Alex Zorach on Wizzley

I'm Alex Zorach.  I like to think of myself as someone who questions things and puts a lot of thought into how I live my life.

I'm very interested in promoting respectful dialogue between people with diverse viewpoints.  I believe that diversity of ideas is important both in reaching truth, and in solving problems.  This philosophy is evident in Why This Way, a group I co-founded in January of 2012, which brings together people with different belief systems to build a consensus-based system of beliefs and practices and an organization to support it.

I'm very interested in food and drink across the board, but particularly in tea.  I am the founder and editor of RateTea, an online community where anyone can rate and review teas, but I'm also very interested in cooking and I love eating out in cheap ethnic restaurants.

Another hobby of mine is birdwatching.  I am an active bird surveyor for eBird, a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society.  I also am an active swing dancer; I dance regularly at Lindy and Blues in Philadelphia, as well as at the University of Delaware's swing club.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of self-publishing websites, and I have experimented with quite a few of them.  Wizzley is not the biggest or most extensive of them, so why did I pick this particular one?  I have three compelling reasons:

• Higher editorial standards - The #1 reason I avoid publishing online on self-publishing sites like article directories is a lack of editorial oversight.  When a site becomes overrun with spam or low-quality pages, the site's reputation and domain authority plummet.  It makes the site look bad.  I was drawn to Wizzley by their higher standards.  These standards are also reflected in a more active, supportive community relative to the site's small size.
• Well-designed, responsive site - Wizzley is exceptionally well-designed.  The layout is clean and professional looking, the site is easy to use and edit, and the site's features are highly responsive.  Compared to Squidoo, I find it takes me considerably less time to work with articles on Wizzley, and I spend more time writing and less time waiting for modules to save and fidgeting with things.
• Responsive site admin - Wizzley is much more responsive than most other sites in terms of the site administrator responding to comments, bug reports, and the like.  The site is clearly under oversight, and it shows: I have encountered very few bugs using this site, even though it is quite young, relative to other sites that I have seen have a more persistent problem with bugs.

I still like publishing on other sites too, like Squidoo, but I have become a big fan of Wizzley.

I have a number of blogs, some of which are more active than others.  These include:

Tea Blogs:

• Teacology - Teacology is a newer blog that, as its name suggests, focuses on the intersection of tea and ecology, which I sometimes present as "Tea, with an ecological flavor."  This blog updates infrequently, but I put great care into posts.
• Spontaneitea - My newest tea blog, Spontaneitea is a place for casual musings about tea.
• Alex Zorach's Tea Blog - My old tea blog, quite active for several years, but no longer being actively updated, this blog has hundreds of posts, some of which are quite detailed.  I am leaving it up in the hope that people will continue to find the older posts useful and interesting.

Other Blogs:

• Cazort on Tumblr - I created this blog mainly to have a presence on Tumblr, a site that I see as having growing importance, especially for a younger demographic.  I occasionally post more casual and spontaneous posts here, on a wide variety of topics, as I feel inspired.
• Alex Zorach's Blog of World Changing Ideas - This blog focuses on a sort of unorthodox activism.  Each blog post is inspired by a problem or problems I see in the world around me, and I write each post with an eye towards giving constructive courses of action that people reading the post can take with them to help contribute to a solution.  The blog is often political but the political perspective is decisively non-partisan, and I make a great effort to integrate both stereotypically liberal and conservative perspectives, as well as including quite a few ideas that do not fit into either of these boxes.
• Cazort's Livejournal of Sorcery - My oldest blog, from before the days in which people widely used the word "blog", this journal started out as a personal journal, but nowadays it has become more of a dream journal, which I infrequently update with some of my more amusing dreams, and analyses thereof.

Some of the other sites where you can find my writings include:

• ratetea on Squidoo - On Squidoo I publish primarily about tea, but occasionally about other topics, under the screenname "ratetea".  It is through Squidoo that I learned of Wizzley.
• Alex Zorach on EzineArticles - I used to publish more actively on EzineArticles, the leading article directory, but I have not been actively publishing there as much lately.  I have over a hundred articles published there, again primarily about tea.
• Alex Zorach on Galoor - Galoor is a new article directory based on higher editorial standards; I've only recently begun to publish on the site, but I find it very promising and encourage other people interested in publishing on sites to promote external websites to check it out.  It's a place for people who want tougher standards to keep out spam, and in this respect, it's a lot like Wizzley.

I've experimented with numerous other article directories and self-publishing sites, but these are the only ones that I have continued to have a good experience with, and the only ones I would currently recommend.  I'm always open to new suggestions though if you have any!