<Update: the post has been saved! I reader of this blog happened to have it opened in his web browser, and was nice enough to mail it to me! You can read the post here.>

Last night I wrote a post called “The Five Phases of Progress.” I spent about an hour typing that thing out. Today, I accidentally deleted it. So if you end up coming to this page for that post and see a 404 error, you’ll know why. Sorry. Read this instead.

Does anyone know how to recover a post you delete from Wordpress? If so, pls send me mail (ravisraman@gmail.com) and I’ll be forever grateful.

I might retype it at some point.

Maybe if I had as much creative skill as Peter, I would take the time to review my moleskine more often!

Ran across another good personal development blog. Steve Aitchison’s Change Your Thoughts To Change Your Life. He has some great content, interesting guest writers and also is pretty open about his quest to become a professional blogger.

I do appreciate it when people who choose to monetize their blogs are open about how it is going. This way others can learn from their successes and mistakes. It’s even better when they take feedback from their readers when their ads are getting too intrusive. Steve does both.

I can’t help but notice the scores of personal development bloggers out there. I read about 25 right now. Another one or two pop up each month.

Some are excellent writers; with well informed opinions, good writing style and frankly, some compelling personal experiences to back it up.

Others….well, let’s just say their sites look like the backside of a VW Bus on a Berkley street corner…..e.g. covered in ads with half-a-bumper. Barely running. Little substance. Written by kids acting as if they were Norman Vincent Peale, Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra all wrapped into one.

Spewing out tips on “how to attract abundance,” “how to live courageously” and “how to be an oustanding person”….without giving so much as a hint at why I should devote one ounce of weight to their self-proclaimed guru status.

In this day and age, anyone can write about <nearly> anything and can claim to be an expert with no credentials.

What I love about blogging is they enable you to have a dialog with a REAL PERSON. You can learn and interact with this REAL PERSON. The writing is less authoritative and more editorial. It has a sharp tinge of personality. Blogs nowadays are losing that personal touch. Their trying to be mini-e-zines with catchy titles.

I’ve noticed far too many blogs in my little niche of personal development totally slacking on the PERSONAL part of their stories. There are tons of “top 10 lists” or quick references to other blogs (no doubt to drive traffic) but little in the way of helping readers actually get a glimpse into the author’s personality, life and personal growth challenges and success.

Frankly, I don’t look to a 2o-something y/o with a wordpress account to tell me how to live my life “courageously.” At least, not without first knowing what this 20-something has done to warrant my dedicated following.

Net-Net…I am more than a little jaded with the state of many blogs right now. If you are a personal development blogger, tell me about how you are evolving and improving your own life. Tell me about your own personal goals. Hold yourself accountable for the progress you are making (or not making against them). Tell me about lessons you are learning, both mistakes and the good things. That’s what blogs are meant to be, an open dialogue.

Stop trying to act like you are a guru.

If I want to read a top ten list I’ll watch Letterman.

If  this is too much to ask….no worries, I’ll just stop reading your blog.

Welcome to sethigherstandards V1.0. Beta.

We’re still working out the kinks but this new design sure does seem to suit the site much better. What do you think?

Alex has a nice post about John Chow.

I just ran across his site last week, and his header self-proclaiming “dot com mogul” definitely got my attention. I must have spent 10 minutes (an eternity in Internet time) trying to figure out what the story was about this guy. Was he a billionaire (my definition of mogul). Was he a multi-millionaire? Was he an early Google employee?

To be honest, I still DON’T KNOW.

All I know if he has a website writing tech reviews. Does that qualify you as a mogul?

I have no clue if he is a mogul or not, but am now intrigued enough to be a subscriber and reader of his blog (his posts are interesting). Marketing gimmick or not…he got me hooked! Nice tagline.

This blog finally has legs. Not a newborn anymore. More like a toddler. A fast crawler.

I bought this domain name way back in March, but didn’t start blogging for a few months afterwards. Consistent blogging didn’t happen for many more months. Starting in September 2006, I really got into a regular habit of writing things down, and figured I might as well put it out there for other people to make fun of.

I track pageviews and broad site metrics using Google Analytics and my subscriber count through Feedburner. To be honest, the site metrics are interesting, but it is the subscriber number that really matters to me.

There are now 54 total subscribers to Set Higher Standards. Of the 54, 12 have signed up for the Feedburner e-mail delivery service to get the posts via e-mail as opposed to through an RSS reader. This really surprised me. I recommend anyone who wants to increase their readership to add this feature to their site. If you use Feedburner, it is totally free.

I pretty much had 3-5 subscribers throughout the entire summer (myself on two computers and Chuck!). There were a couple of spikes when this site got picked up by StumbleUpon, but aside from that, things have just been trending up slowly but surely.

In terms of site stats, I get an average of 120 visits per day (yes Todd, I exclude my IP address!) and 240 pageviews.

All in all, I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am curious as to how long the growth will keep up.

I like simple things. I like big plain salads. I like plain shirts. I like acoustic music. I like meditation. I like using my own two feet to get somewhere instead of driving. I like writing….and of course, I like blogging.

The ideas was simple, charge advertisers $1 for each pixel on a single million-pixel page . The value proposition was equally simple, be part of internet history, Who could possibly pass that up?

The page was started in August 2005, and quickly sold out, netting the creator (Alex, a 21 year old student at the time) a boatload of cash. To get the ball rolling, Alex and his family bought the first few blocks of ad space. Once he had earned $1000, he wrote a press release that went viral instantly. Traffic to the site soared after the BBC started writing about the site. 300,000 pixels were sold in the first month alone. The advertisers (and of course Alex) all benefited immensely.

Start up costs? Probably zero or close it, just time invested to design the site and handle the customer transactions. Web Hosting and domain name would costs a little. Not sure if Alex did a deal with the web hosting company to place their logo on the site. If so, this cost would be taken care of.

This graph shows daily reach per million compared with a Om Malik’s popular weblog. The traffic peaked for about 4 months, but even today has a material number of hits (just under half the reach of Om’s blog in the past few months). Not bad. Wonder if Alex will be starting a 10 million pixel page anytime soon?

Some may look at kids making so-called “easy money” on the web and just bicker and moan. I on the other hand, look at this as a perfect of example of someone getting compensated for following through on a creative idea. Way to go Alex!