An Eclectic Mind

Here are a few links I found interesting on September 30, 2008:

• Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - An interesting take on a possible solution for the current financial crisis. On CNN.com.
• On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor - A detailed discussion of this plot contrivance from the original Star Wars.
• David Weinberger: Top 10 Reasons Sarah Palin Cancels the Debate - THIS is funny.
• Latest Palin Gaffe: Can't Name Supreme Court Case Other Than Roe V. Wade - I don't understand this. Don't they realize that you need to know more about the U.S. and world than a 5th Grader to be the vice president?
• Aeronet Bandwidth Speed Test - Yet another bandwidth speed test.
• Dictionary.hm - Excellent Ajax-based dictionary. Type in a word and the definition appears automatically.
• New York City Walk - This photographer walked every single street in Manhattan and took photos along the way. This site has the maps and photos. Good quality stuff.
• Running the Numbers - Photographer Chris Jordan turns cold, hard stats into provocative statements on economics, culture, and the American way of life.
• Concerns About Palin’s Readiness as a Big Test Nears - Reality is apparently FINALLY setting in — even many Palin "fans" can't deny how unprepared and uninformed she looked in her three interviews. The debate should make things clearer. On NYTimes.com.
• Internet Curmudgeon - Scott McNulty shines a light on the absurdity of "social media consultants" and other modern idiocies. On the BlankBaby blog.

For those who might be interested.

I’ve made a few minor tweaks to this blog recently. Thought I’d take a moment to point them all out.

Tag Implementation

I’ve begun assigning tags to posts on the site. In WordPress, tags are similar to categories in that they enable a blogger to categorize the content of a post. I never used them before because I thought having categories was enough. But I’ve recently discovered two things:

• Tagging posts helps make them rank better in Google. (Please don’t ask for a link to the article where I read that; I don’t have it.)
• Tagging posts offers additional ways to organize them without having dozens of categories.

Implementing the tag feature isn’t an easy task for me. Sure, it’s easy enough on a go-forward basis. But this blog has over 1,500 posts. To truly implement tags, I need to go back and add tags to all the previous posts. I’ve been doing that, little by little, and hope to be finished by the end of the week.

The main benefit of my tagging efforts to blog readers is that they can more easily find posts that cover topics of interest to them. This is implemented two ways:

• In each post’s header, you’ll find a “Tagged:” heading, followed by a list of tags applied to that post. Each tag is a link; click the link to display a posts with that tag applied. Here’s an example of a post heading:
  
• In the sidebar, you’ll find a tag cloud. This is a really cool feature of WordPress that displays tags in an alphabetical list, with each tag’s font size corresponding to how often it’s used in this blog. Here’s a screen shot of the tag cloud as it exists right now. (Remember, only about 200 posts have been tagged so far.)

Category Name Changes

I’m always tweaking the names of categories, although I haven’t done it for a while. This week, I made three category name changes:

• Recipes has become I Cook, Too. I made this change so I could add a recipes tag.
• Writing has become The Writing Life. This change was completed primarily so I could have a separate writing tag.
• Twitter has become Social Networking. I made this change so the category could cover all posts about all kinds of social networking. Twitter has become a tag.

I’ll probably make a few more category name changes in the coming months for pretty much the same reasons. I just need to come up with catchy category names, which is often a challenge for me.

Interesting Links

Those of you who have been visiting this site regularly for some time may remember my link posts. They were automated through a feature on the del.icio.us Web site. I’d bookmark interesting pages on my Delicious account and the links would be automatically accumulated and posted nightly. I set this up in 2006 and it ran pretty well until recently, when changes to either Delicious or WordPress broke it.

I recently discovered a WordPress plugin called Postalicious. This plugin replicates the functionality of the Delicious feature that broke. The result is the daily (or almost daily) Interesting Links posts you find on the site. They’re all posted to the This Just In… category and are tagged links. You can browse all of my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/mlanger.

If you’re a Delicious user, I urge you to bookmark the blog posts on this site that you like. Not only does this help spread the word about the content here, but it helps me identify the content that readers enjoy reading most. You’ll find an Add to delicious link at the bottom of each post.

Polls

The Polls feature stopped working. I don’t know why. I’ve removed the poll from the sidebar and may remove the remaining polls if I can’t figure out how to resolve the problem.

New Link Categories

I added a few new link categories and placed them on the right sidebar. One of them is called On Politics and includes links of interest to U.S. voters this election year.

I urge all Americans who are eligible to vote to do so.

Here are a few links I found interesting on September 29, 2008:

• McCain takes credit for bill before it loses - Classic: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked. By Mike Allen on Politico.com.
• 28 Excellent Free Mac Apps for Graphic and Web designers - Information with screenshots and summaries about free applications of interest to Mac graphics and Web designers. On Speckyboy.com.
• Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy - Sarah Palin believes that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. Looks like the Republicans found another candidate who doesn't believe in science. On the LATimes.com.

Some wisdom from the trenches.

My meeting the other day with a wannabe writer made me realize that there are a lot of people out there who want to write but simply don’t have a clue about many of the basics. So I thought I’d start a new series of articles here. The idea is to share some of my insight with the folks who understand that they don’t know everything and that they can learn from other writers.

I realize that this sounds sarcastic, but I think it’s pretty close to the mark. So many wannabe writers simply don’t understand the basics of writing — or writing for a living. They have this glamorized idea of what it’s like to be a writer. They think it’s easy. And while it may be easy for them to write, it isn’t easy for most folks to make a living as a writer.

And that’s what it all comes down to. As a commenter here said, writers write. But if you can’t get paid for your writing, you’ll probably have to work a “real” job to earn a living. And that might not have enough time to write. So the goal of anyone who wants to be a writer should be to get paid for writing. Then they’ll have plenty of time to write.

My goal in this series is to not only provide tips to help you be a better writer, but to help wannabe writers or new writers understand how they can make a living as a writer and what that living might be like.

I’ve already written a number of posts that you might find helpful if you’re interested in learning more about being a writer. I’ve listed the ones that I think are best here:

• On Being a Professional Writer (Sept 22, 2004)
• Freebies (Dec 6, 2004)
• Software Isn’t Always the Answer (Feb 20, 2005)
• More about Writing Software (Feb 21, 2005)
• Fifteen Years as a Freelancer (Jun 6, 2005)
• You CAN Make a Living as a Writer (Sep 30, 2005)
• NaNoWriMo ‘05 (Nov 3, 2005; also available as a podcast at this link)
• NaNoWriMo Expanded (Nov 8, 2005)
• Contact Negotiation (Nov 28, 2008)
• On Deadlines (Jan 13, 2006)
• Blogger or Writer? Not Both? (Apr 21, 2006)
• Why Write? (Jul 24, 2006)
• On Blogging (Nov 17, 2006; also available as a podcast at this link)
• 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable (Jan 14, 2007)
• Death of a Manuscript (March 3, 2007)
• Royalty Statements (Mar 31, 2007)
• Copyright for Bloggers and Writers - Part 1: Why Copyright is Important (Aug 4, 2007)
• eBooks (Aug 7, 2007)
• Copyright for Writers and Bloggers - Part II: Creative Commons (Aug 7, 2007)
• Copy Editing - Part I: What Is Copy Editing? (Aug 8, 2007)
• Copyright for Writers and Bloggers - Part III: Fair Use and Public Domain (Aug 12, 2007)
• Copy Editing - Part II: My Experience with Copy Editors (Aug 13, 2007)
• Copy Editing - Part III: Editing for the Sake of Editing (Aug 20, 2007)
• Pro Writing Fundamentals: Editors (Aug 29, 2007)
• Grammar Is Important (Sep 8, 2007)
• Question: When does an apparently fun way to earn income become a job? (Oct 5, 2007)
• Why Writers Write (Nov 1, 2007)
• What to Write About? (Dec 22, 2007)
• Article Length (Jan 11, 2008)
• Thinking Outside the Book (Feb 27, 2008)
• BE a Writer (Sep 27, 2008)

I learned two things in the hour it took me to compile this list:

• The list is a lot longer than I expected it to be. I wrote a lot about writing since I began blogging nearly 5 years ago. This list doesn’t include all the posts in the Writing category, either.
• Before writing Saturday’s post, I hadn’t written anything worthwhile about writing since February 2008.

I urge you to read any of the posts listed above that you think you might find interesting. Comment on them, too. Your comments will help me develop ideas for new posts about related topics.

In the meantime, I’ll use the “Writing Tips” title for a bunch of short new posts that cover some of the basics. I promise not to be too chatty.

Here are a few links I found interesting on September 28, 2008:

• 20 tips to help you work smarter with OS X - A quick summary of 20 things you can do to work smarter with Mac OS X. On TechRadar UK.
• A Tally of Federal Rescues - A graphic representation of various budget numbers next to the bailout amount. Scary stuff.
• Top 10 Articles About the Financial Crisis - A list of articles with summaries that can help you understand the current financial crisis. On Intellectual Detox.
• Kathleen Parker: After Interviews, Palin Should Bow Out - The Huffington Post takes Parker's column and runs with it.
• Palin Problem - Conservative journalist Kathleen Parker writes about Sarah Palin: Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League. On National Review Online
• Saturday Night Live: Presidential Debate - More fun from the folks at SNL. On Hulu.com.
• The Great Schlep - Send this to your Jewish friends. 'Nuff said.
• Palin Is Ready? Please. - Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria is saying what we're all thinking: how can they possibly say Sarah Palin is ready to be one heartbeat away from the presidency?
• Hive Five: Five Best Sites to Stream TV - This is the ONLY way I get TV these days, since I have neither a television nor a cable/satellite connection here in my camper. I've been watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report on Hulu and I tried The Mentalist on CBS.com the other day.
• TV ad | Hovis - Great advertisement that takes a loaf of bread and the small boy who runs with it through history. Thanks to @MikeTRose for tweeting the link.
• The 50 most significant moments of Internet history - Interesting article about the development of the Internet from its very beginning to today. On Crave at CNET.co.uk.
• BBC - Languages - Homepage - I don't know about you, but I've been wanting to learn to speak Spanish fluently for years. The BBC Web site has a whole section dedicated to free language lessons: Spansh, French, German, and more. Lot of learning tools, including videos and games. Give it a try.
• Surprising Things You Can Get For Free (Or Almost) - A list in Womans' Day (of all places) of free or very inexpensive things. Some of them are worth a look.
• Saturday Night Live: Couric / Palin Open - Tina Fey does Sarah Palin again. It's really amazing. She has the voice and mannerisms down perfectly. And what she says doesn't seem too far from reality. On Hulu.com.