A good resource on the Web.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a series of articles on the Web titled “Fifty Writing Tools.” The series was written by Roy Peter Clark. It appears on the Poynter Online Web site, which is subtitled, “Everything You Need to be a Better Journalist.”
If you’re serious about writing, I highly recommend that you check out this series of articles. Although they’re primarily written for journalists, there’s a lot for all writers to learn in these pieces.
I mark horse butts and time in the riders.
Yesterday was the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association’s annual Land of the Sun Endurance Ride. And, for the fourth year in a row, I was one of about 80 volunteers enlisted to help out and make the event run smoothly.
For those of you who don’t know what an endurance ride is, our endurance ride is a 25- or 50-mile horseback ride over trails in the Wickenburg area. Endurance riders — people who actually like to cover that many miles on horseback — come from all over the southwest to participate.
The trails are created or maintained and then marked with ribbons by volunteers organized by Robin Ollendick and Nancy Halsey, who manage the whole thing. There are two loops, each of which are 25 miles long. The 25-milers do one loop and the 50-milers do both. There are vet checks, water stops, and check points along the way. There’s food and beverages for riders and horses at the vet checks and riders are required to spend a certain minimum amount of time at each one to ensure the health and well-being of their horses. There are drag riders who follow the last group out and remove the ribbons.
It’s a big deal and a great western event. This year, we started out with 148 riders. A few were pulled early on or on the trail for various reasons — for example, a problem with a horses’s gait or a horse “tying up” — but the vast majority finished their courses.
As a volunteer, I had three official jobs.
The first, on Friday, was to use “paint sticks” to mark numbers on horse butts. Each horse had a number and the number had to be visible by the folks at the check points so each rider could be tracked through the course. We used yellow, pink, or green markers to put the numbers on. The markers are similar to Cray-pas — soft crayon-like markers I used as a kid. But they’re fat — at least an inch and a quarter in diameter — and they’re a pain in the butt (no pun intended) to get off your skin and out from under your nails.
My second job was to make the vegetarian bean soup I make every year for the lunch stop. A lot of the riders are vegetarians and it seems that most other people put some kind of meat in their soups or chilis. I make it without any meat at all. The flavor comes from the root vegetables I include — onions, carrots, turnips, parsnips — as well as celery and leeks. I got it cooking in our camper, which we parked at the rodeo grounds (It’s for sale and we wanted to show it off to potential buyers.), on Saturday and it was ready just in time for lunch.
My third job was to work with Janet, timing in the riders. The first 50-milers, who had left at about 7:00 AM (before dawn!), started showing up at 9:45 AM. That’s 25 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. On horseback. Janet wrote down numbers and times on a clipboard while I handed out check in slips with numbers and times. The 50-milers were required to wait for a hour after their horses “pulsed down” before leaving on their second loop. The 25 milers didn’t get check in slips, but they did get champagne. By 1:30, the 50-milers were coming back from their second loop. Janet and I were relieved at 2 PM, when all the excitement was pretty much over.
I didn’t take any pictures yesterday. I was too busy with my jobs. But if Janet sends photos of the winners, I’ll insert them here.
The big surprise: the winner for the 25-milers was a rider on a mule!
I start to tap into the power of WordPress for Web publishing.
WordPress is an Open Source blogging tool. At least that’s how it’s promoted. But it’s so much more than that.
WordPress is a highly customizable Web publishing platform. With WordPress, a server, and a little ingenuity, you can build a Web site with nicely formatted static and dynamic pages. New content can be added by anyone you give access to. Site visitors can add comments — if you allow them to. Best of all, because it’s based on a blog engine, blogging features apply: date-based content display, automatic archiving of content, support for pinging and trackbacks — the list goes on and on.
I started getting a real feel for WordPress when I started rebuilding wickenburg-az.com, a Web site I have been maintaining since 1999 to provide information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. I started off keeping it simple, choosing a nice looking theme called Connections by Patricia Muller to control the appearance of the site. I immediately started tweaking the theme, changing the link colors and the header image. Then, after I had some content added, I continued tweaking by adding more features: automatic article author images, Webcams, random list of articles on topics pages, random header images, site statistics, weather, donation button, calendar of upcoming events, and Technorati tags. I added some “under the hood” features, too: comment spam protection, automated database backup, and sticky posts (which can glue a post to the top of the Home page until I release it). Right now, I’m trying to add the Users Online feature I have on this site, but I’m running into a page formatting problem and still need to work out the details to get it to work.
Every change I make to the site teaches me something about the way WordPress works. I learn more about HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, and Apache every day. For years, I’ve avoided digging deeply into advance Web publishing coding because I knew so little about it. Now I’m forcing myself to learn by working with it daily. I love the challenge. And I love applying the things I learned yesterday to the things I do tomorrow.
I’ll be writing more about WordPress in the weeks to come, so if you’re a WordPress user or are just curious about it, I hope you’ll keep checking in. Together, we’ll learn more about this great Web publishing tool.
I get a new print magazine about Internet technology when Internet technology is putting print publications out of business.
I got it in the mail yesterday. The regular mail. The kind with the mail truck that puts stuff in my mailbox up on the corner. I like to think of it as analog mail.
The magazine is called AlwaysOn with the subtitles “the insider’s network” and “The blogozine on innovation.” Huh? The cover led me to believe that they’d collected a bunch of blog entries about technology, printed them up on slick paper, threw a few ads in to pay the bills, and mailed them out to people they thought might be stupid enough to buy in at the hefty price of $39 for four issues a year.
Well, that’s pretty much what the magazine is. The “Member Posts” section has short blog-like pieces that end up with the number of posts and comments that I assume are attibutable to that author on the AO Web site. Then there are a few one- to three-page articles about the Internet, blogs, communication technology, and high-tech business. And a couple of interviews. The big feature is “The AO Power List,” summary of a few dozen of the movers and shakers in the high-tech world.
It’s 48 printed pages, 18 of which are full-page ads. That leaves 30 pages of content for a susbcriber per-issue price of $9.75. (There was no cover price on the issue I received, so I don’t know what it would sell for on newstands if it even appeared there.) Is it worth it when you can just go out on the ‘Net and find the same kind of content online for free?
And I wonder how a quarterly publication can keep up with technology anyway. If it includes everything that happened since the last issue, most of that stuff would be sorely out of date. If it included only the latest and greatest info as it went to press, the information would still be stale — considering its editorial content — since it takes at least a few week for the actual production of the print publication. During that time, the same content could be covered to death on the Internet.
What’s interesting to me is that this publication should appear now. Last month, I got a letter from Technology Today, which I subscribe to, saying that because of the boom in Internet publishing and communication, they’d publishing once every two months rather than once a month. And the magazine would be getting slimmer. This, mind you, is a publication that has been in existence for more than 50 years. MIT, the folks that publish Technology Today, will be adding more current, up-to-date content, on its Web site, which has additional content for subscribers. So they expect subscribers to get most of the content they pay for online rather than in the printed magazine.
I also wonder where they got my name and address. From my Macworld Expo registration? Or from the Technology Today folks?
Anyway, in case you haven’t read between the lines, I’m not impressed and I won’t be subscribing to AlwaysOn. I’d be interested in hearing from other folks who have gotten this publication and liked it enough to sign up. Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts.
I get a funny in e-mail that illustrates what I’ve been saying for some time now.
My friend Tom sent me the following joke via e-mail:
A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him,
“What’s your IQ?”
The man replies “150” and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, Quantum physics and spirituality, bio-mimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nanotechnology, and sexual proclivities.
The customer is very impressed and thinks, “This is really cool.” He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectly prepared drink and asks him,
“What’s your IQ?”
The man responds, “about 100.” Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about NASCAR, super models, favorite fast foods, guns, and women’s breasts.
Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks,
“What’s your IQ?”
The man replies, “Er, 50, I think.”
And the robot says, real slowly, “So…ya gonna vote for Bush again?”