Blogging and writing can be just like work and other academic endeavors in that you need to have a good working environment. It’s hard to be creative and get your thoughts out if you’re being distracted, are uncomfortable, or can’t concentrate. If you’ve been having problems getting your thoughts transposed to the keyboard lately, maybe try some of the following:
- Get comfortable - go curl up on the couch or in the easy chair. Take your laptop outside, or maybe find a quieter, more private place to try and type.
- Set the mood - personally, I usually enjoy a little music while I’m working and am in the zone. If you don’t have any mp3s or CDs on you, there are definitely some good places to stream music on the net. If you have a decent internet connection check out last.fm, pandora, or any of the other streaming radio stations out there.
- Acquire a beverage - sometimes a tall glass of your favorite beverage or a snack can help get you going.
- Take a break - sometimes now just isn’t a good time to accomplish your goals. If you have some ideas, jot down a few notes, save as draft and come back later.
These are just a few ideas. Let us know if you have any more.
Have you ever wanted to add a poll to your sidebar, page or post? We’re trying out a new polling feature. Let us know what you think of it. Multiple answers are allowed. If you choose “other”, please leave a comment and let us know what that is.
Loading ...
As Tara mention earlier, I’ve been using mojoBlog for a Joomla blogging tool. So far I’ve been really enjoying it. The tool is basically a stripped down version of Wordpress. I don’t have all the features, plugins, or template options, but it’s eons better than trying to use the Joomla content system for blogging. The only real modification I made was to go into the template and modify the RSS links in the footer section. They’re setup to go to the default feeds, I wanted to redirect them to my feedburner links.
Supposedly you’re supposed to be able to bring in some Wordpress plugins and whathaveyou. There’s a disclaimer saying some will work and some won’t. I’ve only tried one plugin and it didn’t work. I’d be interested to hear if anybody has successfully installed anything.
I’m not anywhere near into photos and photography as Tara and Smitty are, but occasionally I do post a picture or two. Since I’m not a “photo person”, I don’t have any fancy software to crop, edit, or tweak any of the pictures I might have. Two freebies I wanted to mention to you are Irfanview and Picnik.
Irfanview is something I’ve been using for probably three years or so. It’s a great tool for easily cropping, resizing, resampling, reducing red-eye, etc. Another great feature is that you can do batch processes on any folder or group of files. So anything you do on one, like changing to grayscale for example, can be done to any number of photos with just a couple clicks. Renaming can also be done with the batch tool which can be very handy when standardizing a bunch of files that have crazy names from a camera, scanner, etc.
Picnik is a tool I just learned about last week. It’s similar to Irfanview in that’s it’s free and easy to use. This one is web based and I think the interface is much more simple to use. For my “day job” I train faculty and brainy people with PhDs how to do things on computers. We’re always trying to find simple, easy-to-use tools and applications for them to use. These are two we’ve had success with, and I’m sure you’ll find easy to use as well.
This post isn’t so much a tip, trick, or idea, but a call for help. I was using PodPress for a short while on my personal movie blog and it did some funny things to the RSS feed. The one thing I was most unhappy with was it changed the author on every post to something default and not of my choosing. After uninstalling the plugin and upgrading Wordpress to 2.5.1, my feed still looks like it did when PodPress was installed. Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this? I thought upgrading Wordpress would have fixed that, but maybe it’s something in the database.
The reason I want the author field fixed in the feed is because it’s a multi-author blog and people deserve credit for their stuff. Also, I don’t like what it automatically put in there on its own.
blog - http://branfeld.com/movies
forum post on wordpress.org
Since Nathan wrote up a review for us in Wordpress 2.5 brings some fresh air, we have since then upgraded this site and have been using 2.5 ourselves. I have to say I’m really enjoying it. I was a little skeptical at first, and even had a bad experience updating a personal blog, but I’m still really enjoying it.
With the interface being totally re-worked, it might take some time getting used to where things are. The good part is that this will be much easier to figure out than Office 2007. More pertinent information is shown with a lot less clutter. I think this has to be much more easier for non-technical people to use.
Updates are one thing that have always been a hassle, but there is now a built-in feature to upgrade your plugins. All you have to know is your FTP information to allow Wordpress to upload the files for you. Another big improvement are the media features. You can now easily insert images, video, and audio to a post. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m imagining this will make podcasting much easier.
On more awesome thing I wanted to point out is the fact that nothing has visibly changed from the reader’s perspective. Usually an upgrade of these proportions would render themes and plugins obsolete. Maybe we just picked a good template to use, but I really appreciated how we didn’t have to re-work our blogs just to be functional with the version upgrade.
If you’re a current Wordpress user I’d highly suggest upgrading if you haven’t already. If you need any help, feel free to ask and we’ll try to point you in the right direction.
Personal Saviors or Angels of Death?
I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Automated things are just so easy and great to use, right? Well, sometimes. If they truly are all they’re cracked up to be, they’ve usually gone through some heavy testing, usage, and many revisions. This past week I decided I was finally going to upgrade to the new version of Wordpress on my personal blogs. I also decided to try out this nifty updater plugin they were promoting.
I first tried it out on my personal blog, ran into a lot of permission issues, and gave up. Then I played around with it some more, and gave up again. Fast-forward a few days and I decided to give it a third try, cause that’s the one that’s always supposed to work. This time I decided to try it out on my movie blog. Same problems, yet this iteration I did a little homework and tried changing some permissions around. I eventually got to the very end of the installation, but had pages and pages of errors and my blog didn’t work…at all. Part of the updating process was to create a backup. I tried to open these files and could not because Microsoft Windows had deemed them to be unsafe.
By this time I’m sure you can image my frustration and annoyance at my self-perceived stupidity at 1)trusting an auto-updater to fix my blog, 2)not doing my own backup, and 3)not trying this out on something I don’t care about. I think it’s fair to say I’m above-average when it comes to technical things, but I don’t have that much experience troubleshooting web issues. I’m going to have to recommend most of you bloggers out there avoid this upgrader unless you’re very comfortable with file permissions, and tracking down errors within specific lines of PHP code. Even if you are comfortable doing that kind of stuff, is it really worth the risk of having to spend the time on it?
I’m sure some of your are like me and have moved, or attempted to move, from one blogging tool to another. I started off with good ol Blogger before it was bought out by Google. I wasn’t too hip on Blogger Beta when they were making the changes so I decided to bite the bullet and figure out Wordpress. Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress is a mostly smooth transition, however, one thing I immediately noticed was my permalinks weren’t quite the same. Then I found a plugin to help me fix that.
Justinsomnia.org has created a plugin called wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks. Pretty self explanatory, right? Just download, install, and click a button in your settings. Not much else you have to do.
Recent Comments