randomosity

Leo at Freelance Switch offers some great advice for those struggling to write or fighting with the distraction of their too-connected existence. I’ve got my hand raised here. Knowing that it’s a problem I have to solve I thought I’d share Leo’s suggestions in case you can relate.

In the post, he focuses on creating a morning ritual and offers a variety of tips to help make the writing happen. The biggest challenge for me (and clearly how I found the post in the first place) is the temptation of falling into my RSS feeds. Staying away from email and RSS is a maxim that I have to force myself to stick to. I am totally in sync with his belief that the morning is the time to accomplish the writing task. I know that I flag by early afternoon and try as I may I just can’t crank it up. I’m going to give the preparation and minimization of distractions a try and see what happens. Make sure you check the comments on this post as well, there are a few nuggets in there as well.

Answering the question, what’s up with the weird look to Randomosity today…I am trying a strange Wordpress theme today using simple ASCII charters. Its actually a rather complex theme and its surprisingly difficult to actually make Wordpress look so low-tech. The theme is called ASCII and is designed by n.design studio Chris Ensell (sorry Chris). Its extremely well done in my opinion.

Read the complete article… »

I took the plunge on my research blog and upgraded it from 2.05 –> 2.1 today. So far so good. The other blog is quite a bit simpler and uses far fewer plug-ins, of which I remain trepidatious, but we shall see how it goes.

On the path of searching out any hurdles that others had run into, I came across a series of blog entries by Alex King when he re-invented his main blog last year. These posts are a wonderful case study of his systematic approach to usability and user experience with his own blog. he is well known in the blogging community for his theme contest and his website which relies on WordPress for its cms is impressively extended through a few other pieces such as his forum management, but all nicely integrated together. I point out this post as a great resource for wordpressers or wordpressers to be that may like to be reminded of those usability things to remain aware of.

Wow. Three new plug-ins today…in the process of actually making them work.
The first is an implementation of SIMILE’s wonderful TimeLine tool in Wordpress. The plug-in comes from XX and allows you to automatically create a timeline view of posts. Too cool! It has a most robust and customizable dashboard as well. I am implementing it on the archives page, although it has the flexibility to show up throughout your site, and load an unload the code as necessary. Very well implemented.
The second, and equally fun, tool is the Now Reading tool that allows you to share your virtual library with readers and automatically draws information from Amazon to make it much more fun. This I have chosen to add to my header for now…check it out by pulling on the pull this tag above.
The third plug-in is the logical extension of this process…the aptly named, Plugins Used plugin by Viper. Its seems appropriate that as I have benefited from others so careful attention to sharing their site construction I should share mine as well.

With a renewed vigour one feels compelled to renovate and tidy up for the new year. So with that energy I threw a bit of time at the blog look and functionality. Making sure that links actually go somewhere and all the little plugs and pieces are defined and functional. Of course one comes across that piece of functionality that is just beyond ones technical abilities and with verve throws it into the mix and promptly denies oneself root access to the blog. Panic. Manage to regain, and then one starts correcting error with big sweeps that are only small typos. Ah the fun of code and minutiae of detail. A time sink though. Sometimes you haven’t know when to just stop mucking about. Tinkering, tinkering, tinkering….