Posts tagged blogging

We live in a world where these two words are underused.  They are so important.  A bit of appreciation of a person’s actions propagates more goodwill and little by little make the world a better place.

This post has been prompted by this post entitled: ‘Is WordPress a Thankless Community’ by Jeff Chandler.  The post was sat in the dashboard of my blog (for non-WordPressers this is the overview of the management system behind the blog you all see).  Jeff points out that people rarely donate or say thank you to the amazing people who have created the platform that allows me to have this blog for FREE.  I get to download plugins and make my blog better and more like what I want it to be.

I recently moved to WordPress from a Blogger account – the shift couldn’t have been easier and I am really enjoying the experience of running my blog from this platform.  Guess what – I hadn’t said thank you to all the developers who made this possible.  So having been prompted I am going to make sure that I do from now on.

The ‘thank you’ is often forgotten in this fast moving world – especially in the social media community – where we often forget that people had to invest lots of time and energy into the things that we all play with.  This is especially true when things are free – we take them for granted.  We shouldn’t.

A small observation on social media: I have noticed that the new people that I follow on Twitter who have large followings are also people that direct message with a ‘thank you’ for following me’.  You didn’t know they were going to do that – but guess what they go in a ‘decent people’ column in my TweetDeck.  I end of reading their tweets more, retweet them, and hey presto their following grows as a result.

If you write a blog you know the thrill of getting a comment – someone you didn’t (or you do) know contributes to your post – it’s a brilliant feeling.  I recently got an email from a blogger who I have been following for a long time, I love her blog - she said how much she enjoyed reading my blog – I was chuffed to bits to get that email.

Thank yous and positivity go a long way – it just shows you that we need to act online as most of us do face-to-face.  Being a polite human being with good social skills needs to pour out of our typing fingers as it does from our chattering mouths.

PS: I love the lines from ‘Hello Dolly’ – so thank you to the person that created that WordPress plugin.