Author: Nadreck

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?

Sherry Turkle on Social Media

Social media, for all of it’s bounties—and I’m very enthusiastic of all the bounties of social media—it also gives us an opportunity to hide. We perform ourselves on social media, and that is different from being ourselves on social media. That ability to perform yourself is also an ability to hide. It leads to something that I call “Fear of missing out.” You’re always watching what other people are doing and you begin to be jealous because they’re showing their best selves and you’re showing your best self. You almost become jealous of the life you live on Facebook. You have to remind yourself that it’s your life because you’re showing your best self. Sherry Turkle

Twitter Archiving on WordPress

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yahoo Pipes.

There are a few different backup services that allow for backing up your twitter feed. You may or may not be aware, but it’s actually rather difficult to back up and archive your tweets, if you have passed a certain threshold in number and age (the magic number currently being 3200 tweets). If by some miracle, you manage to get a more complete archive (I signed up with BackupMyTweets a while back, and they managed to go all the way back as near as I can tell), there is then the task of figuring out what to DO with those archives.

Personally, I wanted to put them into a WordPress install, and then use a plugin to keep it up to date going forward, because I’m a fan of a consolidated media identity (come to one place, which I manage, and get all the data you want or need). The problem was that while BackupMyTweets had all my tweets backed up, their download options left something to be desired (PDF, CSV, XML, and JSON, none of which in formats that could be easily imported into WP). I could have used a different service, like TweetBackup, but they were limited by the 3200 tweet cap, and thus it wouldn’t be all of my tweets. If I was going to bother doing this consolidation, I wanted to do it ONCE, and I wanted it to be as complete as possible.

I spent some time doing research into this problem, and wasn’t really happy with any of the solutions. I’m not really a programmer, and so the notion of writing a perl or python script to parse the archive xml format into what wordpress needs seemed daunting and unreasonable. Ultimately, I discovered a really simple and easy solution: Yahoo Pipes. If you haven’t played with this service before, I highly recommend it — it’s not really doing anything a good programmer (or even scripter) couldn’t do, but it takes a lot of the pain out of that process and gives you a visual method to track all the transformations and parsing you might be applying. Case in point, I’ve put together a CSV to RSS converter that takes the Twitter CSV archive from BackupMyTweets, and parses it into an RSS feed that I could then import into WordPress. The end result: a blog with ~4200 one-line posts.

A few caveats:

  • If you are going to use this method, be sure to set the default category to “tweets” (or wherever else you plan to put them) BEFORE you run the importer.
  • You may need to break your RSS feed into multiple files, as there is a database timeout that you might run into otherwise.
  • Titles on tweets are kind of silly. I recommend using a theme that supports the “status” post format and removes the titles for status posts.

If you want to check out the pipe I made, it can be found here. It’s pretty simple: pull from a csv file stashed on a site, map the columns to the correct fields in a “Create RSS” widget, do something to solve the “what should the title be on a tweet” question (I did a truncated version of the tweet), output the result.

Indie Web Wishlist

I’d like to self-host everything, and then broadcast those materials out to the relevant locations (rather than vice versa). With that in mind, these are my wish list services I want to replicate in a self-host+broadcast method:

  • Status Updates — broadcast automagically to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+, including long-form article notification
  • Gallery (media management) — with broadcasting to 500px and flickr.
  • Bookmarking — with broadcasting to delicious and google bookmarks
  • Identity management — tracking what services I’m connected to, with notes as to which are broadcast TO, and which are still broadcast FROM (plus aggregation of all these services into one self-hosted spot wherever possible)

WordCamp Portland 2011 (part 2)

Day 2! To clarify on two items on the schedule: custom post types is for when you’re doing CMS-level work such as tracking items in a store. Post Formats is more towards end-users, a new feature that allows you to tell WordPress to format different types of posts (standard post, aside, image, etc) in different ways.

Also, there’s a local wordpress user group here in Portland that meets monthly.

Also, there’s a “happiness table” with WordPress experts offering to answer questions you have.

Also, there’s a job board for folks looking for blogging related work.

Also, thanks to the sponsors and volunteers!

Jane Wells @ Automattic: What’s Coming in WordPress 3.3 and Town Hall Q&A:

  • Jane is one of the UX folks working on WordPress core
  • A bit of background: Jane’s first wordcamp was Wordcamp Portland, where she showcased the changes in WordPress 2.7, and is now showing the changes in 3.3
  • wpdevel.wordpress.com is the officially wordpress developer blog.
  • New in 3.3: the sidebar navigation now has menus rather than having to click into sub-menus.
  • More work in the admin bar, making it useful to connect the front end and the back end.
  • Improving the help menus (more readable, more relevant).
  • Improving the widget screen for larger screens.
  • Improving tablet support for the backend (not targeting phones yet, that’s a whole other kettle of fish)
  • In general going for a more responsive design.
  • Take a cue from gmail and similar, there will be hinting calling out new features.
  • Image handling is MUCH IMPROVED, using a new uploader.
  • Media management revamp is still not done, though. Some minor changes, but not the big one.
  • Inline feature update log (not ready yet, but being worked on), so you can see the changes in the latest version of WP.
  • New User “Welcome” to help new users with a lot of the initial defaults — most users don’t really do an exhaustive search of the admin panel to learn how to change defaults.
  • A quick call-out: there is a setting theme developers can add to a theme to tell the editor to respect the settings of your theme (fonts, line width, etc.), if you want your editor to act more “WYSIWYG”
  • Question came up about styling per post from someone still using tables for layout: You need to learn CSS. At this point, if you don’t know CSS, your HTML is almost worthless. (Preach it!)
  • Development: they tend to test features as a plugin, then if that goes well, patch it into core.
  • Question about the file url setting in the media uploader: they’ve got “none”, but the point of the attachment url and post url is workflow (attachment url is basically to have a smaller shot that links to a larger image; post url is useful for when you want to keep images skinned to your blog, not just the image).
  • Request: better PDF uploading support? Agreed, it would be great, but it hasn’t been a priority since there are other ways to upload PDFs.
  • Random anecdote: one of the reasons for the UI refresh in 3.2: when they were at SXSW, they saw a preview of the new blogger UI, and the new blogger post screen looked just like the old UI for WordPress. This has/had been happening a lot, so they decided it was time to prioritize the planned refresh. (This is anecdotal, not some sort of official reasoning.)
  • Feature scope for a new version is generally decided communally on an IRC channel, and the public are welcome to chime in.
  • Request: that the wpdevel blog gets more usage (used to be more active).
  • Favorite feature .com has that .org does not: email subscriptions (even has jabber support)! Also, automatic twitter/social media broadcasting.

Oh no, Voodoo Doughnuts delayed again! Hopefully after the next session.

Blogging/Content Productivity: How do you write? Workflow? Tools? Discussion of EditFlow:

  • General discussion session, asking about productivity and any tips and tricks and tools people have.
  • Example workflow: text editor, keep a file of drafts sync’d on Dropbox, so you can write from anywhere, and uses markdown.
  • [Personally, I’m curious on Scrivener for this.]
  • Idea to Draft to Post: the amount of time can vary wildly. Sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s weeks or months (or it stalls and is years).
  • Pinboard: similar to Delicious but not slowly dying (oh snap!). Useful for collected link posts.
  • EditFlow demo: grew out of a desire to manage and track external workflows across multiple people and projects.
  • Able to bring in a lot of that workflow into WordPress.
  • Features like custom statuses (“waiting for feedback” etc, instead of just “posted” or “draft”)
  • [This sounds like a godsend for a group blog/e-magazine, though I’m not sure how useful it would be for single user blogs.]
  • Calendar tools for viewing a story queue for scheduled stories/posts.
  • Also story budget tracking.
  • Editorial metadata (due date, location, photographer, needs, contact info, et cetera)
  • Looking for feedback from people willing to road test this plugin.
  • (Now they’re explaining a bit about how this could be useful as a one or two person blog vs a large team.)
  • As a single user, one of the big useful features is tracking drafts more efficiently. Custom statuses, and queues.
  • This actually makes a lot of sense: custom status of “pitch” for a trackable one-line pitch of your idea. Then maybe you have 20 minutes later, so you outline it, and then save it as “outline”. A few weeks later you have time and energy for writing a long form post, you then filter for outlines, and can immediately get to what you want. (Nice.)
  • The calendar view is also useful as a single user because it provides a visual tool to view when you’re actually posting — as was pointed out in the keynote, steady, consistent posting is the key to growing a readership, and this makes it easier to see this.
  • Request: showing due dates on the calendar: Developer: Check back next week, next version! (Yay for responsive developers, we’ll see if he was tongue-in-cheek.)
  • Request: Color-coding statuses. It’s possible easily enough (each post is wrapped in a status-specific class on the post list page in WP, already), just hasn’t been worked out yet.
  • Request: usage statistics (so you can see how many words you wrote through all revisions, and time tracking).
  • Request: RSS feeds to track status updates on posts (pitch to outline, outline to draft, etc).
  • Recommendation: using the new fullscreen feature in WP is great for no-distractions.
  • A lot of folks still use offline text editors for various reasons (I use Scrivener for long-form for the research note-taking, others use Evernote).
  • One thing currently lacking in EditFlow is documentation, and they’re going to work on that.
  • For EditFlow: treat it as a supplement to project management tools, not a replacement.
  • There isn’t a clear answer as to how to keep motivated for blogging. There’s two camps: those that push a schedule for a rhythm; and those that push the notion that “people share your content because it’s awesome, not because it was posted on Wednesday”. [Personally, I feel like it’s a mixture of the two: if you aren’t posting regularly, you don’t get the audience. If you aren’t posting quality content, you don’t retain the audience and they don’t share your content.]
  • Suggestion: go read Caterina Fake’s post FOMO and Social Media
  • It’s easy to get caught up in the noise: follow the people who are important to you and are consistently rewarding: if it’s actually important, it’ll still come up on your radar. The result is more signal, less noise, and clearer topics for writing.

Post Formats: Using Your Blog to Write About Anything:

  • Presented by Andrew Spittle (@andrewspittle), who works as a happiness engineer for Automattic.
  • Post Formats are a way in wordpress of designating a little bit of metadata about a post, so you can customize how different types of content is displayed.
  • Really simple, but requires your theme supports it (but is easy for a theme to add, and a lot are adding them). (Just add a easily cut-and-pasteable function into functions.php.)
  • Nine formats supported: aside, link, status, standard, gallery, image, video, chat, audio
  • Formats are not currently extendable (these 9 are what there are), because they wanted standardization on them so themes could more easily support the options.
  • [Personally, I’d love to see a twitter plugin that pulls and archives tweets as status-format posts.]
  • Post formats are easily re-skinnable.
  • The design can fit your content, without having to come up with one universal format. Different types of content have different needs.
  • Useful suggestion: tie post formats into categories, so users can quickly see all (for instance) images, or galleries, or quotes.
  • If you’re trying to convince your authors, show a site that is already using it, and then point out how easy it is to add by showing the “format” section within a “Create Post” page.
  • The big “shift” in using post formats is that blogging becomes more about what you want to share, rather than just “oh I need to write something now.”
  • One flaw to post formats is that it comes down to each theme as to what formats are supported. (The bright side is the content is still there, you just lose that custom formatting if you switch to a theme without that format support.)
  • Post format is a meta field in the database, so it’s persistent (if you set it to audio, then switch to another theme that doesn’t support audio, then switch to another theme that DOES have audio support, WP will still remember that it was set as an audio format before)
  • Changes to the “create post” page based on the post format is being discussed, but not implemented yet (and probably won’t be for a while, as it’s a BIG change, and they want to make sure they do it right). [This would be a great feature, imho. If I post a quote, I don’t need a title, I need a field for the quote, and a field for citation.]
  • You can’t currently filter your posts list (on the backend) by format, so also using them as categories seems like a good option (most useful if you’re not actively using categories for something else already).
  • A number of the themes in the Theme Showcase on wordpress already support post formats. (And all the free themes on wordpress.com are in a public repository in the SVN.) Just do a search with a filter for post formats.
  • [I’m pretty excited about post formats. It’s one of the things I like most about tumblr, and I’m glad to see that functionality in a self-hosted option.]

(Yay doughnuts!)

Adding Video/Audio/Animation to Your Blog:

  • Leader didn’t show up. Awwww.

And that wraps up WordCamp Portland 2011! (Since my last session aborted, I opted to skip out a little early and missed the wrap-up.) Thanks again to all the organizers and presenters, it was a lot of fun, and I was glad to be able to make it to the event.