Hard to believe it is October already! What a year it has been.
I thought I had the Minto, Martha, tucked away for the winter, but we had 10 days of great weather. I could not resist getting her out again. At a time when it is common for dreary grey skies and poor weather, Kemp and I were out racing around the lake.
Joe, one of my mentors, shared a deep insight tonight. As he lay in his hospital bed he taught me how to be grateful where you are.
All his life Joe has been an active person. He has traveled the world over, hiked amazing places, competed in many sports, and engaged in activities that kept his brain and body stimulated. For the last couple decades he has studied the art of sailboat racing. He is a force to be reckoned with on the local racing circuit, typically taking home the gold medal.
I first met Joe in the context of sailing, during an event for disabled people at Footloose Sailing Association. He was sharing the joys of sailing and teaching the disabled sailors. Later I joined his racing team. Joe is eager to share his love and knowledge of sailing with anyone interested, and I was like an eager sponge. Dried out and ready to soak up his knowledge.
Though he has taught me a lot about how to sail fast and sail well, he more importantly taught me how to think. He showed me that problems are only problems if you let them be, or they can be new opportunities. He taught me how to think about the “why” behind something, to understand what it did before it did it. And he taught me how to think quickly on my feet and make the most of changing situations. Sailboat racing is no walk in the park. It is a mental and emotional chess game, just like life.
Joe did not get to cruise in his sailboat this summer due to his health issues. He got in only a couple races, but as he was laying in that bed, voraciously listening to tales of my adventures, he said something profound.
“I may not have had a summer, but I as I reflected I realized I have had a lot of great sailing adventures in my life. In the grand scheme of things one summer does not matter. As I look out this window I can imagine the wonderful places I might be anchored right now. I am grateful for the wonderful memories of those trips.”
Joe said this with a peaceful smile on his face.
Joe was not upset with his current situation. He was happy to be there sharing memories with me. Those memories helped him be grateful where he was.
The next time I am in an undesirable situation I too am going to look backward at my life and find a reason to be grateful right where I am.
What can you look back to in life and be grateful for?
Have you run into this scenario? You have content that needs to live on multiple sites but you are concerned about SEO issues duplicating said content?
As search engines crawl the web looking for pages to include in their search indexes they may run across content duplicated from another site. When that happens the search engine will first attempt to determine which site is the “source of truth”. The site with duplicated content will be penalized in rankings. If no source can be found both sites rankings will be penalized. An SEO nightmare.
Is it possible to distribute the same content to multiple sites without incurring this penalty? The answer is a resounding YES! All you need to do is let the search engine know where the real of the article is, the canonical article. This is done by including a tag in the html head area. It is for search engines, humans do not typically see it.
WordPress has some built in canonical abilities however in WordPress itself there is no way to set the canonical url. I tend to have articles published all over the web that I would like to copy to this site for posterity. Today I whipped up a little plugin that provides a simple url field to add the article’s canonical url in a search engine friendly way.
It is as simple as adding the url as you create the article!
Publish your post and WordPress will handle the rest.
Here is an example post that I wrote on team building for WebDevStudios.
You may notice there is also a brief disclaimer at the top of the article. That is optional and may be helpful to some readers and/or required by the site you are reposting from to comply with guidelines.
If you want to use this plugin on your own site simply head over to Github and download the plugin!
I was recently asked for the total number of posts on a WordPress website. Normally as simple as looking at the number in the dashboard, however in this instance the WordPress install was a Multisite with nearly 100 sites. That would have taken far too long to do manually, but what about having MySQL do the heavy lifting for me?
The information_schema database contains data about every database and table on the server. One of the metrics it stores is the count of rows in a table. We can use that to extrapolate roughly how many entries are in all the posts tables combined. This is not an exact science, however it will get you close to the real numbers. I argue that it will typically be “close enough” on larger installs, such as the one I was looking at.
In the following query, just replace the database name with your database and run it.
SELECT SUM( table_rows )
FROM information_schema.TABLES
WHERE
table_schema = "{{YOUR_DATABASE_NAME}}"
AND table_name LIKE '%_posts';
There has been a lot going on since my Q1 Update! Still working hard to make my 2018 Vision be, and continue to be, a reality.
How’s it going so far? Pretty great! There have been some setbacks, but much more positive forward motion than backward :).
Lets go through the four vision statements…
Vision: Become a topnotch, well respected communicator and coach
To date I have completed/am currently doing:
| Speaking Engagements | 4 |
|---|---|
| Masterminds | 5 |
| Coaching | Over 60 hours! |
There are two masterminds currently running, and I have plans to start another in September.
Within a week I will have another coaching clients.
I have several team building training sessions in planning phase currently.
In the final planning phase is a leadership networking group.
Vision: Let my money make me money, not me making money
This is my second most actively worked vision, after the next vision which involves my relationship with my wife.
To date I am actively working with startups (new businesses) in the following categories:
| In planning phase | 1 |
|---|---|
| Pre-launch | 2 |
| Self-sustaining | 0 |
| Flops | 0 |
The business I was most excited about flopped, however others are in the works! Also currently working on a multifamily real estate deal.
Vision: Build an ever improving relationship with my wife that others coming behind can model after
This is going great! I feel that Alix and I have never been more in sync. She graduated with her masters this year and we are looking toward the next phase of life. More will come on that in the next quarter.
Vision: Live a slow paced life
I have cut a lot out of my life. I am able to enjoy sailing and business building a lot more because of it. Life is still busy but it is a different type of busy. It feels slower because the busy now is of my choosing and timing.
Life is good!
I expect it only to continue getting better!
Book me for your next speaking, teaching, or coaching event!
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