What I’ve Learned So Far

Just kicking the tires on a new computer setup as I ponder a long stream of topics to discuss here.

Expect more, soon.

Meantime, how’s by you?

I’ve been lax. For the past couple of months, all of my blogging, both here and elsewhere, has been spotty. Lots of good things — e.g. a spate of interesting projects at work — have been happening to keep me away from writing as much, but in any event I haven’t been putting out the words that you so deeply crave that I normally would over the last little while.

But now . . . I can feel the pressure . . . [cue the cellos!] . . . building.

Expect more posts, is what I’m saying.

At least for me and the rest of the Interactive attendees. The crazy kids listening to music and watching films, they still have a few days of debauch left.

I have a head full of ideas, a couple of overloaded inboxes, and a lot of following up to do, so my next few days may be chaotic. Normal posting will resume . . . sometime.

Meanwhile, how’s by you?

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(Image from fliegender via Neatorama.)

It’ll be here within 48 hours. I’m not ready.

More to the point for this blog, it remains to be seen if I can survive SXSW, use it for business purposes, and still keep up the pace of posts here. I’m dubious, but we’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, are YOU going to be at SXSW? If so, won’t you please attend the session I’ll be running? The official SXSW listing is here, and our Facebook event page is here. I’d love to see you there!

Be warned: Sometime this weekend, I’ll be trying again to upgrade my blog backend. I hope that any technical difficulties will be minor and temporary. Because I know how you need steady access to this archive of my thoughts.

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(Photo by kyle58.)

That’s what I learned during several hours of frustration yesterday. As I mentioned on Friday, I wanted to spruce up the backend of my blog this weekend — it’s been overdue for updates for, uh, a while — and . . . there went half of my Sunday.

Looking on the bright side, some good things did happen. Among them, (1) I have a couple of extremely thorough manual backups of my blog tucked away in safe places, (2) I know a lot more about upgrading WordPress than I did, and (3) I have a fair idea of what I need to do next, even if I’m unclear about how to do it.

As if I needed convincing, I was also reminded of the generosity of my friends, since no less than four people of strong Nerd-Fu responded to my piteous cries on Twitter with offers to help.

Updates as warranted. Meanwhile, I’ve backed out every change I made yesterday so as not to interrupt your bloggish enjoyment. (At least, I think I backed out everything — please let me know if you run into any glitches.)

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(Photo by Siebren Kwekkeboom, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Or, rather, you WILL be as you spend hour upon hour of your weekend reading through my extensive archives here. (This is how you spend your weekends, right?)

This weekend I’ll be doing some overdue technical housekeeping on the blog, so you may get some strange results — up to and including a big pile o’ nothing — if you wander in at the right moment.

Tally-ho.

1. Not that I set any specific targets, but it turns out I wrote 75 blog posts — spread across this blog and three others — in January. That’s the most for some time, and it certainly felt better to be in a better writing rhythm.

2. Crap, I’ve got a lot of lingering e-mail and bookmarks and papers to delete. Yes, still.

Given #2 . . . I think that’s all for today. UNLESS you care to amuse me in the comment thread, which would be awesome.

1. Go to Flickr’s “Advanced Search” page.

2. Type in keywords relevant to your blog post, click “Photos” and “Only Photos” in the next two categories, and then click “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” at the bottom of the page. (If you’re writing for a commercial/professional blog, also click “Find content to use commercially.”)

3. When your results come up, click to sort them by “Interesting” rather than “Relevant” or “Recent.”

4. Add or subtract keywords in the search bar at the top of the results page to narrow or expand your search. If you get way too many results, one of the best ways to do this is with a minus sign. E.g., if you’re looking for pictures of licorice sticks and it turns out there are a zillion shots of a thoroughbred horse named “Licorice Stick,” you could add the term “-horse” to your search. (Note that the minus is jammed right up next to the word to be excluded.)

5. Using the thumbnail views that come up in the search results, right-click on any interesting photos and choose “Open Link in New Tab.” This will let you browse through the best candidates much more quickly than you could by clicking through to each picture and then clicking back to the search results.

6. When you have several candidate shots open in their own tabs, compare them in pairs using “winner stays” rules. That is, if A is better than B, keep A and compare it to C; if C is better than A, keep C and compare it to D. Repeat this process as many times as you need to come up with a winner, and remember that choosing blog images is an excellent time for “satisficing” rather than seeking perfection.

7. Right-click on the winner image, choose “Save Image As…,” and save the image to your desktop with some appropriate name.

8. Tweak the size, cropping, etc. of your image using the picture software of your choice. (My go-to choice for simplicity’s sake: Microsoft Office Picture Manager.)

9. Upload the image into your blog post . . . and enjoy the fruits of great visuals to go along with your priceless, priceless words.

10. Oh, and be sure to give credit where it’s due by linking back to the photo’s Flickr page (like I do at the bottom of this post).

By the way, you can browse through more than 150 interesting Creative Commons-licensed Flickr shots that I’ve tagged with “Blog Images” on Delicious.

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(Image by filtran.)

By which I mean “FAILING to keep up with the comment-spam filter,” because that’s what I’ve been doing.

Here’s the deal: if you ever leave a comment on this blog and don’t see it appear in some kind of reasonable timeframe (let’s say 18-24 hours), feel free to give me a gentle nudge via e-mail (”tewalkerjr” at-symbol “gmail” period “com”) or Twitter (@Twalk). I’ll retrieve your comment from the moderation or spam queues.

I will also endeavor to clean up the Akismet queue (Akismet is the spam filter I use) on a more regular basis. When I let it pile up, as I’ve been doing, I find I can’t stay focused on it long enough to go through hundreds of offers for V*agra, Russian pr0n, etc. I just flushed it, so I’ll try to check it every day or two from here forward.

Oh, and one more thing: in general, once you’re approved once for a comment, you’ll be free to comment without moderation going forward. The exception would be if you put red-flag words or multiple links into a comment, which would get you kicked into the moderation or spam queues.

Good? Carry on.

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(Photo by kaiton, CC-Share Alike license.)