Category Archives: Blog

PAD 5/7/2013 – Key Takeaway

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Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging.

If you’re a new blogger, what’s one question you’d like to ask other bloggers?

The best advice I can give is to be honest but have control over what you say. Honesty is the best policy, as the old adage is fond of saying and it keeps blogging simple as you don’t need to remember any lies you’ve written in order to keep your blog internally consistent. However, honesty has it’s limits, and that has more to do with sharing and privacy. Depending on why you blog, sometimes you may find yourself wanting to write about something private. I think that assigning posts passwords is a great feature to WordPress and makes sharing securable.

Some things are worth talking about, writing about. Some things you share aren’t really meant for your coworkers of your employer and then the best policy here is to slap a password on the posts and keep them private from wandering eyes.

There are a lot of great reasons too, to blog independently from WordPress.com. Having control over your content, not having to worry about quotas or paying for extra services all make self-hosting with WordPress.org really worth it in the long run, especially with the right hosting provider. I’ve found a lot of the plugins that enrich the self-hosted option of WordPress.org makes the product really shine. Here are some things to look into if you think blogging may be for you:

1. Fixing your .htaccess file on your blog. This can be configured to restrict your blog from foreign browsers. I’ve decided to ban entire countries from reading my blog mostly because I don’t agree with their politics, and in the case of China, I’ve gotten quite tired of comment spam. By limiting incoming traffic from browsers using this file, you can preclude them from ever being a problem. Just because the Internet is global doesn’t mean that you should feel forced to respect that globality.

2. Blacklist & IP Filter – These two plugins help identify unwanted IP addresses that are unwanted on your blog and the plugin IP Filter helps you block those with more configurability than you can get with .htaccess.

3. Akismet and Jetpack really help protect and extend your blog. Every blog I host has these two plugins and once you get them configured properly they add so many wonderful features to your blog that it’s difficult to imagine using the blogs without them.

4. PhotoDropper – This plugin makes searching for and inserting pictures in your blog posts a cakewalk. It takes care of searching for the terms you want, only shows you Creative Commons licensed imagery so you don’t accidentally run afoul of image copyright holders and automatically includes credit lines to your posts to help respect the people who are sharing the imagery you are using on your blog. It’s about as turnkey as I’ve been able to find when it comes to finding and crediting blog pictures that I use to enrich my blog posts.

Beyond plugins it’s also worth it to mention AgileTortiose’s iOS app Drafts. This app makes writing anything, journal entires, emails, and blog posts a snap. You can update on any connected device until you are ready and the destination selector feature makes pushing your updates out to various service a snap. I journal with DayOne and I post to WordPress using Poster. Drafts has options for these other apps and a dizzying array of more just for the tapping.

Use Drafts, Dumbass!

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Turns out blogging with the iPhone has a hidden trap. Turn the phone to landscape orientation and you run the risk of accidentally sending your blog post and then you have to mop up in the WordPress app. Duuuur.

Then you remember you have Drafts app and smack your forehead with how dumb you were in not using it in the first place!

Fixed that… ;)

PAD 4/13/2013 – Charitable

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PAD 4/13/2013

Daily Prompt: Charitable
by michelle w.
You’ve inherited $5 million, with instructions that you must give it all away — but you can choose any organizations you like to be the beneficiaries. Where does the money go?

The money would not go to any charitable organization. I find the notion of charitable organizations to be inherently wasteful with overhead. Everyone gets a cut of the money and when the funds get to the people with the need, after everyone has their piece of the action there isn’t much left. I’ve thought of this before, and the best thing I can think of is to better lives and keep them that way with an eye to permanence. To that end, the best destination for money like this is to create trusts for people, lock the principal money off and only allow those whom I bestow with the benefits access to the interest earned from the principal fund. This as a permanent thing wouldn’t be wise either, so I would put a 30 year timing lock on the principal, after 30 years the entire principal becomes available to the beneficiary, hopefully by then they have enough wisdom to not squander it.

Plus a construct like this helps fend off the law of found money. If all you get is a constant trickle then the law may not notice you and you likely won’t suffer for the gift. That’s the double-edged sword of giving. The law of found money punishes everyone.

PAD 4/10/2013 – Imperfection

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PAD 4/10/2013

Daily Prompt: Imperfection
by michelle w.
Imperfections — in things, in people, in places — add character to life. Tell us about an imperfection that you cherish.

Imperfections abound. I can’t help but wax philosophical as it was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this particular prompt. Which imperfection do I find the most valuable? Our imperfect understanding of the Universe. Yes, as I said, it’s huge and bold and monumental. If we knew exactly how the Wizard did what he did behind the curtain would life be as rich as is it for us now? Not knowing everything keeps room for the mysteries alive. There are so many little mysteries that would wither and die if we had the keys to the Grand Unified Theory. If we could explain everything then there would be no room for fancy and imagination. Sometimes I think that there really isn’t a Grand Unified Theory, because the Universe loathes certainty. If there is no room for gnomes, dwarves, manitou, brownies, or fairies then there is no room for beauty and who would want to live in a world like that? I suppose it’s the romantic part of me that rejects the notion of the Universe as a marvelously complicated clockwork. If we could pin down a Grand Unified Theory then we could exorcise randomness from everything. How agonizingly banal would it be when we had a rule that fit every single observation perfectly? Sometimes I think that if there is a God, he’s spending his time keeping us guessing because that’s how he expresses his love for us. Keeping us on our toes, always guessing, always learning, always marveling at the mysteries that lay before us, in a way, our imperfect understanding is the fertile soil of the true beauty we are seeking. A wild and wonderful world where the rules are just beyond our grasp constantly challenges and enjoins us to engage with it. That striving for the Grand Unified Theory is actually our goal, not actually attaining it, but pursuing it. Endlessly.

It’s important for it to be this way, where else could the fairies go if it wasn’t?

PAD 3/13/2013 – “I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

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PAD 3/13/2013 – Silver Screen

Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!

“I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

Without a doubt my favorite movie of all time is Airplane. Anyone who knows me really should watch and learn because that movie is one of the best and funniest movies that has ever been made. There are so many kinds of comedy expressed in that movie that it makes me giggle uncontrollably even just recalling some of them. The quote from Lloyd Bridges, playing McCroskey is just one of many, but it’s one of the most useful especially for me at work. There are times when work tries me so much that the escalating substance abuse lines that McCroskey says during the movie accurately reflect much of my emotional state of disbelief that I endure while at work. Whenever I’m feeling down, or when happiness just seems a little out of reach I’ll play this movie for myself and I always feel so much better afterwards.

I wrote before about how blogging is kind of like therapy. So are the movies, especially this movie. The ability to laugh is essential and laughter is much like a hug from a loved one. To quote one of the best lines from one of my favorite TV series, which is Pushing Daisies, a hug is like an emotional heimlich maneuver. It grabs you and helps you eject awful feelings and makes life better. Laughing while hugging? Why, yes! Better than any drug!

PAD 4/4/2013 – The Transporter

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Tell us about a sensation — a taste, a smell, a piece of music — that transports you back to childhood.

I’ve written about nostalgia before. The scent of WD-40 enables me to recall my very early life, when I was about five years old. The scent of this product is indelibly linked with my maternal grandfather and every time I catch it’s scent a part of my consciousness returns back to when I was five, sitting in my grandfathers lap playing with his miniature train set that was set up in his root cellar. It’s quite difficult for me to access those memories without WD-40, so it’s become a part of a ritual when I use WD-40. I always find time when I have to use WD-40 to dwell on the unlocked memories and in a way, bring my long passed on grandfather back to me now. In many ways, the people that we loved and lost are always with us, in this limited way. I suppose in one way of considering it, it’s through WD-40 that my grandfather has a rough semblance of immortality, at least in my consciousness.

There are also other strong memories, but they are linked to places and mundane situations by exceptional events. I remember, for example, exactly where I was and what I was feeling and seeing when the Challenger accident occurred as well as when the 9/11/2001 event occurred. They are unremarkable memories only made important because of their bound events keeping them “alive” in my memory. Not really worth writing about, at least not in the context of WD-40 and my grandfather.

PAD 4/16/2013 – Million Dollar Question

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Why do you blog?

I enjoy blogging because it provides me a way to share more, which has become after a manner of speaking, somewhat of a therapy for me. I can express thoughts and feelings and that’s the primary thing, that they are shared actually is quite incidental. If I have readers, then I have readers and if not, that’s just as acceptable to me. I feel like these posts are letters that I write, and the writing itself helps me explore my feelings and in some cases helps me vent my frustrations, and then I leave the open letters just lying around for others to gander at if they so desire. Before the advent of social networking I used to blog on LiveJournal and there was a vibrant community and I had friends there that would comment on my blog posts. Alas, time and conditions change and LiveJournal is no longer appropriate for me nor is it a place that I feel safe to share my thoughts or feelings. WordPress, a much better platform for writing actually wasn’t such a great move because the community on WordPress is absent. I got to wondering why I wasn’t getting anything but spam comments on my WordPress blog and it struck me that people have organically decided to move their commenting to the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. That’s where all the comments are to my WordPress blog posts. Twitter is dead to me, I pretty much just link dump there. Facebook is only slightly more useful and I haven’t posted on Google Plus without the aid of a “oh yeah, hit the Google Plus option…” in about a year.

It’s actually quite fine because comments actually aren’t why I blog. Over time I came to understand that on some social networking systems the only people who I would find willing to engage with me were people who were trolls – making obtuse obnoxious comments just to get a rise out of me. That’s when I learned that in some situations the best retort to a trollish comment is to not make one at all. So the absence of comments actually became a blessed silence. Trolls ruined it for everyone, and once you go without that sort of engagement, the experience does actually improve.

There are things that I write that aren’t meant for open-letter-on-the-table distribution. Those I put passwords on and only hand that password out to people whom I value enough to trust with everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not to say that if I don’t share the password with someone means I don’t value them as much as the others, it’s just that I write some things that I feel I should protect the people who do not have the password from having to be exposed to. Usually the password protected posts are written in times of distress, and it’s better this way for everyone – those who know and those who do not.

In general the platform on which I blog, which used to be WordPress.com and now is WordPress.org is a tale all to itself. I used to make heavy use of WordPress.com until I ran afoul of one of their well-meaning automatic protection systems that ended up accidentally censoring one of my blogs. It was a misunderstanding and a poorly designed automatic system that led to the falling out, but I no longer trust WordPress.com with my blog. In many ways, the shift to WordPress.org, self-hosted, became more important to me in terms of control and liberty to write what I truly think and feel. I am no longer beholden to a company like Automattic with risking my thoughts and feelings, instead, it’s all on my own recognizance. I thank Automattic for contributing to WordPress.org, and for me it’s the perfect combination of power and liberty.

So in a way, all these posts amount to cheap therapy. One of the added values is that I won’t fall in love with my therapist. In some ways, therapy this way is ideal. I can be brutally honest with an absence of someone than I ever could if there really was someone there playing that role. If nothing more, therapy with an absent therapist is wholly more hygienic and extremely more convenient. As a value added extra, these blog posts also get added to my Day One Journal, so at the end of my life, I won’t have to worry about encroaching Alzheimers or senility robbing me of my memories, all the very best will be written down. For someone who will die childless, this is my bid for some form of immortality.

PAD 3/21/2013 – Bedtime Stories

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What was your favorite book as a child? Did it influence the person you are now?

I can't really remember which book was my favorite when I was growing up, but when I first saw this PAD and started trying to remember, the book that came to mind was this one: Mr. Chatterbox

So, I'll just leave this PAD here, and let people who know me bask in the perfection of my choice from my past. As for whether or not it influenced me as an adult, again, just going to leave it here. LOL

PAD March 14th 2013 – 180

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Tell us about a time you did a 180 — changed your views on something, reversed a decision, or acted in a way you ordinarily don’t.

That sort of altering of viewpoint, after a long time considering if something like that had actually happened to me and coming up blank initially makes me think that I’ve never done that sort of thing. My beliefs are quite entrenched, I’m quite certain of my positions and my opinions. Anyone who knows me knows that of what I speak passionately about I am determined in and if I am not, I rarely speak of it. It’s better to listen if you aren’t sure than to speak out of a position of personal doubt. There just isn’t any passion in doubt. If you aren’t sure about what you think then how can you put any energy behind it? Passionate thinking goes hand in hand with what I consider to be critical thinking. Can it truly be said to be critical if you can’t be passionate about it? I suppose I am too much my Mothers son, I think I learned my views on passionate discourse from her as a role-model for not bandying around the bush. If you feel something, then be out with it, don’t let it just fester in the dark.

Often times at work I get the phrase “Oh Andy, tell us how you really feel!” thrown at me. I knock those lobbed bastards right out of the park with a home-run whack with my bat. Damn right I’m going to tell you how I really feel! Anything else would be dissembling, tantamount to a lie and do a disservice to whomever I’m speaking with as well as to my very own self. As such, I am functionally retarded when it comes to flirting, subtext, and innuendo. I accept a life of blunt honesty over the dubious sea of gray foam that is subtext, subtlety, and innuendo. Don’t try to play hinting games with me, walk up and say what you think and how you feel. Be honest, be direct, be blunt. Time is precious, don’t be a foolish putz.

So there.

PAD 4/17/2013 – Unknown Caller

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You receive a call from someone an unexpected person. Who is it, and what is the conversation about? Go!

This happens to me more frequently than I care for. My work number is identical, if you transpose two numbers in the exchange part of the number with the city jail. I get at least two calls a week from random citizens of Kalamazoo asking about hours, or the status of someone in detention. I always take the high road and tell them that they have misdialed and reached Western.

I want to, I won't, but I want to pull a horrible prank on these wrong callers. “Yes, when is John Doe getting out of jail?” and my response should be “Oh, John Doe you say? We're going to hang him in Bronson Park at Noon today. Thanks!” and hang up.

Much like Johnny unplugging the landing strip lights in Airplane! or pulling the fire alarm paddle at work, it's something you secretly want to do but never will because you just aren't that bad :)

Lesson here? Be careful how you dial the damned telephone! :)