Procrastinate, but Not Now!
by Mike Banks Valentine
Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow.
I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will -- tomorrow!
--Gloria Pitzer
I've been putting off writing this article because it seemed
too hard to write about something I seem to have no control
over. I'm actually writing it 5 days before deadline and don't
really understand why it has me concerned. If it were easy, it
would be done though, and I wouldn't be thinking about it now.
The things I've done instead of writing an article about my
worst habit have been dull, tedious, slow and irritating. But
I've preferred them all to writing about procrastination! Why
do we torture ourselves over some things by delaying them like
this? In order to avoid putting my own thoughts to the keyboard
I went to the dictionary to look up the word.
procrastinate \Pro*cras"ti*nate\, v. i. To delay; to be dilatory
Dilatory huh? Guess I better look that up too.
dilatory \Dil"a*to*ry\, Marked by procrastination or delay;
tardy; slow; sluggish
I guess I knew that, but what can one say about something that
can't be helped. I feel as though I'm chained by dread of action.
If I get started now, that churning in my stomach and slight
twitch in my brow will turn to nausea and a serious headache.
"Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off
a hard one makes it impossible."
-- George H. Lonmer
That's it, I'll go look up some quotes on procrastination! That
will be forward motion and actually move me toward knowing what
others have thought and said about being dilatory. Cool! Off to
Google, my favorite search engine, to find some procrastination
quotes.
In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is
the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
- Theodore Roosevelt
At least I'm doing something! But I guess if I really look at
it, what I wanted to do was to go to ListBot and retrieve my
ezine archives before they shut it down on August 20. Did I
say that I "wanted" to do that? No, I can't stand the thought
of the slow, tedious cutting and pasting of all my archived
newsletters to my own ezine archive.
"How soon not now becomes never."
-- Martin Luther
Here's how you do it folks. Log in, click the link that says,
"View Archive" and then go to your browser menu and click on
your first archived issue and then go to "View" and choose
the "View Page Source" from the choices then, Scroll down past
all the stuff on the page until you reach the HTML tag marked
[pre] and select everything until you reach the [/pre] tag
which follows your ezine text copy.
These tags keep your formatting intact without using alot of
extra HTML as you paste it into your own web pages and upload
to your own site using FTP.
Go to your HTML editor or word processing program and paste
all of that selection into a fresh document and save it as
"archive01.htm". Now to your next issue in the archive and do
the same thing over and over and over again until you're done.
Renaming each page sequentially, or better yet, with keywords
important to topics discussed in each newsletter for search
engine ranking and relevancy increases.
It took me about 4 days of this before I had my entire ezine
archive from ListBot copied and uploaded to my own site for
safekeeping. You can take a look at my own archive to see an
effective naming scheme using keywords in title tags, metatags
and body copy, then creating text links from those keywords
and using appropriate titles. Take a look at:
http://website101.com/free_ezine_content/
Check each of the pages to see that every one has different
tags, title, metatags and text links making keywords important.
This alone makes the sore typing fingers worth something for
all the work it takes. Archiving means more content for your
site, which increases search engine rank as well. It's worth it.
I've always known that archiving my own newsletter would help
increase search engine ranking and relevance for my web site.
I just put it off for so long that it took four days to do
what could have been done weekly and taken five minutes a week
for the last two-and-one-half years! OW! My achin' shoulders!
Carpal Tunnel has my wrists throbbing!
I think we're gonna have a bunch of really weary former ListBot
members very sore by August 20, when ...
"The ListBot service will be turned off completely.
All ListBot servers will be shut down and all data
will be unavailable. Please retrieve any information
you need before this date, since (is) inaccessible
from this date on."
Don't forget to get your subscriber lists while you are there.
ListBot instructions for that task are as follows:
"To download your lists, click on "View Members" in the
ListBot control center. Then click on "Download All" or
"Download Demographics" to download your list subscribers.
If you have problems with this process during peak times,
please try again during off-peak hours."
I'm pretty well peaked right now! Damn! I'll never use free
services again as long as I live! I swear I won't! Well,
maybe the free email service and then there's that free bill
paying service and the free messaging service and the free ...
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