I don’t have anything earth shattering for you today. I know, bummer. (As if I’ve ever had anything earth shattering to share here before, LOL). But anyway, I wanted to call your attention to a few minor changes I made over the weekend.

In addition to redesigning the logo and the header in the past week, I’ve added an “Archives” page and the Categories list to the sidebar. Hopefully this will make it easier for you to find old posts. There are almost 600 posts on the blog now and finding things can be difficult. While there is the search at the top of the sidebar, sometimes you just really don’t know what keyword you’re looking for and browsing the archives can be more useful.

So, check out the Archives link up there in the navigation menu as well as the Categories links in the sidebar. Let me know if you find any posts you think are really cool. I’m thinking of putting a list of the top posts in the sidebar and/or on the archives page.

Anything else you think would make things easier to navigate and find here? Please let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas. I’m always open to improvements. This blog is more for you than for me, after all and I want it to be a place you enjoy visiting and sharing.

Post your ideas in the comments! And I’ll be back soon to let you know how the first day of school went.

Until then . . . keep blazin’!

In my post more housekeeping yesterday, I mentioned that I had revamped the categories. So far, I’m happy with those changes (which were actually made Friday and Saturday) but I thought perhaps you’d like to know a little more about them so you can find what you’re looking for.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do about tags, though. For now I am not using them although they still exist on the blog. But I do have 19 20 categories since adding a new one yesterday. I may add one more but I will be keeping the total number of categories at 20 or less. They may change over time depending on what happens with the content direction and from feedback I get from you. So once again, don’t be shy – speak up! I want to know your thoughts, m’kay?

Anyway, the categories are: (I feel like I’m announcing a grammy or oscar winner or something! LOL)

• Announcements. This is pretty self-explanatory, I think. It’ll be for announcing new things and changes I’ve made (like this post, for example).
• Around the Web. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know I (try to) regularly post a list of links from good reads around the web and that’s exactly what this category is for – so you can find all those link posts!
• Creativity. A new category, it’s purpose here is to share with you creative things, give you ideas to enhance or develop your own creativity and possibly to share my own artwork with you from time to time.
• Food. We all enjoy talking about food and as I continue revamping my family’s meals, I want to document that. My other aim with this category is to give you a resource that you can use with your family too.
• Health & Fitness. I am trying to incorporate more health and fitness into my family’s lifestyle so I will discuss those things here as well as continue to document my own ongoing health needs. Again, it’ll also aim to be a resource for you as well.
• Ideas. Everybody needs to get better at developing ideas and then actually acting upon them and with the goal of this website to live my life authentically and to help you to live yours that way too, there will be lots of times we need to share ideas and thoughts and sometimes we’ll need to discuss how to get ideas and what to do with them.
• Intentions. Since I do not do goals, this is my category for . . . intentions. (You can read why I don’t do goals here.) Every week, we’ll talk about our intentions for the next week or two.
• Life. Because the whole premise here is to live the best Life possible, we have to talk about heavy things once in a while that affect everything else. We’ll do that here.
• Mindset. Probably one of the most important categories. Mindset is everything is learning to blaze new trails and live life at full speed. We’ll be talking about this A LOT.
• Miscellaneous. Sometimes, I’ll post about things that just don’t go with any other category (like music or family or something like that) so I’ll be using this category for those types of posts.
• Motivation. Once in a while (or sometimes, a lot, if you’re like me), we need a little nudge – or a huge shove! So this is where we’ll talk about keeping ourselves going on this new adventure.
• Personal. I often talk about things that are more personal in nature and sometimes we’ll discuss getting personal in your new walk with life too. This category will hold all of that stuff.
• Personal Development. We will use this one very, very often as we get going here. This is where we will talk about all that self-help, self-realization, self-reliance type stuff as well as the resources we’ll use as we develop our best life and set the world on the fire with our ideas.
• Relationships. And this one is because we all have relationships that need nurturing. Part of living authentically will include developing our relationships to their fullest potential – from networking relationships to kids to significant others and more. Relationships play a vital role in going full speed ahead.
• Risk. Remember I told you a few days ago that there will be risk involved? Well, we’ll talk about all that stuff here.
• Self. Isn’t that what this is all about? Getting the most of our life and being true to ourselves? Yep! So, we’ll be talking about this all the time.
• Spirituality. Whether you’re religious or not, there often is some sort of spiritual influence in your life. It’s another one of those very important things in nurturing body, body and soul so we’ll be discussing it regularly as well.
• Trailblazing. That is what we’re doing! Blazing new trails! Life, love and the pursuit of happiness.
• Work. Another one of those things we all need to be involved in, in some way. We’ll talk about traditional work, working from home, my work and everything else that deals with work.

And I just thought of the 20th category! LOL

• Entrepreneurship. Some of us work for ourselves or SHOULD be working for ourselves. My aim is to give you insights on my own business as well as help you develop your own, if you want to do so.

SO, there you go! That is the focus of this blog. From here on out, we’re Trailblazers, setting the world on fire by taking the road less traveled.

Until next time . . . keep blazin’!

You may notice as you’re browsing around, I’ve narrowed down my categories and tags. They were getting out of control and sometimes there is such a thing as TOO organized. LOL It’s a fault of mine. I’m ultra organized most of the time and every once in a while, it actually just ends up creating too much chaos and clutter.

So, I have whittled the categories down to 18 instead of the 36 or whatever I had before. And the tags are now down to something like 116 from several hundred. But I’m not satisfied with the tags yet. I think, actually, that I may just do away with them. My aim here is to keep things simple and cut down on the overwhelm. But I haven’t really decided yet about the tags. I’m going to try revamping them a bit more and if it still isn’t working, I’ll likely just cut them out altogether.

I’ve also added a new toolbar thing at the top of the page. It’s got some great search features as well as social bookmarking/sharing features that I thought you’d enjoy. You can email, facebook or tweet anything on this site with the toolbar. Makes it super simple!

There are a few other things I may do in the next week or two but they’ll be small changes too. I’m not doing a drastic overhaul of anything, don’t worry!

The only thing which really may be all that different is the topics I’ll be covering. Along with what I already discuss, I am planning to focus more on topics like personal development, mindset, self, creativity, entrepreneurship and motivation. I’ll also be talking about spirituality, work, relationships, risk, and health and fitness as well as life, intentions and personal things.

Listen, though – this blog is as much for you as it for me. If you don’t like the direction I’m taking things, PLEASE speak up and say so! I don’t just want to hear the nice comments – I want to hear the critical ones too.

This past week, I’ve spent a lot of time really going over what I want out of this blog. What I’ve come up with really isn’t all that far off from what it is now. Basically, I’m going to be sharing with you the steps I’m taking to “build a better me” like I wrote about last week. My hope is that it offers you some ideas for your own life.

Like I wrote in “Throwing convention to the wind,” I’m blazing a new trail and I’d love to have you along!

Enjoy your Sunday! See you again very soon.

And please, let me know what you think and if there’s anything in particular you’d like to read about here.

Be blessed,