Category: Publishing

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What causes writer’s block?

For me, writer’s block is caused by deadlines. I would like to take time for a lengthy post relating the weekend visit by the extended family, the birthday celebrations, the pains, the miracles, and so forth that transpired over the past few days. Unfortunately, I have work that must get done. My mentally and physically exhausted body failed to wake at the crack of dawn which is when I often let my creative writing out.

My writer’s block is not due to a lack of words but due to a lack of minutes in the day. My podcasting block is due to a need to purchase a hard drive (and preferably a digital recorder).

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Can you resist the urge to type a url into your browser?

Can you watch this video and not type the url into the browser to see what comes up? No. I didn’t think you could resist. Me neither.

Note: If the words penis or fart causes your work censor alarms to go off, then this Saturday Night Live video may not be work safe but then again this post didn’t get through either. Thank you Victor Agreda for the link!

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How do you get work done with all this blogging?

People occasionally question the amount time I waste on blogging and how it affects my productivity. First off, I advocate blogging as a means of professional improvement. I do not view any blogging as a waste. Blogging encourages research, citing of references, learning, exercising vocabulary and grammar skills, and recording of history via journaling. Blogging also polishes my technical side as I use CSS, obscure HTML, play with template designs and php code that I may not have the luxury of experimenting with on a client’s site, and use of tools which catch my xhtml errors causing me to be a better all around coder. Blogging and social networks build connections between other professionals and myself. Since I work alone in a basement, these connections are as valuable to me as the group of people someone else may work with in an office environment.

When do you find the time to blog? I blog on my breaks. Some people take smoke breaks. I take writing breaks. When I am getting the children ready for school in the morning, I cannot settle into coding but I can type out a few sentences of a post. Sometimes I do not finish the post and save it as a draft for later. I have 274 drafts of incomplete posts. This post has been sitting around since November 2, 2007 almost complete. At any time, I can change most of those into a published post within minutes. When my muse hits, say on the weekend, I may write a week’s worth of posts and schedule a couple of day for the next seven days. I had two posts publish today while I worked. They even surprised me! I have one scheduled for tomorrow that was written over the weekend.

A blog makes the reader feel they know the writer intimately; however, those words may be fiction or non-fiction, and the picture may be incomplete. The blogger may not be sharing the pain and trauma in their lives. The blogger may talk about the coolio new gadget in the house while concealing the fact that they had to hock a wedding ring and get food from Fish. In the same way, posts may publish on this blog that give the impression more time was spent on creative writing on a particular day than really happened.

Please enjoy reading Reality Me! If I do work for you, know that my duties come first, writing second.

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Video Comments Now Allowed

Thanks to the power of Seesmic, you can now comment on any Reality Me post by simply using your webcam. Below the regular comment box, you will find a link "add a video comment"
Video comment
If you have a Seesmic account, you can log in and post a video. I have also opened comments up for anonymous comments which means you don’t have to have a Seesmic account. Try it out! You will be prompted to allow the plug to use your webcam and nothing gets installed on your computer. I have heard that there may be a problem with the video commenting and WordPress 2.5.1 but I am sure that will be addressed rapidly.

Update: If you add Seesmic video comments to your blog, be sure to immediately add yourself to the wiki. It takes only seconds. I could have been within the first 100 but ended up being like 187 because I waited to look at the wiki.

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Import from iWeb to WordPress

I helped Chris the Carpenter and Kari the Herbalist set up YurtTrash and The Lifted Lorax Show recently. They were using iWeb and importing to WordPress did not look promising. Fortunately, they decided against importing so I ceased seeking out a solution or writing one myself. Melinda has asked about the solution for importing from iWeb to WordPress. Luckily, Dan of MaciVerse wrote an excellent guide on March 8, 2008 How To: Import your iWeb Blog to WordPress. Since MaciVerse is down right now, I am reproducing his entire post (minus pictures) for prosperity:

Update: Looks like MaciVerse is back up. I just caught caught it during Maciverse’s face lift.

Continue reading Import from iWeb to WordPress

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Blogfest was a blast!

Rich pulled together another great gathering of great minds. Hopefully Lissa will have the official round up. You know..my beer damaged brain keeps wanting to introduce her as Leesuh but her name is Lihsuh. I’m so sorry!

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In attendance were Cathy (minus business cards…sorry), Rich, Lissa, Tommy, Victor Agrenda (Knoxvillians probably want to read him here), Joseph Agreda, Frank Murphy (and son), Jon Katsiros, and a friend of Jon’s (sorry..I missed their sites). Michael Silence had planned to attend but something must have come up. Apologies if I left anyone out.

We secured a large space of the absolutely packed (and valet parked) Wild Wing’s Cafe. Now we probably overstayed our welcome. Little note to management, simply asking if we could free the table would be better than slowly turning up the radio. When the radio didn’t run us off, they turned the televisions to a ball game at LOUD volume. As we left, the TVs suddenly quieted. That was funny! The venue was nice but I think we are still looking for the ideal spot which combines fun, food, adult beverages but child friendly (I suppose that’s optional), wifi, and the ability to socialize.

What happens at a Blogfest? We get to see the faces behind the words we read in feed. Of course as video and audio become more prominent by citizen journalist publishings that statement loses some of its oompfth. Still, nothing compares to the energy and dynamics of real life conversation which is what I believe Loic Le Meur (Whoa! He’s my younger brother’s age!) is attempting to duplicate with Seesmic. New ideas are generated, laughs, laughs and more laughs, food is consumed and beverages, economic and social boundaries are breached bringing people in different walks of life and opposing political views together on common ground, introductions are made and new readers created in this pioneering land of blog. Overall, good times are had. Of course, I miss seeing Randy Neal, Dr. Helen, and the blogfather himself, Glenn Reynolds at the table. Lookout Glenn! You’ve just been RealityMeAlanched! And yes, to all those I didn’t name, I missed you too!

Oh, one, is that Sylar?! (Sylar’s IMDB) And, two, my wife thought one of the guys in attendance had "really sexy eyes."

Other Blogfests:

Update: Lissa posts about A Wild Blogfest and Rich has his wrap up. Frank has posted blogic: the gathering and Tommy put down a few sentences. Cathy talks about the restrooms at Wild Wings Cafe.

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WordPress 2.5 post by email broken

Yesterday when Comcast was down for scheduled maintenance I tried to blog it by sending an email from my phone to Reality Me via a secret email that WordPress checks once an hour. I actually sent two posts via email and neither were ever seen on the blog. I just found both the posts with a "pending review" status. This seems to be a new behavior in WordPress 2.5 and not a feature that I like. There does not appear to be a setting that allows me to change this behavior. Perhaps it is my turn to write a plugin.

I think having the ability to post by email when I cannot otherwise reach the blog is a powerful feature. Having the post hidden from publication by slapping it into a pending review status makes posting by email a bit useless, at least for my purposes.

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New York Times Pwns Bloggers

Let’s knock out some buzz words: new media, blogger, msm, social media, old media. The future of the New York Times, and other traditional papers, is shaky at the moment.

…its financial performance is lagging. NYT Co.’s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002…The Wall Street consensus is that the company will report net income of $290 million for 2004, down 4% from the preceding year and a good 35% below the $445 million it netted in the media industry boom year of 2001. Revenues have plateaued at $3 billion, give or take a few hundred million, for five years running. [Source, BusinessWeek, The Future Of The New York Times]

With newspaper circulations down, the newspaper companies are in a panic and looking for someone to blame. The finger most frequently gets pointed at bloggers, citizen journalists who write without the impedance of an editor nor the accountability of a professional journalist and who are able to get the news out (accurate or not) in seconds from the scene as eye witnesses. Blaming bloggers is simply a red herring.

The root problems go back to the late 1940s, when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop. But for years the U.S. population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and then, after 1970, remained stable. That changed in 1990 when circulation began to decline in absolute numbers. [Source, The State of the News Media 2004]

1940 predates the modern Internet and 1990 predates the blogging boom. But since The New York Times is convinced that bloggers are partially responsible for subscription decline (and that may very well be accurate!), they devised a way to get some of that traffic back…they published an article about how detrimental blogging is to health! They even attributed a 41 year old’s heart attack to blogging. Now that should scare the competition away! Bloggers jumped on this story! Writers like my wife, Michael Silence, and Dr. Helen all chimed in and linked to the story. It spread like wildfire through the blogosphere with each blogger adding their opinion and interesting commentary. Now I respect each of these bloggers and enjoyed reading their take on the NYT‘s article, but I’m going to call it like I see it. In a stroke of marketing genius, you were link baited by The New York Times! Which I’d say is quite an honor!

Is blogging stressful? I suppose if you were relying on it for your income it would be. But if you are a hobbyist who posts between tasks rather than taking smoke breaks (which is how I blog), there should be no stress in this diversion. I do find blogging stressful when I have deadlines because I know my clients read my blog and each post could look like I am playing instead of working (which is not the case). So for me, the stress is in wanting to post but not give the wrong impression to those people to whom I have professional obligations.

Others who took the NYT’s bait:

Whew! The list goes on. I just can’t keep up.

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Cathy recognized by Alltop

Featured in AlltopI think Cathy’s writing is fantastic but I happen to be biased. I find Domestic Psychology a pleasure to read (again with the bias). I am tickled to announce that Cathy has been recognized by Guy Kawasaki and has joined the likes of Jack Lail in Alltop! Cathy is in the Alltop Life category along with some familiar blogs such as xkcd.com, indexed and Sarcomical. Congratulations to Cathy! (Does this mean I don’t have to program anymore?)