Bloggers by definition are writers. They may not write stories, but they write enough to fill many books. It doesn’t matter whether you blog about yourself or random and esoteric topics that only matter to you (cough: guilty). You are still a writer. If you write about yourself, you are writing an autobiography. If you write about current events, you are a journalist. If you write anything at all, you are a columnist, a historian, a science writer, or whatever title you want. You may not get paid a lot, but you are still a writer — most writers out there just gasped and said, “Yah right, like I do?” If you still don’t believe me, I am the self-appointed authority and I hereby declare you a writer, so don’t argue the point.
As a writer, the thoughts and ideas that flit around your head are the most important things you own. Random thoughts become great works of art …
In Vista, normal users are not allowed to save the hosts file, so the easiest way to edit it is to run notepad as an administrator.
- Go to start and either search for “notepad” or go to All Programs > Accessories
- Right click “notepad” and select the “Run as Administrator Option.”
- Once Notepad opens go to File > Open and browse to “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc”
- Set the file filter to “All Files”
- Select and Open “hosts”
- Edit it and save it.
If you get an error about it being read only:
- Go to File > Open, right click the “hosts” file and select properties
- Uncheck read-only at the bottom and click OK.
- Click Cancel to go back to notepad”
- Save it
I’ve linked to TED for quite a while in my sidebar and I urge everyone to subscribe to TED’s video RSS feed if you are even remotely concerned about the world and people around you.
TED talks tends to focus on the grand scheme of things, but this talk by Yossi Vardi talks focuses acutely on the local issues that plague many bloggers. The topic of this talk effects at least 50% of bloggers and all bloggers who care about the future of the world should not only watch this video, but also take immediate action. (If you are not in this 50% you should probably pass it on to someone who is.) Warning this video is not for the faint of heart.
It’s is nice to wake up once and a while to something this amusing in your feed reader isn’t it?
8 Tips for Improving the Content of Your Writing
The content of writing is separate from style and structure because content is what you write not how you write. The following tips apply just as well to academic essays as to blog posts, so feel free to cherry pick the suggestions that apply best to your writing.
- Pick an an interesting, significant topic.
Too many times posts are done on something insignificant or unoriginal. It doesn’t really matter if you write a gorgeous tutorial or a powerful, inspiring and riveting essay if it just explains something most people already know about. Similarly, it doesn’t help to write about issues that very few people have an interest in unless you are writing it solely for your pleasure.
The biggest problem though is when people write about general topics that they have no real knowledge of and don’t say anything new about.
I’ve wanted to be able to add images to my emails inline (one that appears with the text, not as a separate attachment) for a long time, and today, thanks to Wordpress I finally figured out how to do it.
- Open GMail, go to compose mail, select the “Rich Formatting” if it isn’t your default.
- Open your Wordpress Admin Panel, go to a new post, select the Visual Editor (you may have to turn it on under your user preferences)
- Write your email in the Wordpress Visual Editor, and embed the image into the new post (or just embed the image).
- Copy and paste the “email” from your Wordpress Visual Editor to your GMail “Rich Formatting” textbox.
- Send your email, don’t save your post.
Easy as π, I would probably figured this out sooner if I didn’t have a hate-fest with visual editors related to the web. (Oh and this works perfectly in Firefox on Linux, so it isn’t a Windows/IE only trick.)
Improvements for Stattraq plugin.
Ever since I originally started using Stattraq a few things bothered me about the way it worked. Here are the fixes to a few of them.
Include pages with posts in your stats.
- Open stattraq.php
- Find:
global $doing_rss, $p
Replace With:
global $doing_rss, $p, $page_id, $pagename, - Find:
if (($p != '')){$p = intval($p);$article_id = $p;}
Replace with:
if (($p != '')){$p = intval($p);$article_id = $p;}elseif (($page_id != '')){$page_id = intval($page_id);$article_id = $page_id;}elseif (($pagename != '')){$reqpage = get_page_by_path($pagename);if ( !empty($reqpage) )$article_id = $reqpage->ID;}- Use the following to copy and paste the code.
To add a list of all Pages that link to your site grouped by Website (excluding Google):
Open “wp-stattraq/reporter/summary.php”
Find:
<?php echo PrintTimestamp();?><div id="queryTerms"></div>
Before Add:
<table id="referrersTable"><thead><tr><th>#</th><th>Referrer</th><th>Pages</th></tr></thead><tfoot><tr><th>#</th><th>Referrer</th><th>Pages</th></tr></tfoot><tbody><?phpif($results){$i=0;foreach($results as $row){preg_match('/(http.*?\:\/\/.*?)(\/.*)/', htmlentities($row->ref), $matches);$ref_array[$matches[1]][] = $matches[2];}while( list($site, $pages) = @each($ref_array) ){if(strpos($site,'google') ==false && $site != ''){?><tr class="<?php echo ($i % 2 == 0 ? 'even' : 'odd' );?>"><td><?php echo ++$i;?></td><td><a href="<?php echo $site;?>"><?php echo substr($site,0,50);?></a></td><td class="right"><?php foreach($pages as $page){?><a href="<?php echo $site.$page;?>"><?php echo substr($page,0,50);?></a><br /><?php}?></td></tr><?php }}}?></tbody></table>- Use the following to copy and paste the code.
