Author: Nadreck

Osho: Being in Love

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person – without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other. Osho, Being In Love (via [an errant gallifreyan]).

Ira Glass: Creative Work

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. Ira Glass

The Gift of Dyslexia

When someone masters something, it becomes a part of that person. It becomes part of the individual’s thought and creative process. It adds the quality of its essence to all subsequent thought and creativity of the individual. Ronald D. Davis, The Gift of Dyslexia

Utah Phillips on Work

That’s when [Fry Pan Jack] told me – you know, he’d been tramping since 1927 – he said, “I told myself in ’27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work.” Hah! You don’t have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, “I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it’s true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?” Fat chance! Utah Phillips

Two Content Columns, No Sidebar

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is no sidebar on this site. (The closest we come are the widget space in the footer.) Instead, we’ve got an extra wide window, with two columns of content. This was something that grew out of sitting in the Post Formats session at WordCamp Portland 2011 (liveblog transcript found here and here). Basically, post formats allow you to format different types of posts in different ways (similar to how Tumblr works).

If you are already sorting content by type, why not take it a step further and sort content within the page layout as well? For me, it made the most sense to sort my content into long-form and short-form sections. That way, no matter how many links or tweets I post, longer articles still get the time and attention I’d like to afford them, despite being more infrequent.

The process of doing this wasn’t too bad in execution, though I did end up spending a long time exploring the WP_Query entry on the WordPress Codex, since I’ve not done much query tweaking in the past. Basically, I tweaked the CSS of the page to be wider tweaked, the div this template wraps the sidebar in to be wider, then commented out the sidebar itself. Then I made two queries, one for each column. The second column simply searches for the last 20 posts in either the “aside” format, the “status” format, or the “link” format (basically all posts that should never be more than, say, a short paragraph). The first column searches for the last 10 posts that AREN’T in “aside”, “status”, or “link”. This was necessary because “standard” posts have no searchable post-format slug to query against. Simple, eh?