated Sketchbook This week, I put a major focus on other projects - taking the time to produce iterations and further develop on the other tasks. As a result, I didn’t really have time to make any significant progress or development in this project. However, in the following two weeks, I will be putting a focus on developing and completing this project.

Digital Principles This week, I put a major focus on other projects - taking the time to produce iterations and further develop on the other tasks. As a result, I didn’t really have time to make any significant progress or development in this project. However, in the following two weeks, I will be putting a focus on developing and completing this assignment.

Stop Motion In the last week of our stop motion exercises, we were asked to have a character walk on-screen, visibly change expression, and continue walking with this new emotion. Like last week, this began through an extensive preparation process, in which I produced a few storyboard iterations based on my own live-action reference of the task.

My first attempt at this stop motion exercise proved to be rather interesting, showing a successful and exaggerated change in emotion and expression through body language and timing. Where the character is walking with a fast, optimistic bounce to start with, the armature visibly holds a pose allowing the audience to understand that he’s seen something: a nasty surprise. 

With this initial test being much more successful than my previous attempts, I was inspired to continue this task in my own time: developing a few more iterations of this final stop motion exercise. These iterative tests demonstrated clarity of movement through a clear line of action, and gave me the opportunity to experiment and explore character performance in more depth, evoking emotion purely through the use of strong, dynamic posing and body language. I also took this chance to be experimental with the shot composition, having my characters run and lunge towards the camera in these sequences.

In comparison to last week’s stop motion endeavours, however, I can visibly see improvement and better understanding of not only posing but timing within the stop motion process. This is something that I’ve continued to struggle with, however the purpose of these iterations was to intentionally challenge and work on this area. Although each example presents a unique approach to the task, they all include differences in locomotive speed and intention. This was a large focus of the task as a whole, to present a visible and consistent contrast between the two emotional states, and how this affects the character’s movements.

With this, I’ve completed the stop motion animation tasks described in the project brief. I’m happy to say that I’ve completed each task up to a standard that I’m happy with, working in my own time to produce a series of iterations that work to move beyond the requirements of the brief. Stop motion is an animation technique that I really do have a passion for, and would like to continue exploring as I progress in the course. Next week, we are given our next project brief, and I’m hoping to explore the medium of stop motion animation in response to this new assignment, additionally to working within Maya.

Digital 3D In our final session introducing us to the basics of animation and modelling software Maya, we explored the ideas of 3D texturing: serving as an introduction to the UV editor and adding predefined 2D textures to 3D objects. To induct us into this process, our first task was to create a cereal box within the software. Using a simple cube, and editing it into the shape and size of a cereal box, the next step was to map the UV island to a flat map of a pre-made cereal box. After finding each face using the UV editor tools, I was able to create a 3D cereal box: with the correct design on each face.

This then allowed us to export the map as a flat PNG, to develop and edit in Photoshop. The process of texturing a 3D mapped object was more intuitive and straight-forward than I’d initially expected. I’ve somewhat struggled to keep up in the previous sessions, however this week proved to be much more enjoyable and simple in comparison. With this knowledge, I can now add my own textures to predefined 3D objects (such as cubes, spheres and cylinders).

Finally, our last task was to create and edit UV’s for a pre-made bird object, allowing us to project a 2D image to the 3D model’s surface for texture mapping. Whilst the actual process of creating and splitting the model into a series of separate UVs for each body part was time-consuming and difficult at first, I worked with a peer and we completed the task together. With the limited time remaining, I explored the use of painting within Maya. Whilst this is ultimately a limited function within the software, using the flood paint tool did allow me to block colour my model quickly. With this, I created a seagull design working within a limited monochrome palette.

With this, I’ve reached the end of our introductory Digital 3D sessions. Having covered some of the basics of Maya, it is now up to us to continue developing and working on our knowledge of the software independently. From these workshopped sessions, I’ve identified a range of animation potential to develop upon. For example, I’m interested in making the radio bounce to music, and explore the potential of animating this seagull model that I’ve painted in this session. It’s been somewhat of a struggle, but computer-generated animation is a technique that I want to continue to work on as an independent response to this brief. 

[savetopnow]

2018-03-28 00 SEO now

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5 Steps to a Rule-Based Trading System That Works

This type of trading system is very appealing to some traders because it can take a lot of the emotion out of trading. If you find that you are too emotional when you are trading, then this type of trading might be for you.

A rule-based trading system has strictly defined rules for all components of a trade. A trader is not allowed to deviate from the rules. The basic rules cover: entry criteria, lot sizing, maximum trade risk, trade management, maximum portfolio risk and exit criteria. 

There are basically three types of rule-based systems:

100% automated strategies

Manual trade management strategies

A mixture of both automated and manual elements (Incremental Automation)

Regardless of which one you choose to use, this guide will show you how to create a system that works for you. 

Step 1: Understand What Works With Your Personality

This is a really important step, so don't overlook it.

Many new traders think that they don't have to worry about system/personality fit because they just have to follow the rules of a system and they will make money.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even if you have black and white rules, you still have to consider how you will react to the results.

You could have a very profitable system, but if you cannot tolerate certain aspects of the system, you will give up on it.

Let's take a look at the primary elements that you should be aware of.

What Are Your Goals?

The first thing you should consider are your goals for the trading system. 

Do you want to multiply a small account? Or do you want to make a steady income on a larger account?

These are very important questions to ask yourself when you are getting started. 

Your answer to this question will determine the type of system you will create.

It helps to write down a yearly goal that you will be shooting for.

Some traders want to make 10,000% in a year (yes, they are serious). But in reality, 30% a year, with a decent sized account would be more than enough to meet their desires…with a lot less stress.

So take a realistic look at what you really want to get out of your trading system. 

Write down your goals in your trading plan. 

Drawdown

A lot of traders want to make the big bucks. But big profits usually also means big drawdowns.  

Can you handle that?

Some traders can.

However, in my experience, most traders can't.

So pay attention to your drawdown numbers. A 40% drawdown might not be a big deal when you are demo trading. But the psychology can change dramatically when real money is on the line.

If you have a hard time feeling the emotional impact of a drawdown in a demo account, open a small real money account and use nano lots.

You may find that you are willing to tolerate a higher or lower drawdown than you expected. That's why it's important to test different types of trading systems to find out what works best for you.

Trading Frequency

Next, it's important to understand how frequently your strategy trades and how you feel about that frequency. 

For example, let's say that your strategy only executes a few trades a month. But when it does trade, there's a high probability of success and you usually have a few big winners because you trail your stop loss.

That sounds great right?

Well, that actually sounds terrible to some traders. These traders get bored easily and want to be trading more frequently.

The opposite can also be true.

If a system executes too many trades, some traders get stressed out about having to trade all the time, or having too many trades open at once.

So take some time to consider your optimal trading frequency. 

It's not the same for everyone. 

Winning Percentage

Are you the type of trader who likes to see a high win rate? Or do you prefer to win less often, but have higher risk multiple returns per trade?

One trader I know of likes to go for 100R trades. But he only wins about 20% of the time. Could you handle 8 losing trades in a row (or more), before you get a winner?

Or would you rather only make 1R, but win 75% of the time?

Both methods are profitable.

There are no right or wrong answers here.

It's all about what you are most comfortable with.

Again, experiment with both to see what you prefer.

Fully Automated, Manual or Both?

The mechanics of how you enter and exit trades can make a big difference in your trading results.

For example, if your trading system has to be automated in order to be profitable, but you don't know how to program an automated trading strategy, then that strategy won't work for you.

But you can always learn. Take our Beginning MT4 Programming Course by master developer Adam Hartley.

Of course, you can also look for programmer to code it for you. Here's a list of programmers and a guide on how to find the right one.

On the other hand, maybe you don't trust an automated system and would prefer to manage trades yourself. If that's the case, then be sure that you will be able to trade at the times when your trades usually set up.

If your system usually has its best trades at 3:00 am local time, then that probably won't work as a manual system.

This is why backtesting and beta testing are so important. You want to figure out the blind spots in your system so you can compensate accordingly.

Step 2: Create a Written Trading Plan

The next step is to write down your trading rules.

This ensures that you have a solid reference point from which to make all of your trading decisions.

Use any recording method that works for you, but I've found that good ol' pen and paper works best for me. It's just easier to take notes and change things during the development process.

After I'm done making changes to a system, then I'll put it into Evernote.

If you want a template for your trading plan, you can download a free PDF worksheet here. I find it very useful to print out a bunch of these and leave them near my desk.

When I get an idea, I jot it down so I don't forget. Then I can come back to it later to develop the idea.

A good trading plan should have the following elements:

Trading system name

Version number

Indicators used, with settings

Entry criteria

Trade management rules

Risk rules

Re-entry rules

Rules for portfolio risk

Will this be traded manual, fully automated, or a little of both?

There may be other elements that you want to add later, but that list is a good start.

You can get a trading plan from many sources on the internet. There's no shortage of them, you can get them from courses, forums and blog posts.

See the strategies that we've shared here.

I would also recommend checking out the MQL5 Codebase and TradingView trading strategy communities. They are a big mish-mosh of strategies, with varying levels of quality, but they can give you some good ideas.

You can also look at the code and copy/paste ideas you like. If you find a strategy that actually works, that can be a great starting point for your strategy.

But how do you know if a trading strategy will give you an advantage in the markets?

That's what backtesting is for…

Step 3: Backtest Your Trading Plan Rules

Next, it's time to test your plan so you are confident that it will work in real-world trading. If you are new to backtesting, read our free guide here.

There are different ways to backtest and the best method for you will depend on the type of strategy you have.

For example, if you have a fully automated strategy, you may consider testing in something like Forex Tester or MetaTrader 5. These are good platforms to backtest automated Forex strategies on.

If you have a manually executed strategy, Forex Tester, MetaTrader 5 or TradingView are all good platforms to test on.

Your backtesting will give you some key pieces of information:

Drawdown

Win rate

Longest win streak

Longest losing streak

Best/worst days to trade

Best/worst times to trade

And more!

If a backtesting platform doesn't give you some of this data, you can always export it to a spreadsheet to figure it out.

Don't expect to hit the jackpot on the first try. A successful backtesting result is almost always the result of many, many experiments.

Successful traders make small tweaks to a strategy and test the results. Remember to only change one thing at a time and test that change.

Otherwise, you won't know which changes worked and which ones didn't.

Once you have a strategy that hits your goals, you are ready to move on.

Step 4: Beta Test Your Rules

After you have tested your strategies and are confident in the results, don't jump into live trading just yet. There's one more step to do before you start risking real moola.

This is called beta testing or forward testing.

You don't want to jump directly into live trading because there are still a few things that you may need to work out.

For example, if you have a fully automated trading strategy that runs on MT5, you should definitely test it in a demo account with the broker that you intend to trade live with.

The broker's spread or server lag may affect how your strategy trades in live conditions. Sometimes the results can be significantly different.

So run this beta test for a few months to be sure that there aren't any other hidden issues with your trading system. Once you are confident it will work as you expect, now it's time to go live!

Step 5: Go Live

Now it's time to put your system into action. I would recommend starting out with a small account or using a smaller amount of risk in the beginning.

There may still be a few unforeseen differences between your broker's live server and the demo server. 

But if it's all good, then let your strategy loose!

Remember to track your trades in a trading journal, so you can review the results every week.

Don't change anything about the system until you have at least 100 trades in the books. It can be tempting to start to mess with the system if it isn't winning right away.

Resist the urge because you may just be in a normal drawdown. You need to give the system time to apply your edge.

Final Thoughts on Rule-Based Trading Systems

A rule-based trading strategy will not take all of the emotion out of trading. For some traders, a very strict trading system can actually lead to more losses because they are not free to take all opportunities that come along.

But for traders who can be indecisive about trading decisions, or prefer to minimize the effect of their emotions, strict rules can be a great way to trade.

The added benefit of a rule based strategy is you can change specific elements of the strategy and see exactly how those changes affect the results.

If you want help testing a rules-based system or a discretionary trading strategy, join the TraderEvo Program. We take you step-by-step through the process of testing, verifying and reviewing trading strategies.

The post 5 Steps to a Rule-Based Trading System That Works appeared first on Trading Heroes.

5 Steps to a Rule-Based Trading System That Works published first on your-t1-blog-url

[mekhigreene]

Free Productivity Apps For Students

The past few blog post I’ve written have been tech-inspired and to continue with the trend I figured I would go over some of my favorite and most used productivity apps. These tools are directed towards students but anyone can use them.

By no means do I consider any of these tools to be “the best”, these are just apps that happened to be introduced to me at some point in time and they compliment my workflow. 

Although I don’t use these apps every day (I probably should) I know the ins and outs and can give you a clear summary of each tool. Each has its pros and cons and by the end of this blog post, my goal is to pitch to you as to why you should use these apps too! 

For clarification, this is not a sponsored post and I’m not being paid, so my opinions are my own. I truly love these tools and they bring a ton of value to my everyday life. I’m just excited to be sharing them with you. 

I want to note that these are free productivity tools so you don’t have to spend any money! 

Who doesn’t like free?!

I also forgot to mention, all of these tools are available as web and mobile applications. And on top of that, they also sync across different platforms so if you type something on your phone it’ll appear on your desktop and vice versa. 

All the productivity tools I talk about will be linked throughout the post as well as towards the end. 

So getting into this list…

  Google Keep

In all honesty, I couldn’t tell you when I started using Google Keep but that should give you an idea as to how reliable it is. The primary purpose that this app serves is for taking random notes throughout the day and overtime its evolved into a tool that has done that and more.

 If you’ve read my blog post on my everyday carry you know that I prefer to use a field notes notebook for day to day note taking however there are times when you need to go digital. If you haven’t read my everyday carry post you can check it out by clicking here. 

Keep Notes is a very functional and user-friendly note-taking app with some pretty sweet features. This is a tool with many features but I want to cover the most appealing details. As I mentioned before ^ this software is great because of its ability to sync your work across all devices. 

It also saves your work so you don’t need to worry about doing that either. I personally only use keep for the absolute minimum which is typing out quick thoughts and ideas but here are some components you might enjoy exploring. 

Unique Features 

– Share notes and add collaborators – Take photos and upload images – Drawing (This is awesome if you use a Galaxy Note) – Voice Recording – Add Reminders – Label notes – Change the color of notes

At any given time I can find myself using any of these features but the one I use most often is adding reminders. I’m sure if you decide to download Google Keep you’ll figure out what things are practical and what isn’t. I enjoy using keep and over the years it’s become the go-to in regards to my best productivity tools. 

It’s hard to point out the flaws of this application because its something that I’ve used extensively for 5+ years. You would think that with that much usage time I would grow to dislike even the tiniest of details but truthfully I can’t say that I do. 

I’ve used Keep for as long as I have because it’s been nothing but functional. In my opinion, this is an app that just works and it’s hard to look past that. Regardless of what device you use this is an application that has real value if your someone that likes to take notes.

In case my very brief micro review wasn’t enough, click here to learn more about Google Keep. 

Moving onto the next productivity application we have… 

  Notion

To explain what Notion is in as few words as possible, it’s an all in one workspace where you can collaborate projects, plan tasks, and take notes. This software is capable of so much more and that description doesn’t do it justice. I discovered Notion over the Summer when I was Studying Abroad in London. 

Ali Abdaal who is a YouTube creator from Cambridge, England introduced it to me at that time and I quickly realized how powerful a tool it is. Ali loves Notion and would probably consider it to be one of the best productivity software tools out right now. 

He’s created a few informative videos on the application and I highly recommend them to anyone looking to use Notion for the first time.

Ali’s Notion Videos 

– Tour with Ali Abdaal (+Free Template for Students)   – How I use Notion as a Resonance Calendar (This is a collaboration video) – My Favourite Productivity App for Students – Notion (2019)

If you end up finding these videos helpful stick around and watch a few more videos on his channel! 

Notion is a very useful tool that anyone can take advantage of whether you’re a student or a business professional. It acts as a database, note-taking app, and content management system. The best part about it is that your experience with Notion can be unique to you.

You’re able to fully customize and dictate what you interacting with. If I were to go over every feature this tool contains we might be here for a while so instead I’ll list some of my favorites once again. 

My favorite Notion features 

– Templates (Prebuilt databases) – Endless customization options for databases – Labeling in databases – Import and export files – Available on all devices

When I use this tool I use it intending to dump my thoughts and develop an unstructured todo list. I know that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what this tool can do and because of that I’ve made it a goal to start using it more often. I notice that when I use it consistently I’m at my most productive and I move with a sense of urgency with creating new content. 

Over the past few weeks, I’ve begun to use Noition more and I’ve created several databases. I now have tabs for school, managing content creation, tracking daily habits, personal notes, and for saving inspiring ideas. I fully expect to add onto this list and make this application my all in one hub for most things in my life. 

I think the next thing I’ll start to do is track my expenses! Notion has something for everyone.

There is a lot to love about this application and I believe it’s one of the best productivity applications out there. My main complaint about Notion is that the barrier to entry can seem intimidating at first. 

When I first signed up for an account I thought the layout was somewhat complicated and I wasn’t sure where to begin. There is a lot to learn and understand as a newbie to the software but once you mess around with it or watch a tutorial video it’s easy to feel comfortable navigating the app. 

My last criticism with this software is that although it is available on all devices, mobile performance is significantly worse in comparison to desktop. I usually find myself getting annoyed and slightly frustrated when it comes to doing most things in the mobile app outside of viewing text I already published.

I typically only publish new content when I’m on my laptop at this point just to avoid a possible headache. This is just my experience however so definitely try for yourself. 

Notion is a free application with an option to upgrade to a paid plan. 

Notion Plans 

– Free $0 – Personal $4-5 month – Labeling in databases – Team $8-10 month – Enterprise $20-25 month

  Feedly

This is a news aggregator app that pulls together articles and news sources from all over the web. I open up Feedly every so often to catch up on news and occasionally it’s responsible for content ideas.  

  Freedom Journal

This isn’t an application or software tool but it’s a treasure in my productivity system. The Freedom Journal is an organization notebook that looks to tackle a larger goal by breaking it up into smaller goals. This book has been life-changing for me. 

  Field Notes

This is an item that I carry with me every day because every single thought, task, or idea I have gets written down in this thing. It’s just an ordinary compact notebook with impressive design cues but to me it’s irreplaceable. 

  If you’ve made it to the end, I want to thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed the review. This is a list of apps to increase productivity and if you get around to trying them out, I think you’ll find that they do just that! 

Be sure to follow me on Instagram and Twitter @greenemekhi for more posts like this one. I post every Wednesday so don’t miss out!

The post Free Productivity Apps For Students appeared first on Mekhi Greene.

[thetagsale]

Kid Fears

I can remember as young as three-years-old, Opal would get overwhelmed by her feelings and just scream. Nerve-racking, soul-shattering yells, high in pitch and sharp-edged enough to bring the house down. I thought it was a tantrum. I thought it was her big emotionality. I wrote my ass off about parenting methods I’d tried based on all the books. So many books. I wanted to share the wisdom of experience, but frankly, I didn’t feel any sort of extra intelligence from my experience of navigating the world of Opal’s emotions. Just heartache and exhaustion. 

She got older, but the bouts of screaming stayed with her like an invisible illness. When her feelings grew even the slightest bit beyond tepid, or plans changed abruptly (which is something I avoid as much as possible, but then, life.), or homework was challenging, or Ruth was too annoying, or what-have-you, I’d find myself reaching to steady the breakable vases as they did in Mary Poppins when the neighbor blew his cannon every hour on the hour. Batten down the hatches. 

Having a sibling certainly complicated things. I always feared the screaming was somehow damaging to the baby in the house. Our first foster daughter, Ericha, came to us because she had birth parents whose main mode of communication was to scream and hit. The last thing I wanted was for her new and safe home to be filled to the edges with the intermittent shriek-fests of her sister.

I can see myself putting the baby in her crib—Ericha, our first, who we had for a year, then Ruthy, who we adopted—and coming upstairs to calm Opal by just holding her. She’d push me away at first but then flop into my lap with a defeated sigh, weeping into my shoulder so much I’d feel like she’d need an IV drip to recover. I saw it in a movie about working in a child psychiatric unit. (I find I am always looking for glimmers of understanding and hope to apply to our situation, like panning for gold from thin air.) In the movie, the staff people would just hold these kids, as if they were squirming puppies in a blanket, firm but loving, to keep the child from hurting herself or anyone else. When I saw that, I cried. The rage and violence of these children eventually dissipated and they were left boneless and vulnerable in the lap of the staff member. 

God, so many years of it. Taking the time now to reflect, I feel a new sense of fatigued humility. It was never constant, her outbursts. There have been enough gaps in the weave not to put her in real therapy. (We’d consider it, reach out, even find someone to talk to, but then we’d have a collection of angst-free days and put that particular approach on the shelf.) 

Also, I had so much therapy as a kid (an older kid, but still) for my big emotions, my staggering ups and downs, that I always felt like I was a broken thing to be fixed. I have zero recollection of anyone trying to give me tools to work my particular disposition. I would have given anything for my parents to sit with me and say, How are things going for you? What’s it like for you in there? I love you just as you are AND we will work through this together. That’s what we’ve been trying to provide for Opal. I never ever in a million years want her to feel like she is a fucked-up thing. The concern of that has certainly guided our choices.

Here we are. Now. She just turned nine. The current method of working with the screaming was most recently to suggest that she go to her room to cool down and regroup. We moved her beloved guinea pig, Lightning, in there. We discussed it at our family meeting—she chose this as the best course of action when she loses control. But when it came down to it, when the emotions kicked in the door, all she wanted to do was talk about it. Her need to examine those emotional parasites piece by piece was all-consuming. She was unable to see how that method unfailingly exports her—almost instantly—to a very deep and dark place. She feels she is being negligent by taking her mind off of it, when in fact, her focus is like voluntarily gripping the anchor as it pulls her to the bottom.

God, I know about that approach all too well. Before children, I used to think journaling about my feelings was what needed to happen to work through my feelings. Perhaps that’s true, but only partly. Once written down, pen-to-paper, I missed the step of what’s next? How can I rise out of this? What can I do for others? And thus, I wound up cultivating a more engaged and deluxe mode of communicating about how fucked up I was. I got really really good at chasing my emotional tail. Having kids was the ultimate teaching in you just ain't got time to dwell in the muck.

It was then that I finally experienced what happens when emotions occur, acknowledged but uncoddled for lack of time. (I’m talking about the everyday emotions, here, not the heavy-hitters that DO need tending.) They PASS. Eureka. 

Even now, my instinct when I’m feeling shitty is to sit down and write about the shitty feeling. Pretty much across the board, that DOES. NOT. HELP. What does help? Connecting with a friend. Walking in the fresh air. Finding some art to linger over. Essentially, raising my gaze so that I can once again view beyond my own, personal, self-serving, survival-based bubble. 

This is all just to say that I have decade-upon-decade of experience with this for myself. 

So now, Opal is no longer given the choice. And as much as I’m not a fan of this is for your own good thinking, Opal’s emotions simply cannot be in charge of steering the ship of our entire household. How did that saying from my time in a twelve-step program go? You can’t fix your thinker with a broken thinker? Something like that.

Now, when the cannonball sounds and the screaming begins, I am quick and clean, tethered and steady in my predetermined course of action.

Honey, when you scream you lose the privilege of being in the same space as we are. Your feelings are welcome. Screaming is not. So it’s time to head up to your room and I will check on you in five minutes and be the one who decides when you are ready to calmly join us again. 

It used to be that she would go to her room to cool off and come back out when she was ready. NOPE. That only prolonged the painful process. She’d think she had calmed down, then come out and start the whole thing right up again and the back-and-forth to and from her room was a grueling and painful dance, leaving us all feeling defeated and assaulted.

So no, now I am in charge of saying when she can come out. And as pissed off as she was, initially, she seemed to see that she can regroup much quicker when she’s not also in charge of gaging if she has re-grouped enough yet. If that makes sense.

As I said, the wailing fits have been an occurrence in our home for at least six years. I remember blogging about them in my second parenting blog which was when Opal was two and three years old. There have been eras where a certain thing we are doing really seems to help quell her inner turmoil (and we go on a kick of feeling like badass parents), but inevitably the humbling and confusing time will come when what we are doing no longer seems to have any effect and the volume-dial on her outbursts is once again off the charts.

But, familiar as her episodes are in our family and our household, and such a major part of her childhood, they have never really had one obvious cause.

Except for the Fluid.

The Fluid is what Opal used to call the stomach Flu when she was younger, Kindergarten. That’s when she got it for the first time. Our entire house, including baby Ericha, got the stomach flu. It was nasty and took weeks before I felt confident that our house was no longer being tormented by the demon-virus. The next year, First Grade, Opal was out sick for a total of 40 days! She had the Fluid for exactly five of those days, the rest were generic viruses. Regardless, a phobia was born.

However, Opal’s Fluid-phobia always had a very different texture than her screaming. On the one hand, she had her regular outbursts which were completely unconcerned with volume and level of destruction. On the other hand was her fear of sickness: it was quiet, helpless, lots of tears, as if she wanted to hide from it all. 

Only now do I realize that they are each a side of the same coin.

It’s all fear. It’s all feeling a lack of control. It’s all having emotions that feel bigger than what her little body can process. The same story told in two very different ways.

Recently, during the last few weeks, Opal’s Flu Phobia (she no longer calls it the Fluid) has grown to a massive, suffocating beast. Most mornings, she will be going along fine and then say something like, “Here comes the fear again.” It’s heart-wrenching. Like the twinge in the back of my neck that tells me I’m about to have a headache; it’s so hard not to brace yourself against it, gritted teeth, white knuckles. Or to simply give up before it even starts, which is often the case with Opal. She sees the beast approaching and she lies down at its feet. Tears, paralysis, panic. 

Jesse and I agreed that something more has to be done. Something bigger than us from someone who is trained to guide us all along this rocky, unpredictable path. I suppose I always thought that since Opal was working with the same things I have worked with —and still occasionally work with—that I could help her through. But no. My experience does not translate. And I say with all the heart I can muster. 

Nov. 13, 2018

[alamante]

Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Bales of recyclables at an Ecomaine recycling facility in Portland, Maine. Ecomaine is one of many U.S. recyclers that have been affected by China’s waste import restrictions.

Americans recycle millions of tons of trash every year. We trust that the items we toss in the blue bin won’t end up in a landfill. We hope this stuff is repurposed and turned into reusable goods ― but a lot of it isn’t getting recycled at all. 

Two-thirds of U.S. states are facing a recycling crisis of our own making. For months, mountains of plastic, paper and other materials have been piling up at recycling facilities across the nation. Recyclables are ending up in landfills en masse. Some municipalities — from Sacramento, California, to Hooksett, New Hampshire — have canceled or significantly curtailed their recycling programs, leaving residents with no choice but to throw their recyclables in the trash. 

To put it in the words of a waste manager in Bakersfield, California, the situation is “not just a little bad, it is terrible.”

“I’ve been in garbage all my life. This is unprecedented,” Kevin Barnes, the city’s solid waste director, told The Bakersfield Californian earlier this month. “I think there’s been nothing in history this severe for the markets. So we’re in uncharted waters here.”

The first signs of trouble came in January when China, which had long served as the world’s de facto wastebasket, banned the importation of several categories of recyclable waste. For decades, China had bought massive shipments of recyclable plastics, paper, cardboard and other materials from countries around the world.

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It had been a win-win situation. On the one hand, China needed a steady supply of recyclable waste to feed its flourishing manufacturing sector. And on the other, countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Japan lacked the recycling facilities and manpower that China had ― and they desperately needed a destination for their growing quantity of garbage.

About a year ago, however, China abruptly announced its intention to close its borders to this trash influx. The country notified the World Trade Organization that it would be banning the import of 24 categories of solid waste, including several kinds of scrap plastic and mixed paper. It also demanded that other waste materials, like cardboard and scrap metal, have only 0.5 percent contamination from food and other sources ― a standard that American recyclers have said is “impossible” to meet.

The immediate global impact of the new Chinese restrictions, enforced on Jan. 1, was staggering. “It was a huge shock — a tsunami for the industry,” said Arnaud Brunet, head of the Bureau of International Recycling, speaking from Brussels on Wednesday. “When the biggest market for recyclables progressively shuts the door to imports, you can expect the global industry will be under stress.”

Prior to its new policy, China had been processing at least half of the world’s exports of waste plastic, paper and metals. Between 1992 and 2016, China accepted more than 110 million tons of plastic scrap from countries around the globe, or about 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste. A recent study predicts that about 120 million tons of plastic waste will be displaced worldwide by 2030 because of China’s policy change. 

Aaron Ontiveroz/Getty Images

Alpine Waste & Recycling in Denver has been investing in cleaning up its paper recycling stream in an effort to meet China’s new import standards.

The United States has long been one of the biggest exporters of trash to China. Of the estimated 66 million tons of material that Americans recycle each year, about one-third used to be exported — a majority of which had been bound for Chinese shores.

Since January, however, local and state governments, together with domestic recycling companies, have had to figure out new destinations for all this garbage.

At least 38 states have experienced “noticeable” impacts since the policy took effect, according to Waste Dive, a D.C.-based publisher of waste industry news that’s been documenting the ban’s effects with this online tracker.

At least 10 states — including California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Oregon — have been “heavily” affected. A waste coordinator in Alaska, another of the hardest-hit states, described the shake-up as “Armageddon for recycling.”

“At this point, there is no state in the country that has not felt at least something because of the ban,” Waste Dive reporter Cole Rosengren told HuffPost. 

Is your #recycling facility being impacted by China’s waste import restrictions? Check out our resources page and infographics for more information on policy and next steps! https://t.co/SHZ6KubZjH pic.twitter.com/ND8b7UvHJ9

— SWANA (@SWANA) July 15, 2018

Recyclables Get Dumped 

In the U.S., local governments often contract private recycling companies to collect and sort through recyclables. Once sorted, the marketable materials are sold to domestic or overseas processors. In the past, China had, in many cases, been that final destination.

Nowadays, however, there are few willing buyers ― and none of them come close to filling China’s shoes.

“Overall, the value of a ton of recycling has declined by about 40 percent over the past year,” David Biderman, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, told HuffPost in an email.

In some of the worst-hit places — like parts of the Pacific Northwest, which has traditionally sent a greater proportion of its recycling to China, and New England, where waste processing costs had been hefty even before the ban — there’s now “no market” at all for certain materials like mixed paper (cereal boxes, junk mail, magazines and the like) and some types of plastic, Biderman said. 

Across the country, thousands of bales of paper and plastic are being stockpiled and stored at recycling facilities in the hopes that new markets will eventually be found for them.

E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company in Massachusetts, told The New York Times in May that half of its 80,000-square-foot facility was stacked high with about 6,000 tons of stockpiled material. In New Hanover County, North Carolina, “piles of recycled cardboard” have reportedly sat unused for months.

Mid America Recycling in Des Moines, Iowa, told The Wall Street Journal that it had stockpiled about 1,000 tons of mixed paper, which it had hoped to sell when prices improved.

All of it, however, was eventually dumped in a landfill.

“We had to purge,” Michael Barry, the company’s president, told the paper in May. “There’s no demand for it.”

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Recology, a curbside recycler in San Francisco, admits it’s been diverting some materials to landfills. “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill,” a company rep told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month.

Dumping recyclables in a landfill is a recycler’s nightmare. “We hate the landfill. We do everything we can to avoid it,” Brunet said. “It’s a waste of resources — for the industry, for the planet.”

But many U.S. recyclers have had to resort to landfills in recent months. 

States like Oregon and Massachusetts have laws prohibiting companies from dumping recyclables ― but have recently been granting waivers so firms can dispose of the materials they can’t seem to sell.

Garten Services, an Oregon recycler, told The New York Times that the company recently sought a waiver to dump about 900 tons of recyclables in a landfill.

Republic Services, one of the country’s largest waste managers, said it’s disposed of more than 2,000 tons of paper in landfills since January.

Some municipalities have raised recycling rates or even resorted to canceling or cutting back on recycling services. The Alaskan cities of Sitka, Ketchikan and Petersburg, for instance, have stopped accepting mixed plastics and paper to their recycling programs. In Arizona, one of the states believed to be less severely affected by the new recycling landscape, the city of Flagstaff nevertheless announced in June that it was limiting its curbside recycling collection to only #1 and #2 plastics.

Sacramento said it was similarly dropping several kinds of plastics from its curbside program, and Hooksett, a New Hampshire town of some 14,000 people, said it was canceling curbside collection entirely. The town has said the move is only temporary. The Hooksett Department of Public Works did not respond to questions about when the program would be reinstated.

Saul Loeb/Getty Images

The Waste Management Material Recovery Facility in Elkridge, Maryland, says it’s had to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic that it would have normally sold to China.

‘A Real Wake-up Call’

China has been widely vilified as the cause of the current recycling fiasco. But industry watchers say the blame should not be placed on China, which has cited environmental and public health concerns, as well as a desire for self-sufficiency, as reasons for its policy change.

“China’s not the bad guy,” Mark Murray, executive director of the advocacy group Californians Against Waste, told the Los Angeles Times in June. “To the Chinese credit, they’ve decided they don’t want to have Third World [trash] sorting in their country.”

So, who then should be held accountable for this mess? It turns out we’re all to blame.

“People were upset and had been pointing the finger at China, but really, here in the U.S., it’s a shared responsibility,” Rosengren said.

China’s waste import restrictions have revealed just how flawed ― and dirty ― the American recycling industry is, and how bad American consumers are at recycling.

“One of the principal reasons China imposed these restrictions is that the scrap and recyclables that the U.S. was sending to China included too much ‘contamination’ ― material that is not recyclables,” Biderman said. “This is because many Americans are ‘wishful recyclers’ and put items in the recycling container hoping that the recycling company or local sanitation department will recycle them.”

Dirty takeout containers, most plastic bags, batteries, Christmas lights, garden hoses and those takeout coffee cups from Starbucks are all not recyclable ― yet many Americans toss their trash willy-nilly into the recycling bin without a second thought.

Rosengren also blames waste management companies for allowing higher levels of contamination over time. Before the ban, some companies were shipping recyclables to China with contamination levels of up to 30 percent, he told HuffPost.

“Things had been good, they were making money, so a lot of these companies got complacent,” he said.

Federal, state and local governments also failed to support and invest in domestic recycling infrastructure, Rosengren noted. “Everyone got complacent, they figured China would just be there… It’s been a real wake-up call for people.”

David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images

Trash is separated on a conveyor belt at E.L. Harvey & Sons in Westborough, Massachusetts, on May 31. The company says it’s been forced to stockpile thousands of tons of recyclables since January.

New Markets, New Opportunities

Industry experts say China isn’t likely to soften its stance on foreign scrap ― in fact, the country recently suggested that it would seek to ban all solid waste imports by 2020. Global recyclers will thus need to evolve and adapt.

There are expectations that the downturn in the recycling industry will continue for many months, if not years. But there is also optimism that the recycling industry as a whole will eventually emerge better and brighter than ever. 

“On the short term, it’s painful for the industry, but long term it’s probably a good thing for society at large,” said Brunet, who predicts more market diversity and better, cleaner recycling processes as a result of China’s policy change.

Already, new recycling markets have emerged to fill the void that China once occupied. In recent months, recyclables have flooded into other nations, mostly in Asia, including India, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan.

These countries have only a fraction of China’s processing capacity, however, and signs of strain are already starting to show.  

“Vietnamese ports are clogging up due to the upsurge of plastic waste imports into the country,” Von Hernandez, global coordinator for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, said in an email. “In Thailand, the spike in imports is, unfortunately, fuelling demands to establish more incinerators in the country, which would be tantamount to exporting and externalizing one country’s toxic air emissions to another, if those plastic materials end up being burned in those facilities.” 

It remains to be seen whether these other nations will be able to adequately ― and sustainably ― handle the new influx of waste. 

Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

Ecomaine says it’s been implementing new policies to eliminate contaminated recycling from its waste stream in an effort to reduce losses in the global recycled-commodity market.

Stateside, many opportunities have emerged for the American recycling industry ― from investments in contamination reduction to the building of more recycling infrastructure. 

“I hope that the federal government recognizes the value of strong municipal recycling programs in the United States,” Biderman said. “Recycling is a job creator ― recycling creates up to seven times more jobs per ton than landfilling, preserves landfill space for what truly needs to be disposed of, and is good for the environment.” 

Consumers, too, have a critical role to play in turning the recycling tide. 

“People seem to think that once recyclables hit the curb, they just go away. They don’t think about the process,” Rosengren said. 

Check your local guidelines to find out what can and cannot be recycled in your municipality ― the rules tend to vary from city to city and county to county. “Make sure you’re giving the right stuff, and make sure they’re all clean and dry,” Rosengren said. “Get the peanut butter out of the jar, rinse your beer bottle out and remember to never, ever put plastic bags in your recycling. That’s death to a recycling facility.”

“Try to reduce your consumption,” he added. “Just because you’re recycling doesn’t mean you’re absolved of your environmental footprint on the Earth.” 

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[chrisaldrich]

Organizing my research related reading

There’s so much great material out there to read and not nearly enough time. The question becomes: “How to best organize it all, so you can read even more?”

I just came across a tweet from Michael Nielsen about the topic, which is far deeper than even a few tweets could do justice to, so I thought I’d sketch out a few basic ideas about how I’ve been approaching it over the last decade or so. Ideally I’d like to circle back around to this and better document more of the individual aspects or maybe even make a short video, but for now this will hopefully suffice to add to the conversation Michael has started.

Lots of good insights in the responses. One thing stands out: this is a real pain point for many, & I don’t think anyone feels like they’ve nailed it (or how they organize information in general). It’d be great to have more ideas added to the thread! https://t.co/6KfhO5aVU3

— michael_nielsen (@michael_nielsen) March 8, 2018

How do people organize their reading? Perennially frustrated by this. I want one system that lets me trivially add books, papers, webpages, etc, re-organize very easily, search & filter. What works for you?

— michael_nielsen (@michael_nielsen) March 8, 2018

Keep in mind that this is an evolving system which I still haven’t completely perfected (and may never), but to a great extent it works relatively well and I still easily have the ability to modify and improve it.

Overall Structure

The first piece of the overarching puzzle is to have a general structure for finding, collecting, triaging, and then processing all of the data. I’ve essentially built a simple funnel system for collecting all the basic data in the quickest manner possible. With the basics down, I can later skim through various portions to pick out the things I think are the most valuable and move them along to the next step. Ultimately I end up reading the best pieces on which I make copious notes and highlights. I’m still slowly trying to perfect the system for best keeping all this additional data as well.

Since I’ve seen so many apps and websites come and go over the years and lost lots of data to them, I far prefer to use my own personal website for doing a lot of the basic collection, particularly for online material. Toward this end, I use a variety of web services, RSS feeds, and bookmarklets to quickly accumulate the important pieces into my personal website which I use like a modern day commonplace book.

Collecting

In general, I’ve been using the Inoreader feed reader to track a large variety of RSS feeds from various clearinghouse sources (including things like ProQuest custom searches) down to individual researcher’s blogs as a means of quickly pulling in large amounts of research material. It’s one of the more flexible readers out there with a huge number of useful features including the ability to subscribe to OPML files, which many readers don’t support.

As a simple example arXiv.org has an RSS feed for the topic of “information theory” at http://arxiv.org/rss/math.IT which I subscribe to. I can quickly browse through the feed and based on titles and/or abstracts, I can quickly “star” the items I find most interesting within the reader. I have a custom recipe set up for the IFTTT.com service that pulls in all these starred articles and creates new posts for them on my WordPress blog. To these posts I can add a variety of metadata including top level categories and lower level tags in addition to other additional metadata I’m interested in.

I also have similar incoming funnel entry points via many other web services as well. So on platforms like Twitter, I also have similar workflows that allow me to use services like IFTTT.com or Zapier to push the URLs easily to my website. I can quickly “like” a tweet and a background process will suck that tweet and any URLs within it into my system for future processing. This type of workflow extends to a variety of sites where I might consume potential material I want to read and process. (Think academic social services like Mendeley, Academia.com, Diigo, or even less academic ones like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) Many of these services often have storage ability and also have simple browser bookmarklets that allow me to add material to them. So with a quick click, it’s saved to the service and then automatically ported into my website almost without friction.

My WordPress-based site uses the Post Kinds Plugin which takes incoming website URLs and does a very solid job of parsing those pages to extract much of the primary metadata I’d like to have without requiring a lot of work. For well structured web pages, it’ll pull in the page title, authors, date published, date updated, synopsis of the page, categories and tags, and other bits of data automatically. All these fields are also editable and searchable. Further, the plugin allows me to configure simple browser bookmarklets so that with a simple click on a web page, I can pull its URL and associated metadata into my website almost instantaneously. I can then add a note or two about what made me interested in the piece and save it for later.

Note here, that I’m usually more interested in saving material for later as quickly as I possibly can. In this part of the process, I’m rarely ever interested in reading anything immediately. I’m most interested in finding it, collecting it for later, and moving on to the next thing. This is also highly useful for things I find during my busy day that I can’t immediately find time for at the moment.

As an example, here’s a book I’ve bookmarked to read simply by clicking “like” on a tweet I cam across late last year. You’ll notice at the bottom of the post, I’ve optionally syndicated copies of the post to other platforms to “spread the wealth” as it were. Perhaps others following me via other means may see it and find it useful as well?

Triaging

At regular intervals during the week I’ll sit down for an hour or two to triage all the papers and material I’ve been sucking into my website. This typically involves reading through lots of abstracts in a bit more detail to better figure out what I want to read now and what I’d like to read at a later date. I can delete out the irrelevant material if I choose, or I can add follow up dates to custom fields for later reminders.

Slowly but surely I’m funneling down a tremendous amount of potential material into a smaller, more manageable amount that I’m truly interested in reading on a more in-depth basis.

Document storage

Calibre with GoodReads sync

Even for things I’ve winnowed down, there is still a relatively large amount of material, much of it I’ll want to save and personally archive. For a lot of this function I rely on the free multi-platform desktop application Calibre. It’s essentially an iTunes-like interface, but it’s built specifically for e-books and other documents.

Within it I maintain a small handful of libraries. One for personal e-books, one for research related textbooks/e-books, and another for journal articles. It has a very solid interface and is extremely flexible in terms of configuration and customization. You can create a large number of custom libraries and create your own searchable and sort-able fields with a huge variety of metadata. It often does a reasonable job of importing e-books, .pdf files, and other digital media and parsing out their meta data which prevents one from needing to do some of that work manually. With some well maintained metadata, one can very quickly search and sort a huge amount of documents as well as quickly prioritize them for action. Additionally, the system does a pretty solid job of converting files from one format to another, so that things like converting an .epub file into a .mobi format for Kindle are automatic.

Calibre stores the physical documents either in local computer storage, or even better, in the cloud using any of a variety of services including Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. so that one can keep one’s documents in the cloud and view them from a variety of locations (home, work, travel, tablet, etc.)

I’ve been a very heavy user of GoodReads.com for years to bookmark and organize my physical and e-book library and anti-libraries. Calibre has an exceptional plugin for GoodReads that syncs data across the two. This (and a few other plugins) are exceptionally good at pulling in missing metadata to minimize the amount that must be done via hand, which can be tedious.

Within Calibre I can manage my physical books, e-books, journal articles, and a huge variety of other document related forms and formats. I can also use it to further triage and order the things I intend to read and order them to the nth degree. My current Calibre libraries have over 10,000 documents in them including over 2,500 textbooks as well as records of most of my 1,000+ physical books. Calibre can also be used to add document data that one would like to ultimately acquire the actual documents, but currently don’t have access to.

BibTeX and reference management

In addition to everything else Calibre also has some well customized pieces for dovetailing all its metadata as a reference management system. It’ll allow one to export data in a variety of formats for document publishing and reference management including BibTex formats amongst many others.

Reading, Annotations, Highlights

Once I’ve winnowed down the material I’m interested in it’s time to start actually reading. I’ll often use Calibre to directly send my documents to my Kindle or other e-reading device, but one can also read them on one’s desktop with a variety of readers, or even from within Calibre itself. With a click or two, I can automatically email documents to my Kindle and Calibre will also auto-format them appropriately before doing so.

Typically I’ll send them to my Kindle which allows me a variety of easy methods for adding highlights and marginalia. Sometimes I’ll read .pdf files via desktop and use Adobe to add highlights and marginalia as well. When I’m done with a .pdf file, I’ll just resave it (with all the additions) back into my Calibre library.

Exporting highlights/marginalia to my website

For Kindle related documents, once I’m finished, I’ll use direct text file export or tools like clippings.io to export my highlights and marginalia for a particular text into simple HTML and import it into my website system along with all my other data. I’ve briefly written about some of this before, though I ought to better document it. All of this then becomes very easily searchable and sort-able for future potential use as well.

Here’s an example of some public notes, highlights, and other marginalia I’ve posted in the past.

Synthesis

Eventually, over time, I’ve built up a huge amount of research related data in my personal online commonplace book that is highly searchable and sortable! I also have the option to make these posts and pages public, private, or even password protected. I can create accounts on my site for collaborators to use and view private material that isn’t publicly available. I can also share posts via social media and use standards like webmention and tools like brid.gy so that comments and interactions with these pieces on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others is imported back to the relevant portions of my site as comments. (I’m doing it with this post, so feel free to try it out yourself by commenting on one of the syndicated copies.)

Now when I’m ready to begin writing something about what I’ve read, I’ve got all the relevant pieces, notes, and metadata in one centralized location on my website. Synthesis becomes much easier. I can even have open drafts of things as I’m reading and begin laying things out there directly if I choose. Because it’s all stored online, it’s imminently available from almost anywhere I can connect to the web. As an example, I used a few portions of this workflow to actually write this post.

Continued work

Naturally, not all of this is static and it continues to improve and evolve over time. In particular, I’m doing continued work on my personal website so that I’m able to own as much of the workflow and data there. Ideally I’d love to have all of the Calibre related piece on my website as well.

Earlier this week I even had conversations about creating new post types on my website related to things that I want to read to potentially better display and document them explicitly. When I can I try to document some of these pieces either here on my own website or on various places on the IndieWeb wiki. In fact, the IndieWeb for Education page might be a good place to start browsing for those interested.

One of the added benefits of having a lot of this data on my own website is that it not only serves as my research/data platform, but it also has the traditional ability to serve as a publishing and distribution platform!

Currently, I’m doing most of my research related work in private or draft form on the back end of my website, so it’s not always publicly available, though I often think I should make more of it public for the value of the aggregation nature it has as well as the benefit it might provide to improving scientific communication. Just think, if you were interested in some of the obscure topics I am and you could have a pre-curated RSS feed of all the things I’ve filtered through piped into your own system… now multiply this across hundreds of thousands of other scientists? Michael Nielsen posts some useful things to his Twitter feed and his website, but what I wouldn’t give to see far more of who and what he’s following, bookmarking, and actually reading? While many might find these minutiae tedious, I guarantee that people in his associated fields would find some serious value in it.

I’ve tried hundreds of other apps and tools over the years, but more often than not, they only cover a small fraction of the necessary moving pieces within a much larger moving apparatus that a working researcher and writer requires. This often means that one is often using dozens of specialized tools upon which there’s a huge duplication of data efforts. It also presumes these tools will be around for more than a few years and allow easy import/export of one’s hard fought for data and time invested in using them.

If you’re aware of something interesting in this space that might be useful, I’m happy to take a look at it. Even if I might not use the service itself, perhaps it’s got a piece of functionality that I can recreate into my own site and workflow somehow?

If you’d like help in building and fleshing out a system similar to the one I’ve outlined above, I’m happy to help do that too.

Related posts

Notes, Highlights, and Marginalia: From E-books to Online

A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow

PressForward as an IndieWeb WordPress-based RSS Feed Reader & Pocket/Instapaper Replacement

[mrrolandtfranco]

Oral History Mapping with ArcGIS Online

This is a guest post by Sam Raby. A freelance mapmaker, Sam created Placing Oral Histories under contract with the Esri Story Maps team. 

My first attempt at creating an “oral history map” was with a project I worked on documenting my family’s escape from Iraq. My whole life, I had heard bits and pieces of their story of displacement but never had a chance to record it, and in 2015, I finally got an opportunity to create a permanent archive of it as part of an independent school project.

Given my obsession with geography, I wanted to preserve not only the oral histories of my family’s escape, but also the places and spaces that marked their journey to the US. I came to a realization through developing the project that mapping these stories brought out a crucial component that would have been lost in words alone — it carried my family’s story out of the ambiguously defined image of the “Middle East” and into the real world. Placing Oral Histories, a project I developed in conjunction with Esri Story Maps, is essentially a recreation of the project I did with my own family’s story. It is a further exploration of how we can use maps to humanize refugee oral histories.

Click the image above to launch “Placing Oral Histories” in a new tab.

This post will walk through the methods I used in creating “Placing Oral Histories.” No previous experience with GIS software and/or ArcGIS Online is required. Keep in mind that there are infinitely many ways to capture geography when telling someone’s story, so I encourage you to use this method as a starting point for developing your own ideas with oral history mapping.

1. Recording the Oral History First

My process developing “Placing Oral Histories” started with in-person interviews I conducted with Syrian refugees living in the European diaspora. As preserving the oral part of these oral histories was important to the project, I used audio recording software on my personal computer to record my verbal interviews, and I later transcribed them. I specifically used QuickTime Player to record the audio, an app that is standard on all recent Mac OS X operating systems, but any type of audio recording software or device would have worked just as well.

I experimented with two different interview methods during this process, and one very clearly worked better than the other:

The less effective method: Gathering a list of geographic locations during/as part of the interview. I tried this method first, and I found that it interfered with the interviewee’s focus on their own story (and also made transcribing much more tedious).

The more effective method: Story first. Geography second. Let your interviewee tell the story the way that they remember it and the way that they choose to tell it. This seems to fit best with proper oral history practice, and also naturally gives a roadmap for the geographic component by filtering what places are important to the storyteller and what are appropriate to leave out.

2. Collecting the Geographic “data”

After I recorded the verbal part of each interviewee’s oral history, I began the process of placing the story on a map. I found it crucial to begin this next step immediately after the interview, so the interviewee’s story was fresh in their mind. Here is the process I used:

On a computer, open up a blank web map in ArcGIS Online in one window and a spreadsheet (I used Excel) in another window. On the webmap, have your interviewee locate points on the map that corresponded to segments of their oral history. The easiest way to do this is by clicking on the “Measure” tool on the top of the page, clicking on the third icon from the drop-down menu, and then clicking points on the map. This tool will generate the lat/long coordinate for each point your interviewee finds. Each point the interviewee selects on the map, copy the lat/long in the Excel document.

Other common mapping tools like Google Maps can get you these coordinates as well, so feel free to use whichever is most comfortable.

3. Formatting the Excel Document

For your project, once you collect the lat/long coordinates for whatever story you are working on, make sure to separate the coordinates into two different columns in Excel, one called “Latitude” and one called “Longitude”. I included a “Name” column and added in a name for each point (e.g., “Damascus, Syria”). You can feel free to add and fill in any extra columns you see fit. Make sure that whatever you plan to include as a part of the spatial data, you add to the spreadsheet during this step. It it much more difficult to add things in later on.

After formatting the Excel sheet, save the spreadsheet as a .csv file on your local computer.

4. Adding the data to ArcGIS Online

To get these points online, log in to your ArcGIS Online account (if you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free basic account here), and create a new blank web map.  Click on “Add” in the upper left corner, then “Add Layer from File.” In the new pop-up window, click on “Choose File,” select the .csv file of locations you want to visualize, and click “Import Layer.”

Now, you need to specify which fields in your spreadsheet are the lat/long coordinates. In the new window, make sure the “Locate features by” prompt is set to “Coordinates.” Below it, you will see a list of all the columns from your spreadsheet. Click the text that is directly to the right of “Latitude” (or whatever you named the latitude column), and you should see a dropdown list. Select “Latitude.” Do the same for “Longitude.” Click “Add Layer.”

And there you go! You should see dots on the map pop up, corresponding exactly to the points your interviewee located during your interview process. If the points look all over the place, it is likely that you mixed up lattitude and longitude when making your spreadsheet (this happened to me twice during my project). Simply repeat the steps above except switch “Latitude” and “Longitude” when designating the location columns in the CSV import dialogue.

Feel free to symbolize your points and add pop-ups as you like. You can always come back and change that later on. Once the points look as you want them, make sure to save your web map, using the button in the upper-right corner, before you quit.

5. Building Something Cool

At this point, you now have a fully interactive spatial dataset as part of your interviewee’s very own oral history. There are many things you can now do…

Export some maps for print/static viewing. This method is great if you hope to include these maps in print. There are two easy ways to do this: when viewing your web map, click on the Print icon. This will allow you to print (or save to your desktop) a view of your map. Or, simply take a screenshot of your webmap. This method is even easier, and if you have a high-resolution display, you may get a better quality image.

Build a Story Map. Story Maps are a perfect way to blend together text, photos, maps, and even audio to create an archive of one’s oral history. Placing Oral Histories used the Story Maps Cascade Template, but the Story Maps Journal template also works very well with these kinds of projects. Check out this tutorial to get started.

from ArcGIS Blog http://ift.tt/2xZPqxR

[savetopnow]

2018-03-27 21 SEO now

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Grist for the Machine

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Rank Checker Update

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Search Engine Journal

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Search Engine Land

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Search Engine Watch

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[beingmad2017-blog]

The way to Discover an Honest Seo Global Internet Marketing Organization

New Post has been published on https://beingmad.org/global-internet-marketing/

The way to Discover an Honest Seo Global Internet Marketing Organization

One of the greatest challenges going through any Worldwide enterprise today is being discovered on the Internet. The Internet has modified the essential method for a way we conduct Worldwide commercial enterprise. It gives immediately, actual time answers to lots of our daily business and private questions. However now that you have an Internet site, can your website be observed while one plays a search on Google, Yahoo, Live.Com or AOL on your Corporation’s service or product?

Probabilities are that when any other home or Worldwide enterprise seeks to Find your services or products, they will no longer Find you. Maximum Webmasters deal handiest with design and format. They’re picture artists who’ve discovered a little bit of HTML. They reproduction and paste written replica into a desk and add. They’re now not expected to be professionals within the artwork of Worldwide Internet Advertising nor must they be.

The Net is a large location. An increasing and an innovative digital universe which needs a selection of professionals in hardware, software, portraits, replica writing, International Advertising and marketing, domain stores, operations, finance, journalism, advertising and public members of the family. But in which can we Discover that magician known as a Seo or search engine optimization Global Advertising and marketing expert?

We discover an avalanche of companies advertising and marketing themselves using Google AdWords as Seo Worldwide Net Advertising and Web advertising experts. However sad to say, over 80 percent of these groups recognize little or no approximately Search engine optimization Net Advertising and lots approximately The way to take your hard earned money.

In May also of 2006 the Interactive advertising and marketing Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (P.C) announced that Net advertising and marketing revenues reached a new file of $3.nine billion for the first region of 2006. The 2006 first zone sales represent a 38 percentage growth over Q1 2005 at $2.eight billion and a 6 percentage growth over This autumn 2005 overall at $three.6 billion.

Ultimate 12 months, AdWords on my own generated $three.4 billion for Google.

With the Internet being the place to comfy marketplace share, many charlatans and wannabe Global Internet Advertising specialists are surfacing – thieves who recognize little extra than The way to coins your take a look at and disappear quickly.

So how does one move about looking for an Honest and a hit Enterprise which focuses on International Advertising and public relations on the Net?

You ought to ask numerous questions. Trouble is, Maximum organizations searching for Worldwide Search engine optimization Net Marketing aid do no longer recognize the questions to ask. Leyden Communications (Israel) gives a listing of questions for each Employer from Tel Aviv, London, Washington, and NY, to Paris, Japan, India, and China to ask the Seo or Worldwide Internet Marketing Corporation before they signal a contract.

First, in case your target market is NY, London, Manchester or La, or any native English speak market, be positive to lease a native from that u. S . A .. One whose English is at mother tongue degree and understands the Advertising tradition of your goal marketplace. If you do hire an Israeli, make sure that they have got lived and worked for your target market locale for at least ten years.

2nd, you want to understand what enjoy and for how many years they have got worked with Global Advertising, conventional distribution channels, income, Marcom, viral Advertising, production of brochures, advertising, and public relations?

1/3, what professional revel in do they’ve in reproduction writing, journalism and research?

Fourth, what sensible enjoy do they’ve in programming?

And Last But now not least, how lengthy have they been operating on the Internet?

A Global Net Advertising and marketing expert ought to wear many hats to prevail. The Internet Search engine optimization has to be an experienced Worldwide Advertising or PR person – one that understands How to penetrate and motivate a market outside of Israel without the Internet. They need to understand the basics of International Advertising and marketing, branding, distribution and income channels in order for them to combine the virtual world with the traditional print, broadcast media and sales markets. The Search engine optimization have to be an achieved, innovative and professional creator who can write for each the reader and the search engine.

This newsletter is an instance of ways one writes for both the reader and the Google and Yahoo search engines. The English suffer a chunk as the writer unearths a satisfactory balance between getting your attention and the eyes of the search engines like google. However, what is extra essential? the hunt engine!

For in case your clients within the Uk, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan and South Korea do not Find your Internet site, then having an Internet site with the high-quality of traditional reproduction writing will Discover itself lost in cyberspace.

Are you able to find a Webmaster, Net photograph layout, Net programmer, expert Net Advertising, Global Marketing guru and professional journalist and or copywriter all in one individual? Many in Israel will tell you sure. I say you will be fortunate to discover a crew with each one of these specialists in no extra than possibly 3 Global Net Search engine optimization Advertising and marketing businesses in Israel.

What then would be the real acid check for securing a professional Search engine optimization – search engine optimization Net promoting Advertising Organization in Israel, Big apple, London, Paris or Beijing?

Truely carry out a search on Google for “Israel Internet Marketing” or “Israel International Advertising.” If the Seo Employer you’re speaking to in Israel is not listed inside the pinnacle ten, you have to ask yourself one question: “How can they rank you, without the continuing use of a pricey Google AdWords marketing campaign, in a pinnacle ten function?”

Google AdWords are a completely effective advertising device utilized by Search engine optimization International Net Advertising agencies in Israel, However, They are not an alternative to having your commercial Internet site stand on its very own virtual legs. AdWords aren’t an alternative to getting out optimized information memories on Google information and PR news releases into the numerous corners of the Net. AdWords do not the replacement for creating blogs, professional rooms and boards in Google and Yahoo and the creation of movies for YouTube.

Can a locally born Search engine optimization in Israel Find, let alone professionally write the English, French, Spanish or China replica and news you need for your Website and for International blogs and news releases? Are they fluent in a spread of Israel export and import markets regarding hi-tech, meals, defense era, agriculture, biotech, safety, real property, chemical substances, metals, gaming, politics, crisis communications, training, plastics, song, shopping, telecommunications, income, stocks, manpower, diamonds, Judaica, workplace products, food, liquids, tourism, video games, textiles, courting, health, sports, news, videos, clothes, inns, airlines and condo automobiles?

Permit the native Israel Seo to marketplace your products and services to home markets and sales cultures that they realize high-quality – Tel Aviv, Ra’anana, Ashdod, Herzlia, Afula, Haifa, Jerusalem, Kiryat Shimona, and Eilat.

Never look at workplace size as a degree of success. What you’re paying for are knowledge and talent. Many Seo specialists and their complimentary personnel of replica writers and programmers may go from a domestic workplace in Israel. Again, decide their International Net Advertising fulfillment through the rating in their clients and their personal search engine optimization ranking on Google and Yahoo.

In no way pay an upkeep charge. Global Internet Advertising Search engine optimization specialists are not servicing a vehicle or cleaning a house. What you do need to spend money on is more Net pages created through their Webmaster and extra news testimonies and or news releases created with the aid of their PR firm to be located on Google information.

Never pay all that they ask for up front. Except you know the Corporation an excellent policy is paying half of earlier than the paintings starts of evolved and the balance once the work is finished. It takes about 3 weeks to start seeing the outcomes of Seo or SEO. Although with some Israel Search engine optimization, you can see scores improve inside a rely of days on using the use of Alexa.Com upon. In the use of Alexa.Com, it’s miles a tool that you may use, one which can not be performed with by way of the Seo or SEM Enterprise.

Lastly, if the Seo International Net Advertising Organisation guarantees you a primary place ranking, you will then realize that They are bogus. No Seo or SEM can promise you something for which simplest Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL manipulate. They can promise you a better ranking and rely on the hyperlink density of your industry maybe even a pinnacle ten position.

Remember the fact that the top ten seek engine function that we’re talking about could no longer be a paid Google AdWords subsidized hyperlink. it’s far your Web website, your Web pages standing on their own ft that counts. Additionally having an optimized news story approximately your Agency’s services and products in a top ten role might identical your Internet site being in a high Search engine optimization ranking. In reality, as long as the Seo news / public family members tale is in an excessive position, it reinforces your credibility as it serves as 1/3 birthday party endorsement. it’s miles far stronger than your Internet site ranking, so long as the tale has a link to your Website.

You’re first to preventing in hiring a Global Internet Marketing Corporation in Israel is a Google seek. Your Second forestall is to satisfy the Seo and SEM – search engine Advertising and marketing team. In case you don’t see a local English speak, experienced Global Advertising professional who is familiar with terminology which includes POP, embassy commercial attache department, Israel Export Institute, packaging, 4 color bleed and what an optimized Search engine optimization information headline at the Net looks like – hold strolling.

Joel Leyden turned into considered one of Israel’s first Internet pioneers, having co-created Israel’s first commercial Website – NetKing – in 1995, the primary Net based totally information company in Israel – Israel information Enterprise, the first Website for an Israel Top Minister, first web page for the Israel defense Forces and masses of industrial, non-profit and governmental groups. Leyden has worked for over 25 years in journalism, Global Advertising, public family members and advertising from NY and Israel. Leyden became Israel’s first Seo and today affords lectures on International Internet Marketing.

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

Ryan promises to replace Obamacare 'this year,' but implementation could take longer Play Video1:32   "We hope to get this done as fast as possible," he said. (Reuters) For weeks now, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has struggled to convince his colleagues of the benefits of the border adjustment tax. If his reasons seem unsound and unconservative (Why should the government dictate which suppliers you use?), it’s because he is not being honest about the motivation behind the plan to tax imports. The one and only reason behind the push centers on the massive deficit the rest of the GOP tax plan would create. (Take a fiscally irresponsible tax plan and add in a counterproductive border tax adjustment!) In short, his tax plan needs the infusion of cash that a tax passed on to U.S. consumers would raise. Libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy blasts Ryan for intellectual dishonesty in claiming that the “United States was at a disadvantage because other countries’ exports are exempted from taxes while U.S. goods aren’t.” This is wrong: For instance, he claims that Japanese exports are exempt from taxes. No, Japanese products exported to the U.S. are exempt from the Japanese VAT but the Japanese company is still paying U.S. corporate tax on its U.S. profits. And you know what? In that sense, the Japanese export is treated exactly like the U.S. goods sold in the U.S. In other words, the playing field is even! I repeat: Japanese goods in the U.S. are taxed like U.S. goods in the U.S. How about U.S. exports in Japan? Well, it gets hit by the Japanese VAT in Japan and by the Japanese corporate tax but so are Japanese goods sold in Japan. Again, the only disadvantage faced by U.S. companies selling tape recorders abroad comes from the U.S. tax system, which requires that income earned in Japan be taxed by Uncle Sam at 35 percent after benefiting from a tax credit for tax paid in Japan. If the U.S. company decides to keep its Japanese income outside the U.S., the U.S. rate won’t apply. The plan will raise the cost of consumer goods. (Not even Fed Chairman Janet Yellen buys into the notion that the U.S. dollar will instantly and sufficiently rise in value to offset higher prices.) And it will hurt a whole bunch of businesses that rely on imports, whether they are sold directly to U.S. consumers or, in many cases, incorporated into U.S.-manufactured goods. Read These Comments The best conversations on The Washington Post Sign up [Congressional Republicans, do your job or get out of the way] De Rugy concludes: “The way to fix the U.S. disadvantage is not to create a new expansive tax that would penalize imports in the U.S. — including imports for the benefit of U.S. domestic companies — and would penalize U.S. consumers. The solution is to reform our corporate-tax rate by lowering the rate and moving to an origin-based territorial-tax regime.” The problem is that such an approach won’t raise sufficient revenue to offset revenue losses from Ryan’s underlying tax plan, raising the question as to whether the tax plan is the real culprit here. (Maybe a smaller tax cut, or one that does not reward upper-income taxpayers at all, would be wiser? Nah, that would rain on the parade of the right wing, which for years has been pining for a huge Ronald Reagan-style tax cut, although our current debt, tax code and economic situation bear no resemblance to the factors Reagan faced in the 1980s.) This is no small or esoteric policy debate. Without the border adjustment tax, the GOP tax plan will be (rightly) excoriated for blasting an enormous hole in the budget. However, with the border adjustment tax, the Senate and a great many House Republicans will not vote for it. Keep Reading Retailers have organized against the border adjustment tax. In particular, small businesses — the darling of Democrats and Republicans alike — foresee disaster. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that small businesses “typically have less ability to negotiate better deals with suppliers or push through price increases to customers or spend time and money modeling tax changes. More than 95% of U.S. importers have fewer than 250 employees, according to 2014 U.S. Census data.” Richard Woldenberg, chief executive of Learning Resources, is marshaling some interesting data to defeat the plan. He told the Journal that “a border-adjusted tax would increase Learning Resources’s tax bill by four- to fivefold, even with a lower corporate rate. That would force his company to raise prices by as much as 15%, which he fears could cause sales to drop by 20% or more.” He pointed out that it is not as though there are domestic suppliers readily available. (“Learning Resources tried in 2013 to find a U.S. molder to produce simple plastic counting toys it could sell at mass-market retailers with a ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ label. Just one firm bid on the job. ‘They gave us a terrible quote,’ Mr. Woldenberg said.”) For this very reason, many of President Trump’s products are made outside the country and imported. Woldenberg is also amassing some politically potent data. On his website, he writes: Rep. Kevin Brady [R-Tex.] is a big cheerleader for the BAT as Ryan’s designee and Chair of Ways and Means. He has said publicly on numerous occasions that he will go forward with this provision at all costs. Thus far, despite lots of bad press and organized opposition that will endanger his Republican majority in the House, he has refused to relent. Notably, Brady’s own district is full of importers. . . . According to my research in a public database, there have been 24,402 import entries associated with zip codes either wholly or partially within Brady’s district over 2015-16.  The total importer count is 2430 in this two-year period, including many individuals (let’s call them “voters”).  They will all have to pay up in Brady’s BAT … Brady may be in a GOP safe seat, but he is not immune to a primary challenge. [At CPAC, conservatism betrayed] Trump and arrogant lawmakers can swear up and down that protesters in their districts are paid phonies. What they cannot ignore are the legions of small businesses, importers, retailers and consumers who will surely conclude that they’ll be worse off than they are now with the border adjustment tax. It is the sort of issue (tax cuts for the rich! price hikes at Walmart!) that can set off a wave election. Ryan might persist with the border tax adjustment gimmick, but it likely will mean the end of his tax reform effort. That would be some economic karma if a non-conservative, distortional tax grab knocked the legs out from under a GOP that has decided to discard its fiscally responsible free-market positions.