The Happiness Project is such a wonderful idea for a blog – spend a year test-driving principles, tips, theories, scientific studies on how to be happier from Aristotle to Oprah and record the resulting insights on a blog. Fortunately, it’s not only a good idea – it’s well executed. The blog has been going since January and looks like making its target for a year of daily posts on happiness.

The blog’s writer Gretchen Rubin has a great personal story. She used to be a lawyer but she discovered that her true calling is writing and she now has four published books to her name (including Forty Ways to Look at JFK and Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide). Through the blog, she has discovered that she is also a happiness evangelist and she encourages everyone to have their own Happiness Project. 

A great idea that we all can do for ourselves, is that she has spelt out her guiding forces:

Role models: Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson
Mission: Be happier now.
Motto: Do good, feel good.
Symbol: Bluebird
Patron Saint: Saint Therese of Lisieux
The Two Splendid Truths:
1. To be happier, think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. 
2. One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

This information doesn’t need to be made public (that’s your choice!) but taped up somewhere you can see it from your work desk or first thing in the morning is a brilliant way of keeping on your path which is well known for making us feel happier.

The Happiness Project is on the TypePad platform and Gretchen has made good use of her sidebar to put lots of interesting content for her readers. In the sidebar, Gretchen includes her goals for each month and her twelve commandments (you can do the same using TypeLists in TypePad)

Another nice feature of the blog is that every Wednesday, she gives out a tip for happiness like 10 tips for being happier which includes this really counter-intuitive but completely accurate advice (if you want to read a whole book on this concept, have a look at Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less):

7. Don’t insist on the best.
There are two types of decision makers. Satisficers (yes, satisficers) make a decision once their criteria are met. When they find the hotel or the pasta sauce that has the qualities they want, they’re satisfied. Maximizers want to make the best possible decision. Even if they see a bicycle or a backpack that meets their requirements, they can’t make a decision until they’ve examined every option. Satisficers tend to be happier than maximizers. Maximizers expend more time and energy reaching decisions, and they’re often anxious about their choices. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Another great post is Nine helpful yet REALISTIC tips, one favourite tip being:

9. Remember my Eighth Commandment and “Identify the problem.” This sounds so obvious, but it’s astonishingly helpful. For example, I like to work in coffee shops, and for years, and I mean years, I spent a lot of time running out of battery power and chasing around looking for someplace to plug in my laptop. Then I asked myself: “What’s the problem?” Answer: “I need more battery power.” Light dawned. I could buy an extra battery! I did, and it gave me a huge boost in productivity.

So check out the Happiness Project and make your day happier!

Like TypeLists in TypePad, Photo Albums can be used by multiple blogs. You’ll find that Photo Albums have their own tab, select it.

Creating a New Photo Album

You will then find your albums listed. As we don’t have any yet, there’s none. To create a new album click on “Create a new Photo Album”

You will then get the option to give the photo album a name. It will automatically create a folder name to house the photos and will serve as part of your photo album’s web address – you can edit this if you want. When you’re happy with the names, click on “Create New Photo Album”.

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TypePad Lists or TypeLists as they are known, make it fun and easy to create lists of things (which then can be used on your blog).

If you want to create a TypeList, you are creating a separate entity that doesn’t belong to any one blog. This is because any one TypeList can be used by multiple blogs if you so wish. 

Look for the TypeLists tab and select it.

Creating a TypeList

Click on the “Create a new TypeList” link.

Select the one that is best suited to your list type and give it a list name.

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A pretty neat feature in TypePad is that you can do a search and replace across your whole blog. This is really handy if you have a bad habit of misspelling something! But it has no “undo” function so it needs to be operated with care.

First, we’ll have a look at how to do a search of your blog.

Searching through posts and pages in TypePad

In the “Manage” tab of your blog, you’ll notice a search bar in the upper right hand corner. This is available whether you’re listing posts, pages, comments or trackbacks but it disappears once you are in the “Compose” tab.

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As TypePad is also your hosting service, it is also their job to make backups of your data in case anything happens to their servers, but you should always have your own backup copy JUST IN CASE.

Make a habit of doing a regular backup – at the very least, once a week. The best habit is to create a backup after you have added a new blog post or page. Back ups are part of your blog insurance.

If you do any big changes to your blog, it’s a good idea to create a backup first.

You can also use your back up to export your TypePad blog to another service (the instructions will depend on which service, you’re exporting to).

TypePad Backups

It’s important to note that TypePad only backs up the text of your blog posts so it doesn’t back up posts and it doesn’t back up images – so make sure you keep a copy of any images you upload to your blog and any pages.

To make a back up, click on the Import/Export link in the Manage tab.

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