What is RSS

If you are not familiar with RSS-feeds, you can read an introduction here. It is simply a standardized way of receiving a notice whenever I post a new article. When you start to subscribe to different feeds you might feel a bit overwhelmed at first, this is a natural response to the huge amount of content that is available through feeds. What you will probably notice though, is that after a while you stop thinking that you have to read it all and simply scan the headlines for what is really interesting to you.

How to use RSS

In the subscribe section you will find an easily recognizeable “XML” button that links to the RSS-feed of my blog. You can use that for traditional application-based RSS readers. If you prefer one of the many online feed services, I have added several buttons that make it much easier to subscribe to my articles through those services.

Using email

Finally I have also included the possibility of using the FeedBlitz service to get an email whenever a new article is up. If you use email a lot you might find it easier to manage if you get the new articles in the mail. Or if you think all this RSS-stuff is a bit annoying or overly complex, this is also the option for you.

Quick and easy

With all these options to choose from, it is quick and easy to subscribe to my articles. I try to do everything I can to make things easier for you, as it simply makes more sense that I spend 10 minutes once instead of every new subscriber spending 10 minutes each. Now you can subscribe by the click of a button and it does not get much easier than that

While I am not a big fan of using quotes excessively in books and articles, they do serve a good purpose as a way to interrupt our daily patterns of thinking. The best sayings will make you stop and reconsider the subject anew and hopefully let you see things from a new perspective. The new distinctions and beliefs might be just what you need to see a solution for a problem you have been wrestling with, or it might inspire and motivate you to new heights of personal excellence. Think of it as a potential catalyst of change in your internal “map of the world” and remember that even small changes in your map can lead to big changes in the quality of your life if considered during a lifetime!

You might not like all the quotes I have selected and that is perfectly fine, just use the ones you find useful and ignore the rest. Given that each of us meet the world with a unique set of experiences and beliefs it is impossible to design a set of quotes that will appeal to everybody. Nevertheless i sincerely hope that you will find it a nice complement to the rest of the content and that it can be of value to you.

With the new design I have also introduced a motto for the blog : “Better self, Better life!”. I totally believe that the best way to improve the quality of your life is to improve your skills and knowledge in the area of personal development. This is also the entire reason I am writing this blog : I believe that it matters, I believe I can make a difference in people’s lifes by sharing the best and most inspiring ideas in personal development. Such ideas can be the result of my own contemplation and experiences, or I learn about them in books and articles. Regardless of the origin, I try to filter out the fluff and only write about the ideas that I really think can make a difference in the lives of my readers - as well as in my own life. I will always choose quality over quantity.

I have many ideas for the future evolution of the blog but I am always open for suggestions. If you have a topic you would like me to write about, or if you have other suggestions for the design or content of the blog, do not hesitate to send me an email, you can find the address on the contact page.

Alex

When you have a question or problem the first thing you should ask yourself is : “how common is it to ask this question?”. If you think that even a tiny tiny percentage of the world’s population could have asked the same you can probably find it on Google. Only if your question is highly specific to your situation you should start looking for other sources of information and even then it does not hurt to try anyway.

The first thing to try will often be to just type your question like you would ask it to another person. Say if you want to take some great pictures with your new digital camera and therefore you want to know about photography, just write how to learn photography.

Sometimes when asking such a question the results are sort of on target but what you are after is not found on the first page. Then it often helps to use quotes around the parts of the question that belong together : “how to” learn photography. This tells the search engine that these words must be found exactly in the order you specified within the quotes.

In this example the search engine might find a lot of pages about how to do things related to your query but you are still not satisfied with the ratio of interesting pages to uninteresting pages. Then you can adjust the search in order to tell the search engine that the word “photography” must be found on the pages you are willing to consider, if that word is not found on the page, you are just not interested. The way to do this is to adjust with the “+”-sign : “how to” learn +photography.

If that still does not do it, it normally is due to your results getting “spammed” by pages that want to sell you something. So in order to weed those out you want to tell the search engine what terms you do not want to see in the results. The “-”-sign is used for that and for the online marketers terms like “price” and “discount” will often work to get rid of them : “how to” learn +photography -price -discount.

Now you should hopefully get the information you were after and even though it seems like a lot of steps when I describe each adjustment in detail, in practice you will quickly learn to recognize from the results you are getting what kind of change you should make to your query. In some rare cases, even when trying each of these adjustments, you do not find what you are looking for. In that case you should look at the result returned by the search engine from your best efforts at a query - if the results are all about the same subject, but just not the subject you want to know about, there is still hope and you should probably just try to use some other terms that describes your question from another perspective. If instead the result seems to be about all sorts of different subjects and none of them are quite right and it seems like the search engine is really trying hard to give you results at all you might have found a question where the answer is not easily found.

If you are using Google and search a lot a good tip is to install the Google toolbar. It installs an extra toolbar in your Internet explorer with a search field so you can search directly on Google without going to the Google site first. But the best thing about it is that when you search the terms in your query becomes buttons on the toolbar, which you can press to search for the term within the page you are viewing. This is extremely helpful when you need some details in a big page containing a lot of text and can help you to quickly assess whether the page actually contained the answer you were looking for or not.

Another quick tip is that Google actually can do more than just search for pages; another feature I use a lot is unit conversion. If you need to know how many litres 4.2 ounces is, just type in 4.2 ounces in litre and Google will return the correct amount. And this works for distance(3.5 yards in centimetres), area(1000 square feet in square meter) and weight(2 stone in pounds) conversions as well.

There are even more things you can do but these are the basic tips I have for you and the features I use all the time. I hope this will help you to find what you are looking for.

Alex Scheel Meyer