Category Archives: On Blogging

Some thoughts about blogging.

4 Great Articles about WordPress 2.7

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Why reinvent the wheel?

WordPress LogoLast night, the folks at Automattic updated WordPress.com to version 2.7. The self-hosted version of WordPress is still in beta, although Release Candidate 1 (RC1) was released two days ago.

I’ve been working with WordPress 2.7 for about two weeks now (since Beta 2) and am absolutely thrilled with it. The Dashboard and administrator interface has been completely reworked to make it not only more useful, but easier to navigate. Sure, a lot of folks will be grumbling about the change from horizontal-on-top to vertical-on-left navigation, but when you look beyond the obvious, you see a true user interface improvement.

There are plenty of other new features, too. But rather than write my own article about them, here are links to four other articles written by folks who clearly love WordPress as much as I do. Read up, upgrade, and enjoy!

2.7 Gets Here in 2 Days! by Jane Wells on the WordPress.com blog was the first official announcement of 2.7’s upcoming appearance on WordPress.com. Jane helps fuel the excitement with a great description of the new features.

10 Things You Need to Know about WordPress 2.7 by Aaron Brazell on Technosailor states, “This is not your grandma’s WordPress!” (Not sure if I should be offended by this; there’s a chance I might be old enough to be his mother.) He then goes on to describe and state his opinions of the new features.

WordPress 2.7 – 20 Must See Features by Sean P. Aune on Mashable lists the 20 features he finds most notable with a few screen shots.

WordPress 2.7 arrives Thursday night is a shorter and more to-the-point piece by Joshn Lowensohn on cnet news. It links back to the first article here (which I also think is the best) for a full discussion of features.

I’ll be writing a bit about WordPress for Maria’s Guides as I find new tricks and tips to share. I’ll also be revising my Lynda.com training material to cover the new features available on WordPress.com.

Five Years Blogging

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How time flies.

Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

Not a Blogger? Maybe You Should Be!

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If you read blogs, you can blog, too.

One of the hats I wear is the Webmaster hat for wickenburg-az.com. This is a Web site I started back in 1999 to provide information of interest to Wickenburg residents and visitors. A few years back, I converted it from straight HTML to a blog-based system utilizing WordPress. This makes it very easy to add new content, automatically archives old content by topic, and adds a great search feature.

wickenburg-az.com is a place for folks to share their own content. I have a number of regular contributors, as well as a few folks who just send new content for consideration when they have something to say.

Yesterday, I received two new submissions — a record for a single day. One was a piece by a woman — we’ll call her Jackie — who was deeply offended by something John McCain said in an Interview with Sarah Palin and Katie Couric. She wrote a short article that explained her views. I could tell by reading it that it was something she’d thought about, something that bothered her a lot. She wasn’t a Democrat latching onto yet another Republican faux pas to prove that Republicans weren’t fit to be in office. I got the feeling that she’d been a McCain supporter who felt betrayed by his recent behavior. This comment he’d made was the last straw.

I couldn’t put the article on wickenburg-az.com. Although the site does cover politics, it concentrates on politics at a much more local level. (Heaven knows that the politics in Wickenburg has enough scandal, cronyism, and blatant favoritism to keep us busy.) So I wrote to Jackie, told her that we couldn’t use it, and suggested that she submit it to the newspapers.

Jackie responded to say that she had and that no one seemed interested in printing it. She thanked me for my response — I may have been the only person to extend that simple courtesy.

That got me thinking…I’ve been blogging for nearly five full years now. (My first blog post was on October 15, 2003.) I’ve used my blog to share everything from boring stories from my life to opinions about politics and religion. If I have something to say, I say it here. I don’t try to submit it to newspapers or other Web sites. I have my own publishing outlet and you’re reading it: An Eclectic Mind.

So I wrote back to Jackie and suggested that she start her own blog.

Those of you who think there’s some kind of computer programming knowledge required to start and run a blog are seriously mistaken. If you have the equipment and skills to find and read a blog post on someone else’s blog, you have everything you need to start your own. Best of all, there are plenty of free blogging tools and services out there. My personal favorite is WordPress. Although I use the WordPress server installation, which does require an above average amount of computer know-how, WordPress.com is a free service that just about anyone can use.

Why haven’t I mentioned this before? Well, it’s mostly because I thought everyone already knew this. It wasn’t until I began this e-mail exchange with Jackie that I realized that there are people out there with something to say and no easy public outlet in which to say it. Blogging fills this purpose for me. Why can’t it fill this purpose for others?

Are you someone like Jackie? Someone with something to say to the world and no place to say it? Consider blogging.

Lynda.com WordPress CoverAnd at the risk of turning this into a commercial — which is not my intent — I invite you to check out the free sample lessons from the WordPress.com video I created for the folks at lynda.com. There’s enough there to introduce you to blogging so you can find out whether blogging is for you. There are also free lessons that cover the WordPreess.com setup process. That’ll get you started. WordPress isn’t difficult to use, so there’s a very good chance you won’t even need training material. (But if you do, I can’t say enough nice things about lynda.com materials.)

Blogging has become an important part of my life. It gives me an outlet to communicate what I’m doing and thinking to the world. So what if only a few hundred people read each blog post? I’m not writing for them as much as I’m writing for myself — to get what’s in my head out where it can be read by others.

Isn’t that what Jackie was trying to do when she submitted her article to wickenburg-az.com?

Airport Codes: A Meme for Pilot Bloggers

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What can you say about the airports you’ve landed at?

This afternoon, while slowly steaming in my camper with the air conditioner on full-blast, I took a moment to connect to the Internet, check my e-mail, and check up on my Twitter friends. One of them, Highway 89 Project photographer Ann Torrence, had linked to a blog post she’d just updated, “Collection of Airport Codes.” In it, she wrote about her dislike of flying and provided a table of codes for the airports she’s been to.

It’s interesting to me because the average person doesn’t pay much attention to the three- or four-character airport codes that are part of a pilot’s life. For each airport listed — and she listed airports all around the world — she included a very brief comment about her experience there.

While I’m not nearly as well-travelled as Ann, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been to more airports. In many cases, however, I was the pilot in command when I landed at the airport. I have my own story for each of the airports I’ve landed at. So I decided that it might make a good theme for future blog posts about flying.

Quincy, WAThis, in turn, triggered an idea for a meme — something that other pilots who blog could write about, too. What are the airports that you’ve landed at? Pick one and write about it. You can write about why you went there, what you were flying, or what it was like. You can write about the perfect weather or nasty crosswind or unreasonably hot temperatures. You can write about the coffee in the FBO, the courtesy car, or the line guy — or lack thereof. You can write about the people you were with and what they thought when you made that perfect landing — or two, or three. (Just teasing my airplane friends.)

If you pick up this meme and spread it, please do use the Comment link or form to post a comment with the URL for the blog post you created. Be sure to say a little bit about the post when commenting to prevent my spam protection software from thinking it’s just spam and deleting it. (It tends to delete comments that contain only links, especially if there’s more than one link.) As long as the link points to a post in this meme as described here, it’ll stay. You can copy any part of this post to spread a description of the meme, as long as you link back to this post so others who follow it will add their links to the comments here.

In the meantime, I’ll start writing my own posts about some of the airports I’ve landed at. I’ll try to keep it interesting.

I hope those of you who have blogs will join the fun. Because, as we all know, an airport is far more than the three- or four-character code that represents it on charts, publications, and GPSes. I want to read your stories.

Another Comment Policy

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And you thought mine was strict.

Reader comments are often what can make a blog far more interesting than it would be without comments. In fact, the commenting feature of blog software can create a community at a blog when regular readers and commenters add their two cents to blog posts.

Unfortunately, not everyone has something of value to add to a conversation. And that doesn’t stop them from adding it.

Comments Here

I review every single comment posted to this blog, so I know the full range of comment quality. Tossing aside the hundreds of daily automated spam comments caught by my spam protection software and the obvious attempts of human readers to redirect my blog’s readers to their sites, the “real” comments can be informative, helpful, interesting, funny, or thoughtful. But they can also be sarcastic, nasty, rude, or offensive.

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

I state my comment policy in various places throughout this site, including here. Although I occasionally do have to delete a comment that’s overly offensive or one that’s sure to generate a nasty argument, in general, this site has a great group of regular readers and commenters that don’t need to be watched over as if they’re poorly behaved children.

As an example of how much commenting can contribute to a blog, check out one of my posts, “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has accumulated almost 50 comments in just over a year. Many of these comments offer helpful insight to helicopter pilots and wannabes. They’ve created a conversation that just keeps growing — indeed, five comments have been added to that post in just the past week.

Anyway, I welcome comments and won’t prevent one from appearing unless it’s either offensive or totally self-promotional. Get a conversation going. I really enjoy it. And reader comments are often what trigger me to write new blog posts.

A Comment Policy From Down Under

Today, while in search of both images from the Iran missile photo controversy, I stumbled upon an article on the Herald Sun Web site. It showed both photos and provided some commentary about the situation. It mentioned that Iran was firing more test missiles today. The thought that if they kept firing missiles for tests they might run out came to my mind. Since the article had a comment field, I decided to voice that unlikely but amusing thought, mostly to lighten things up.

I posted the comment and submitted it. On the confirmation page, the following comment policy appeared:

Please note that we are not able to publish all the comments that we receive, and that we may edit some comments to ensure their suitability for publishing.

Feedback will be rejected if it does not add to a debate, or is a purely personal attack, or is offensive, repetitious, illegal or meaningless, or contains clear errors of fact.

Although we try to run feedback just as it is received, we reserve the right to edit or delete any and all material.

What I like about this comment policy is how clear it is. It’s warning commenters, almost up front, that what they submit may not appear at all or as it was submitted. I like the second sentence/paragraph. (Oddly enough, the commenter before me said “I Still dont Belive USA went to the Moon” and I’m wondering how that got through the moderation process, being that it’s pretty much meaningless, contains clear errors of fact, and does not add to the debate, but I guess that’s just my opinion.) I find the third sentence/paragraph bothersome, mostly because I don’t believe in editing someone’s comment. If it needs editing, it probably shouldn’t appear at all.

Up for Commenting

Anyway, I’m just tossing this out there, mostly to see what visitors here think about it.

Commenting is one of the good and bad things about blogging. On this site, I really enjoy most of the non-spam comments we receive. As long as you keep commenting, I’ll keep writing.