Co-blogger leaves Tennessee

David Goodman was a recent co-blogger here who did a few posts on art and his garden...and one 'guest post'. He commented as VIDAD mostly and was a good person to know and a strong supporter of 'Chicken Wednesdays". I recently received this email from him.

I'm gone! I've moved back to Florida. And I just ordered chickens in the mail. Heck with Smyrna laws...
.............
How's that for a "Chicken Wednesday?"

I wish him well down in Florida and hope he enjoys his backyard chickens.

Slow

This blog has been going through a slow period for many reasons. While I try to keep up I found this last month the effort was just too much and slacked off big time.

I'm not sure if it will increase anytime soon so if you are one of the many co-bloggers please step up and post to your hearts desire.

I'm currently broke, ill, hating the heat, trying to go back to school, and purchasing a house all at the same time. I'm pulled in so many directions that even when I find something I think the readers here might like I find it hard to put forth the mental effort to post it for you.

Summer Solstice.

Today is officially the first day of summer. To me the heat implies that it has been here for a while already.

Update

Things have been slow at This is Smyrna, TN. for a lot of reasons. First School for me ended, then my brother enlisting and the whole 'going away' activities, and my knee (which has me on crutches) is not getting better has made me getting out very hard. I link to articles, but that is limiting for the most part.

I'm also looking for guest bloggers, or ones who would like to join as fully active bloggers..from Smyrna of course.

Things will pick up some as I am working on putting out my own video episodes of 'This is Smyrna TV' for your enjoyment...but not the town governments.

Well off to get along with life as it is.

What does your meta tag say about you?

I tried something over the last week and it has had a very positive effect on this blog. I changed my meta tags.

In your templete you may have some coding like this.

#title##$BlogPageTitle$##/title#
#meta name="keywords" content="#$BlogTitle$#" /#
#meta name="description" content="#$BlogTitle$# - #$BlogDescription$#" /#

I changed the "<" and ">" symbols to # for ease of viewing.

I noticed our meta tags were still in the default setting as this shows. I then changed them to read this after a little research.

#title#This is Smyrna, TN.#/title#
#meta name="keywords" content="This is Smyrna, TN." /#
#meta name="description" content="This is Smyrna, TN. - This is Smyrna, Smyrna, Tennessee, blog, city government, Rutherford county" /#

In the last week This is Smyrna, Tn. has moved from 8th to 4th position when you Google "Smyrna Tn", and from 7th to 3rd position when you Google "Smyrna Tennessee".

A few small changes to a default setting can change your search engine ranking big time.

Google has a whole tutorial on how to effect changes, or even add meta tags, to your webpage.

Website changes

In the next week the visual layout of This is Smyrna, Tn. will be changing some. A new template will be installed, and links on the side column will be changed.

We will be reverting to the Blogger comment system. While it does work the same way as the Haloscan comments, comments made on haloscan will not be brought forward to be viewed on the new system.

While these changes are being introduced, there might be some problems. If you note an issue please email me here with the description so we can work to correct it.

We will also be adding certain services for the community such as advertising space for local businesses to purchase.

Thank you for your patience.


update:
Yikes. Seems the youtube videos have issues with the new blogspot template I picked..or something.

update 2:
retreating to the old template. Seems the youtube videos are still not up. Might be a youtube issue and not a template issue. Very odd.

update 3:
test

update 4:
Now I'm irritated. When I go to the new system, nothing changes, and posts like the picture post above, will not post to the page. May just stay old school and code myself. The new template is hinky and bothersome.