Jerry D. Russell dot Com

I was discussing politics earlier with fellow bloggers and I just can’t seem to get a few notions out of my head.  There are things that have bothered me for years and they are the reasons I rarely ever discuss politics with anyone.  I just leave the conversation feeling like I’m going to be ill. I have to get a few of them off my chest.

So if you will please allow me my non-partisan and entirely personally fueled rant, we can get back to what’s important…

…The blogger steps up on his apple box…

To both of our Presidential candidates.  I don’t care which one of you wins this race.  I could give a rat’s behind what your age, color or religious denomination might be. I don’t care if you like broccoli or not.  I will never lose sleep over your gender, sexual preference, sexual prowess or lack thereof. There are just a few things that I would like to see happen in my lifetime, which they tell me is going to be longer than any generation’s before mine.

So if I could take a few minutes of your time, these are the things that I think you should address over the next four years:

[Read the rest of this entry...]

If you’re like me and rarely read the Google AdSense TOS updates, you may have missed the new(ish) policy stating that all sites running AdSense ads must have a publicly displayed privacy policy.  As far as I know, Google hasn’t kicked anyone out of the program for not having one yet, but hey, who wants to be the first?

Not feeling particularly interested in writing a privacy policy page?  Neither was I.  Luckily, Serp Rank has the answer for us lazy types, or just those of us who can’t afford an attorney to write these things up for us.

Just pop over to the SerpRank Adsense Privacy Policy Generator and you’ll have yourself a privacy policy page in no time.  It may take a bit of tweaking if you use services that aren’t on their list, but it’s a small effort to modify a tiny bit of text, and you’ll never have to hire that lawyer.

Unless you get in some kind of trouble, that is…

If you’ve ever come off the tail end of a project that has taken an extended amount of time, it’s possible that you have found yourself staring blankly at your monitor and wondering “what do I do next?”

This is a completely understandable reaction.  Think about it, you’ve just singlemindedly poured your creative heart and soul into something for a month or more. Immediately turning your attention to something else will more than likely be difficult at best.

If this has ever happened to you, let me offer you a solution.   Clean your space and take a few days off. If you’re working for someone else, the second part of that equation may be a bit difficult to manage, but cleaning up your space should still be at the top of your priority list.

Long projects tend to build a lot of desktop clutter as well as mental clutter. Unless you are totally paperless in your working life, you’ll have scribbles of notes, scraps of research, printouts and assorted other “stuff” that ended up sitting on your desk while things were unfolding.  Take the time to go through all of these things.  File what you need and toss what you don’t.  Wipe down your desk and surrounding areas.  Make sure the trash is out.  Make a clean space for a clean start on the next project, it will help you focus on what needs to be done, rather than what you’ve been doing for the past several weeks.

The same goes for your computer. If you’ve been dropping links, photos or documents on your computer’s desktop for easy reference while you were working on that last project, now is the time to move them to a permanent spot on your hard drive or send them off to the recycle bin.  Leaving these items out where they can distract you serves no purpose once the project has been completed.

Once you’ve tidied up your workspace, walk away from it.  If you have the luxury of making your own hours as I do, take a few days off. Use the time you’ve earned to read a good book, catch up on your new favorite video game, plan to take over Chicago using just the resources you can find inside the city or perhaps get ready for that all-too-imminent zombie infestation.  Take a cue from the girl pictured at the top of this article and go have a long conversation with an old friend, even if it’s by phone, in the park or over coffee. Whatever you do, don’t go sit at your desk and stare at your monitor.

If you work for someone else, get up and take a quick stroll around the office.  Check in on a few coworkers or chat with someone in the office you may not know all that well yet. Sort through the inevitable folder of forwarded jokes and chain email to see if there really is something funny in all of that chaff.  But take a break from whatever is next on the list if it is at all possible.

These breaks will help you to be far more productive when you do get back to your normal routine just as much as a clean workspace will.  They are necessary to help achieve focus and keep you motivated to complete the task at hand.  Push too hard and you’re headed for what we in the freelance industry lovingly call a burnout, when we’re speaking in polite terms, that is.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve known people who can keep dogging away at project after project for a very long time before they suffer from burnout.  Unfortunately these people are not the norm.  If your mind is tired, your work will suffer and so will your productivity, especially after a very involved project that has taken a lot of time to complete.

Another way to combat this type of mental fatigue is to constantly flip between projects, never allowing yourself to become buried in one thing or another.  This helps to keep the mind fresh and moving freely from idea to idea.  This kind of mental exercise takes a bit of practice, but it can be a life saver if one project is threatening to fry what’s left of your grey matter.

I hope that these ideas prove helpful to you the next time you’re ending one project and moving on to the next.  If so, drop me a comment and let me know!

This is the third in a series of articles that will cover making several modifications to the Mimbo 2.2 Theme by Darren Hoyt.  I am modifying the theme to fit the requirements for my own site.  To see the first step requirements and get an overview of what I have planned, please read The first article in the series; Modifying Mimbo 2.2: Step One - Identifying Requirements. For the methods used to modify the way the theme handles output in various places, check the second article in the series; Modifying Mimbo 2.2: Step Two - Modifying index.php. This article focuses on modifying the way Mimbo pulls images for the lead and secondary articles on the main page.

Darren Hoyt's Excellent Mimbo Theme

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, I wanted to change the way Mimbo handles it’s images to better suit my work flow.  By default, mimbo stores it’s main page images under the theme folder in a folder named (appropriately enough) images.  Using this method requires that the user has to find an alternate method of uploading his or her image files, which to me is counter-intuitive.  My solution is to store the images in the standard WordPress manner and upload them using the “Add media” dialog.

This might sound inefficient, but for me, the ability to simply paste the image url into the proper custom field makes things much more pleasant, especially when I’m trying to get several posts knocked out in one session.

The default Mimbo code for the “Featured” image is as follows:

<?php
// this is where the Lead Story module begins
   query_posts('showposts=1&cat=3'); ?>

    " alt="" id="leadpic" />


    

The important piece of code in this instance is in the image call where Mimbo’s creator hard coded the image location:

< img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/<?php
// this is where the Lead Story image gets printed

by simply removing the hard coded file location, we can now add our images in the normal way and simply paste the url into the custom fields we’ve created to handle them. In my case these fields were lead_image and secondary_image respectively.

That’s as simple as it gets, script kiddies! with just a few tweaks, you can easily take Mimbo from this:

Darren Hoyt's Excellent Mimbo Theme

To this:

Pretty nifty, huh?

If you’re thinking to yourself… “Hey, there are a LOT of modifications here!” You would be absolutely correct.  Unfortunately these are out of the scope of what I set out to do here, and I’m not going to get into them. Truth be told, I didn’t do anything that difficult, even for a WordPress theme novice.  All of the information you need to get the job done is in the WordPress Codex or on various sites areound the Internet.  There really is no reason for me to go over them again.  I’ll leave it up to you as an excercise in coding.

I do hope that some of the information provided here proves useful to someone.  If so, drop me a comment and let me know!

Happy Coding!

The last time you heard something similar to the title of this article may have been in high school, but if you think for a moment that it doesn’t apply to your blog as well, you had better think again. The language you use when publishing blog posts may very well be a factor in readers deciding to add your blog to their feed reader, or just moving on to another blog and leaving yours in the dust for good.

I have written in the past on this very topic on another of my blogs and I have tried to follow my own example.  Unfortunately, it seems that I have fallen into the same sort of writing malaise that plagues a large part of blogs that are “almost good”.

I forget that I must always.  ALWAYS. Proof-read my work before I publish it.

Why am I writing this now?  Because It was very recently brought to my attention that I had been breaking my own rules.  In my rush to get my ideas posted, I had neglected to read over my own work and check for simple errors in both spelling and grammar.  This omission did not go unnoticed nor will it ever, in my opinion.

The person that brought this to my attention may or may not have been aware that I have already stated the very same thing in regards to other people.  She may not have had the slightest idea that her comment would make me feel like a complete hack, unable to practice what I preach but rather adopting a “do as I say and not as I do” attitude, whether intentional or not.  No matter whether she was aware of it or not, I feel that I have let both myself and my readers down and this disturbs me greatly.

Why would I be disturbed by a typo or two?  The answer is simple really.  If I let one or two go through today, the same will happen tomorrow.  Eventually this piece of collective work we call a blog would be nothing but a collection of laughably incompetent chaff that no one in their right mind would take seriously.  This is of course not what I’m after, especially in this particular instance.

The thing is, I know what I’m talking about.  I research my subject matter.  I move with all due diligence to assure that what i am presenting is, to the best of my knowledge and ability, a complete overview of a given topic.  To allow a lapse in writing etiquette make something I may have worked for several weeks to finish look amateurish is simple foolishness.  It should not happen. But yet it has, even though I have spell checking running in my browser and grammar checking in my word processor.  And the errors do not lie with the tools, they lie with the user.

They almost always do.

So far this article has been pointed at my recent shortcomings.  This is not to say that I think that I am the only one guilty of failing to do some simple proofreading.  Most blogs have one or more typos.  To be honest, there aren’t too many books that have ever been published without a few errors in their pages.  This is not due to any lack of effort by production staffs or copy editors, it is simply human error.  It happens.

I’m also not trying to say that you can’t have an extremely popular blog if you don’t use perfect grammar and composition.  As a case in point, take a look at PerezHilton.com.  The writing is a combination of traditional and leet (L33t) speak, with more than a smattering of completely made up words tossed in for fun.  The result: Somewhere between 650,000 and 1,000,000 visits per day. But Perez is not writing a site that is supposed to make him sound like an expert on a given subject.  He simply reports snippets of news, most of which is aimed at an audience that spends much of its time texting other members about what they’ve just read. If he was attempting to write about “How to be a celebrity blogger”, his site would reek of inexperience by virtue of language alone.

You must know your audience and what they expect.  One of the best ways to gauge this is to look at the most popular blogs in your own niche and study them carefully.  If you find that the language, grammar and cadence of these blogs is informal, then by all means be informal.  If, in the case of blogs on this topic, you find that writing styles tend towards the formal and that spelling and grammar are attended to as a rule, then it best serves both you and your audience to follow along in that style.  It’s what your readers expect, and that should be what you, as an author, are striving to give them.

Another good rule of thumb is that you should never. Ever. Ignore criticism.

It may be that some critiques of your work do not require your attention but in most cases they do at least deserve your notice.  There is a rule in large corporations that for every complaint that is actually submitted, there are at least a hundred people who feel the same way that did not bother to take the time to tell you.  They simply move on to another provider.  It’s a good rule to keep in mind.

So to the person who let me know in no uncertain terms that my oversights in spelling and grammar had cost me her loyalty, I thank you.  Even though you will probably not be around to see the changes in my work ethic, I think that future readers will appreciate that I have taken your words to heart.  I will strive to do better.  It’s all I can do.

To the others out there who are doing their best to make a buck out of this internet thing.  make sure you pay attention to spell check.  Write your piece and walk away for a few hours.  Then read over it to make sure there is nothing you’ve missed.  It’s what I’ll be doing from now on.

I’m Jerry D. Russell, and I approve this message.