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JerseySmarts.com

An Extended Entry is Coming Very, Very Soon

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Hi everyone! I know I haven’t posted a new entry on the blog in the last few days, but there’s a reason for the delay. About a week ago I uncovered something online that deals directly with me in a way that is very humorous (at least I ultimately found the entire situation humorous when it really isn’t that funny, but more or less pathetic). I’ve been crafting an extended entry for your reading pleasure which attempts to explain what it is that I found online. However, I keep running into an issue where I find that once I explain one element of the story, another element then needs additional explanation.

The end result is an entry that, at this point, is almost 3,000 words. For comparison’s sake, that would be like reading about 15 entries the length of the one that you are reading now. As you might imagine, this is becoming a monster of an entry which I think most of you may just skip through. However, for those of you who take the time to read the entry you’ll find out a little bit more about me, my hometown, my elementary school, some of my former friendships, etc.

Look for that entry coming at some point this weekend. 😉

It’s Christmas Time in New Jersey!

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After the wonderful snowfall that we experienced over the last week, I thought that no time would be better to upload another poem from Mr. Joseph P. Martino of Millburn, New Jersey! Mr. Martino is JerseySmarts.com’s poet of choice – especially during the holiday season. So, without any further adieu, JerseySmarts.com is glad to bring you It’s Christmas Time in New Jersey, by Joseph P. Martino.

It’s Christmas time in New Jersey

“It’s Christmas time in New jersey, come see and hear,
all the sights, sounds and the glow and sparkle of lights so pretty,
that comprise the heartbeat, rhythm and sparkle of our great,
big wonderful welcoming state and cities.

It’s Christmas time in New Jersey our cities, towns and villages,
are now all adorned in their most glorious dress,
as church elders prepare the baby Jesus creche.

Christmas trees on town halls, stores, homes, lawns and malls are all shining bright.
Gaily decorated in colored bells, tinsel, garlands, angels and lights, that glow and sparkle day and night,
boy oh boy what a magnificent and inspirational sight.

As Santa Clause makes out his Christmas list, making sure no girl or boys requested
toy will be forgot or missed. as Santa Claus extends his warm and welcoming Christmas greeting to everyone throughout our great state.

” Merry,Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to one and all.”
For, it’s Christmas time in New jersey.”

Copyright Joseph P. Martino – Poet, Writer
Millburn, NJ 07041

Random, Unseen Updates to JerseySmarts.com…

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You may have noticed that the blog hasn’t had a frequent, daily update for some time. Instead, I’ve been updating every other day and sometimes a few days in a row (like the last few days). As you’ll recall from an entry I uploaded in November, for the first year of Joe’s Journal and JerseySmarts.com being combined I was keeping to a one-post-each-day format to prove to myself that I can handle the increased pressure of having a single blog that continues to increase in popularity. I think I’ve accomplished that objective! Besides, I’m finding that as I put more time in some of these entries, they are garnering better search engine rankings and thus the website is getting more hits – which is always nice.

Some of you might be interested to know that I’ve been working on a lot of the behind the scenes elements of this website since our one year anniversary of merging back in November. Most of the stuff that I’ve been doing is boring, but some of it might be interesting to at least a few of my readers. So here is a short list of what I’ve been up to lately.

  • Random HTML Updates: As always, I am obsessive about the cleanliness of the code that is used to create JerseySmarts.com. The WordPress people are great at releasing frequent updates to the blog’s core structure, but I make a great deal of changes and modifications to that structure that I am always going back to tinker with and clean up. I told you this was boring, right? 🙂
  • Automatic “Strong” Links: This one is really a personal preference, but I like to have the ability to control the appearance of the links in my entries. WordPress is very flexible when it comes to this, but sometimes it is not very clear on how you manipulate the code for these options on the back end. I’ve had some success with a quick, easy workaround on some of the other WordPress-based websites that I own so I decided to institute them here and it has been working very well. Which brings me to the next point…
  • Amending Older Posts & Comments: When I merged both sites last year, I brought everything from both sites over to the new system. As those of you who work with me on websites know, I’m a stickler for maintaining content – I hate deleting ANYTHING from a website! However, I do understand the need for content to be correct. To this end, I spent some time the other day amending all of my old comments on this blog to reflect the new URL of JerseySmarts.com instead of the old URL for Joe’s Journal which was based off of the now defunct thebalrogslair.com website. That took some time… And while I was at it, I also amended my buddy Eddie’s comments to reflect his new blog URL as well as my other friend Martin’s comments to reflect his new blog URL. Having the proper URL out there is cyberspace is important to generating hits and interest in your website – you can’t let that stuff fall by the wayside.

There have been a few other things that I’ve done in the last few weeks that really begin to dig into the minutiae of operating a website so I won’t bore you with them. Just know that on those days when there is not a new entry for you to read, chances are I am working on something else behind the scenes that is, in the long run, just as important as new content!

The Merger – One Year Later

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Can you believe it was one year ago today that the merger was complete? Pretty amazing, huh? I mean, just to think that there used to be such duplication seems absolutely mind-boggling! Oh wait – you’re not sure what I’m talking about? Let me refresh your memory…

Joe's Journal - As it used to exist

Joe's Journal - As it used to exist

If you read that link, you now know that I merged my old blog – Joe’s Journal – with the one that you’re reading – JerseySmarts.com. One year ago today, that merger was complete. I think the results have been great, but you could probably be the judge of that better than I can…

One of my favorite parts of the old Joe’s Journal was that crazy header that I put together by blending all of the different things that crossed my mind at the moment. You might be able to tell from that screenshot, but there are a whole bunch of different things on there including the Monmouth University hawk, Stewie from an early episode of Family Guy, the Arrested Development television show’s logo, a Cross, the American flag, my fraternity’s flag, a Lord of the Rings logo, a Smallville logo, a silhouette of New Jersey, a Rutgers University logo, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, the main color of the site was yellow.

In general, I never hate on any of my old sites and Joe’s Journal is no different. I really enjoyed that blog since it was my personal blog where I let off steam and commented on a variety of issues (the entries have all been merged into this site, so go back a few years and look at some of the older posts – lots of bitching in there!). However, as I began to enterprise my web design skills and I began creating newer websites with stronger capabilities and better marketing opportunities, I realized that I had to begin eliminating duplication in those areas of my life where it was unsustainable and, really, unnecessary.

On that point, a few years ago I opened up JerseySmarts.com as a place where I could capture some of the writing skills of my friends from college and other people that I’ve met along the way. It never really panned out the way I wanted it to, but that’s okay. Since JerseySmarts.com became a viable source of revenue, I wound up keeping the domain and just uploading my Joe’s Journal entries onto both blogs. It was easy, but pretty laborious in the grand scheme of things. I never wanted to engage in larger marketing campaigns or new ways to present content because I didn’t want to have to duplicate everything. Plus, I felt like the impact of my entries was being thinned since they were available in two locations.

The logical answer was to merge the two blogs and condense my efforts to create a single website with greater impact. I think that I’ve been pretty successful in that effort considering that JerseySmarts.com is both profitable and has a wide readership. Since the merger, I’ve admittedly held back on publicizing the blog to the extent that I originally intended and part of that was because I wanted to ensure that I had the commitment to keep the thing updated. With that, I’m glad to announce that today marks one full year of this blog being updated every single day. In 365 days JerseySmarts.com has had more than 365 entries. I think that’s a pretty significant accomplishment for a one-man show. One of the ways that I accomplished this was taking advantage of the ability to “schedule” a post in WordPress. For example, I wrote all of the entries for November 1st through November 16th (that’s today) on Halloween. Hey, I had the free time while sitting around waiting for trick or treaters, so I wanted to use it productively! I can’t guarantee that I’ll be updating the blog on a daily basis for the coming year, so I might miss a day here and a day there, but I made it work in the last year so I might be able to keep the momentum going in the coming year!

If I had my way, I’d get more people to sign-up for the monthly newsletter in the next year and I’d utilize that newsletter for more than just a recap of previous entries. I think that goal is attainable, but not when the newsletter stands at 26 subscribers. Last month I started a new Google Group which replaced the old newsletter system that I’ve been using for the last year. Let’s hope that it has some staying power, huh?

Anyway, we’re one year into this merger and I think it’s going great. Let me know what you think!