Meta

OK, I just noticed that during a recent upgrade of the blog software I apparently imploded the tag searching and search box features and never even noticed it. My bad. Well that’s embarrassing. It should work now.

OK, as geeky as I tend to be, the whole social networking site thing hasn’t particularly been my cup of tea. Most of them are black holes of uselessness in my opinion. I am kinda digging Facebook, though. I’m running into people I haven’t talked to in years.

So, let’s try an experiment. I created a Both Hands and a Flashlight Facebook group. This will give all you commenters and lurkers a chance to connect with each other, give a little support, chat, shout out encouragement, and whatever else strikes your fancy. We can draw strength from each other, and this is one way we can do that.

You should be able either to search for “Both Hands and a Flashlight” under Groups on Facebook or just try going to this address directly - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=31630254519.

If something is screwed up, just post a comment here and I’ll see about fixing it.

Hope to see you there!

It’s a whole new day at Both Hands and a Flashlight!

Mary and I are overjoyed to announce that I am not pregnant! Phew. However, Mary is!!!!!!!!!

Yep, that was a bun in the oven. Mary has a hysterical story to tell about that, at my expense of course. But I’m a good sport about it.

It’s amazing how much a single word on a high-tech, digital, ‘dummy-proof’, peed-on stick can change everything, even when you’re hoping for it. However, for me, finding out the positive test involved a hot dog bun. There is a LOT we haven’t blogged about over the past month as we waited for the right time to spring the good tidings on the world. We have much ground to cover there, and we’ll get to all the news recap soon.

Officially, Mary is 10 weeks along and is due in early May. After J-Man was The World’s Easiest Pregnancy (TM), according to Mary, she has lots of new, choice, family-unfriendly words to say about this time around. More from her on that to come, too.

I figured why not celebrate such a life-changing announcement by completely redoing the look and layout of the blog. I picked something sorta autumnal for the color scheme, so this blog may have mood colors for a while until we settle on something we like.

I also wanted to do something to keep the quality of the site ever-improving for the growing numbers of visitors, both those of you who have been so nice, insightful, and supportive of us as well as those who just lurk (which is fine!). At the top of the page, you’ll see a tab that takes you to a collection of links and resources related to all the things we talk about here in the Flashlight Universe. Go check out those links! We have much more to add, but it’s a start.

We also have lots more new stuff planned, so stay tuned. As the wise man said, “Business is about to pick up.” More soon!

Just for fun, we’ll leave you with what I think may be the best commercial ever.

[Update - The point of all this is now explained here.]

Boy do we have all sorts of crazy excitement about to land on our blog soon. There’s a blog redesign, new links and resources pages, a couple of what I think are exciting product reviews (working on some freebies and discounts for readers too), more about autism and presidential candidates than you probably care to read, some explanation of why we’ve been posting a bit less frequently lately, me running in and doing a photo diary of a 5K autism fundraiser in a yet-to-be-designed ridiculous costume, and…

[Cue dramatic music - dun, dun, dun!]

… a twist that will change this blog forever.

I may be known as Captain Hyperbole (it’s at least a billion trillion times worse than I thought!), but in this case, I’m not exaggerating one bit.

Stay tuned!

I’m contemplating a variety of improvements to our blog, though given that we’re parents first and everything else second, time is always scarce. So I’m seeking input from you all on what you’d like to see more of, what you think would make the site more enjoyable and easier to use, and whatever else you can think of.

The good news is that we have a good chance at 2,000 pageviews for the month. Considering that just coming to the site and reading the many articles on the insanely long front page counts as only 1 pageview, this ain’t bad. Given that we’ve only been at this four months and haven’t done squat to publicize the site, I feel good about how that’s going. Word-of-mouth and Google have been good to us. Thanks!

We have some brilliant, regular commenters and some great people who haven’t commented but have e-mailed us directly. We’ve met some fantastic people, and I hope we’ve provided some useful information to our readers in return. We’ve definitely discovered some helpful resources from you all. We’ve even had a guest poster. How cool is that!

All that is to say, we’re growing, and with a growing readership comes a sense that we need to - you know - actually find out what our readers want. Please leave your suggestions as comments here or you can e-mail us at info [(at)] bothandsandaflashlight $dot% com. (pseudo-spam-inhibiting format - obviously format it as a real address)

Here’s what I know I’m going to do as soon as I have some time.

• Create a comprehensive list of helpful links, categorized in some way. (autism, speech, sensory issues, technology, etc.) The blogroll will become the place for kindred blogs and sites, so if you have a site related to the kinds of things we discuss here and you want to exchange links, just e-mail and ask.
• Create a suggested reading list that will cover the helpful resources we’ve discovered, and we read a LOT so this should be a useful list.
• Put together an actual description, with photos, of the home classroom we put together and the rationale behind the design.
• I plan to remove the categories list (on the right) in favor of the tag cloud, which is way more comprehensive in scope. I could be talked out of this though if people use the categories.

Here’s what I’m debating about. This is where you come in. We’d love your input on these.

• Straightforward vote - Are posts too long, about right, or too short?
• Changing the front page (and the archive pages) to where what you see are article summaries (first three paragraphs or so) with a link to the full article. This hopefully will make the site easier to scan, especially since the articles are typically long. If people like reading everything straight through without clicking off to read a full article, I may not do this.
• Making it easier to find specific topics. There are a zillion ways to do this. The “Most Popular Posts” area has been a hit. The problem is that it’s self-fulling - the posts listed there will get visited more often, so they stay on the list forever. I have some ideas, but would love any comments you have, especially if you run your own blog.
• Finding more guest posters. Gigi’s IEP post came out very well in my opinion, and a good number of people read it. Since our revenue (ha!) is less than zero, the only reward you would get for an article is the warm, fuzzy feeling of bettering humanity or something (well, you could pimp your own site too). If you’re interested in writing something, please let us know.
• Blogging more about what’s going on in the autism world outside of the four walls of our house. We talk about ourselves a lot and little about what’s happening in the rest of the autisti-verse, which we do keep up on quite religiously. I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time so we’ll try to do both.

Also, are there topics you’d like to see us do more of? It’s been very interesting reading through the search terms people use to get here. (Don’t worry. We don’t - and can’t - get any personal information about you at all.) That’s given us ideas for what people are looking for.

However, there are topics we won’t discuss any time soon, if ever. Vaccines and ‘cures’ are two of them, and we will only venture into causes with extreme care. These discussions are covered at great length elsewhere and frankly are outside the scope of our plans for this site. We’ll discuss treatments we use, but take it as a given that we’ll talk about what does and doesn’t work for us and only us. You have to research and figure out what works best for you and your child.

OK, that was a lot of meta stuff, but the point is that we really want to provide a resource that’s helpful for people and fun for us to do. If you have suggestions on how we can do that better, let us know. Thanks!

In our continuing work to make your time here at Chez Flashlight more informative and enjoyable, we’ve implemented a few new features to help our growing (!!) readership.

Today we added the following new stuff for y’all to play with. We’d love to hear whether it works or doesn’t for you. As always, please share your feedback with us on this or anything else.

• “Some similar posts” - If you open an individual post or just happen to arrive here that way, at the end of the post you’ll see a “Some similar posts” list that shows five topics the blog software thinks are most related to the topic you’re reading. I haven’t played around with this enough to see whether I agree with it, but so far it looks pretty good. I realize navigating a blog can get annoying fast, so I hope this helps some.

  If you’re reading along on the main page and want to open an individual topic’s page, click a post’s title or click the link at the bottom of the post that says how many comments that post has (e.g., “2 Comments”).

• Most Popular Posts - On the left side of the page below the Recent Posts is the “Most Popular Posts” (of all-time!!) list. When you read an individual topic, you’re giving it a vote (more or less). This doesn’t require any action on your part beyond that. This will keep posts people like from falling off the front page.
• Sign up to receive notice of new comments - When you leave a comment, you should see a little check box below the comment box. If you check it, it will notify you by e-mail when follow-up comments are made to that post.
• ShareThis - The ShareThis button will allow you to bookmark the topic in every conceivable social bookmarking system you can think of. You can also use it to e-mail a post to someone you know or love (or both).

If you’re new here, don’t forget the keyword Tag Cloud near the top-right if you’re looking for something in particular. You can, of course, always use the Search box for that, too.

There’s also the Categories list, but I’m pondering removing it as the Tag Cloud covers things in greater depth. The Cloud is uglier than Barney’s incarcerated second cousin, but I’ll work on it.

Please subscribe to our feed through FeedBurner to get the latest and greatest of everything our opposable thumbs can come up with.

Future improvements in the works include a much more comprehensive set of links to sites that have helped us with researching and better understanding autism, speech delays and speech therapy, occupational therapy, educational/behavioral therapies, etc. We’re also working on a reading list of books we’ve discovered that have really helped us out and a glossary page because some stuff we post here I know goes over the heads of some readers new to the jargony world of autism.

We also have oddles of exciting posts planned for the next few weeks. We’re plunging headlong into IEP Days, so you get to walk through it with us. Plus, I’m about done with the home schoolroom to complement J-Man’s therapy work when he’s not at school or with a therapist. Lots of news on that front.

All this and more, coming soon to Both Hands and a Flashlight! Huzzah!

I set it up so you can subscribe to our blog through FeedBurner. My main reason for the change was to give people a bunch more subscription options and to give me a better way of tracking blog traffic. I’ve been using Google Analytics, which is good for what it does. The old feed address should (hopefully) still work, and if you don’t feel like making the change, no worries at all. I also set it up to work through Technorati, but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to use that yet.

“Does that mean you’re spying on me?!?!”

While it may fill my ego to know we have a growing number of readers, I’m mostly interested in what posts people in general are reading and what search engine terms are used to get here. This helps us get a feel for what people want to know more about.

(BTW - Nothing we see personally identifies you in any way except for whatever you decide to post in a comment. We intentionally set this up so people could be as anonymous as they wanted to be.)

On top of autism-related search terms, we’ve had a lot of hits on speech issues, fish oil, apraxia, and other things related to late talking or non-verbal children. The picture board/PECS discussion was a hit based on visits and searches. Sensory issues are also popular search terms.

Knowing these sorts of things will help us anticipate the kinds of information you’re looking for, and we’ll try to plan future posts accordingly. That won’t stop us from blogging about whatever the heck we feel like blogging about a good chunk of the time, but we are a community of parents who just want to learn how best to help our children. If we can help keep the conversation going, we’ve fulfilled one of our biggest goals.

What I find particularly poignant are the numbers of searches that lead people to us that clearly involve parents just trying to figure out what the hell is going on with their children. I read the aggregated list from Google - which includes words like “flapping arms” and “doesn’t respond to name” - and think, “there are a lot of scared, confused, stressed-out parents out there, and I’m one of them.”

We’ve already (electronically) met some of our readers and those conversations have meant a lot to us. We invite you to say hi and let us know if you have questions. We can be a little slow to respond depending on how crazy things are at The Flashlight House, so we’ll apologize in advance for that.

Again, thanks for reading. Y’all are great!