Tag: blogging

This is one of those odd posts that came about because I starting playing with one idea and something else came about all-together. It started with me considering blogging options besides WordPress. There’s lots of platforms out there, and some of them are quite good. I’m also looking for something that I can run for free. Right now my WordPress.com premium account is paid for until almost the end of the year. So I have plenty of time to consider other options.

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This was my own little experiment on how posting every (week)day for the month of May would go. I didn’t say anything about it before starting because I honestly didn’t know if I could keep up the pace. If you look back over May’s post, you might notice they’re all either technical with screenshots or photo-themed with multiple images, and all had featured images attached. Putting in the time to prepare each post took a significant chunk out of each day. But I was happy to reach my word count goal for the month.

I’ve been mulling over making a few changes to the blog since Christmas. In the last few days I’ve got around to it. The biggest and most visible change is the new theme. I previewed the Twenty Sixteen theme a few times but didn’t install it. After digging into some of the customizations, I finally clicked apply. Overall, it’s a clean theme and I like how the sidebar looks. The mobile responsive view is espectially nice.

After a recent feature request I decided to look into adding category support for my Ulysses-Post-to-WP script. In the end it was actually easy. It involved changing one variable from post-tag to category. The hard part was finding out that was the needed change. The documentation isn’t very clear, and I had to pull a post out via XML-RPC to see the format. The testing and writing up the changes took more time than the actual change.

This has been one of those periods where I haven’t been focusing on the blog. I’ve set a goal for myself to have my Ruby book out by June 1st. Along the way, I’ve managed to start adapting a short story into a comic and also started the preliminary work on a novel. So I’ve been neglecting posting regularly.

But even with the other projects, there’s still some gaps in my schedule. There’s time for posting, I just have to make use of it. Part of doing this is getting a handle on what I want to post about. With my attention pulled away, finding topics is more important than ever. I also need to spend some time coming up with a list of topics I can have at hand when it’s time to write.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

This week started out strong, but I was hit with intense shoulder pain that sidelined me for the weekend. Goals for the next week: finish the WIP chapter of the ruby book, and do three chapter reviews of the WSF&F book.

I watched the Apple event this morning so you wounldn’t have to. Tim Cook covered a lot ground in the 90 minuite event. The last half-hour was devoted the Apple Watch.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

I was shooting for more, but a bug in the Pogo software left me spending my time troubleshooting instead of writing. The average turned upwards again. I’m happy with that.

In an wonderful post, the author John Scalzi produced twelve standard responses to online stupidity. The list seems complete and covers most cases.

The list:

I saw on Twitter than someone had made a random response generating page. I decided that a local version was also in order.

The project is a ruby script that can be run from the command line. It also contains a MacOS X workflow file that can be installed as a system service.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

I spent the first part of the week learning about how to make eBooks. But for writing, this was a week of poor concentration. I wasn’t able to focus on much of anything. It wasn’t writer’s block. It was more of a feeling that I just didn’t have anything worth writing inside me. Instead I spent time on Twitter. Overall, a poor showing.