Diabetes Thought For the Day

The topic of the last day of Diabetes Blog Week is My Favorite Things, meaning what has moved me the most during the week.

This was the first time ever I attended the Diabetes Blog Week. One important thing for me was that the week pushed me to write and get my thoughts out. Too many times in the past I've drafted something but never quite finished with the writing. It really helps to have a schedule. I didn't manage to post on Saturday, but don't feel too bad about it.

What's a lot more important is that the through the Diabetes Blog Week I found dozens of new interesting diabetes blogs, and gained an incredible amount of new diabetes wisdom. However, during the week I only managed to read a few percentages of the total blog posts listed. I really want to create a habit of reading more of these blog posts.

What's key when creating a habit, provided motivation is there already? We need to make it simpler to take that action. So, to make it as easy as possible to read new blog posts, I decided to create a simple web page that takes me to a new blog each time I visit it. It would not be that complicated to navigate to the Diabetes Blog Week pages, select a topic, and a new blog from there. However, I didn't believe I'd be able to make that sequence of actions into habit, and wanted to make it even simpler.

Originally, I considered a service that would take me through the blog posts one by one, in the order they were entered in Diabetes Blog Week, topic by topic. Then I thought it could be more fun if there be some randomness in the process. So instead, the service I created now randomly selects one of the posts entered so far. I've bookmarked that page, and just now made it my home page, so whenever I'm going online, I'll always have new diabetes reading available. You can do that too. The address is:

sensotrend.com/ThoughtForTheDay

It only took an hour to set this up. Honestly, writing this blog post took more effort. Here again, I think the main point was to keep it simple. In the future, I might include filters to search posts about certain tags or topics. I also may add posts from previous blog weeks, or add a user interface for bloggers to add their content to the service manually. Or anything any of you may think of, that would add value to the service. But first, let's see if this raises any interest.

Many thanks everyone for the amazing week! And a special thank you to Karen for organizing it all!

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http://www.bittersweetdiabetes.com/2014/05/diabetes-blog-week.html