Posts about writing, editing, publishing, and blogging
Another one of my small stones is appearing at a handful of stones today: “Beet Stone.” Check it out.
It fits with this week’s “South Austin Chili,” though the beet was sliced for a different recipe, and the poem was written several months before the chili one.
I started another blog about a month ago, but kept it under my hat until I had a name for it. The name came this week: a gnarled oak.
It’s from this haiku I wrote last week:
I watched and listened—
a gnarled oak full of stories,
birds turned into words
a gnarled oak is a microblog where I’ll be posting short observational poem-like things mostly about birds and nature.
This started from my experiments with Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter where the gnarled oak stuff is automatically be cross-posted). The notion of posting every moment of one’s life is kind of silly so I just twittered short little poem-things and haiku. I discovered there are a lot of people who do this. Many quite well. I wanted a more personal and simpler space for these besides Twitter, and I discovered Tumblr, a microblogging platform that works nicely for this.
The things I post there are the things that often got written and lost in my paper journals, but after being inspired by a small stone, a handful of stones, The Morning Porch, TWITTERKU, Open Micro, Paiku, Haiku Habits, Full Moon of November, Oversouled and numerous others whose RSS feeds and tweets I’ve been enjoying, I decided to have a go at this style of blogging. Many of these sites are powered by Tumblr and that’s how I found it, so thanks to all of those for inspiring me.
Coyote Mercury is still my main joint, but you’ll find these other bits of writing that seem too small for a “full-size” blog laid out for large images at a gnarled oak where they won’t be overwhelmed and can kind of live by themselves in a simpler region of the blogosphere that lacks sidebars, comments, spam, and upgrades.
Check out a gnarled oak and have a look around. There’s even an rss feed for those who use readers.
Please visit Postal Poetry. My poetry postcard “time to leave” is appearing there today.
Have a look around too. There’s lots of great stuff over there.
Please visit a handful of stones. One of my small stones is appearing there today, which is a very cool thing, I think.
What is a small stone? Editor Fiona Robyn writes:
A small stone is a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment.
Look around while you’re there. There’s great stuff to be found.
I’ve found a lot of great stuff lately, and so, a links post.
Heather wrote a very nice review of A Place Without a Postcard.
Jon Swift included a post I wish I never had to write on his compendium of the Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). Okay, so I picked the post, but it was nice to be invited.
I and the Bird #91 is out on From the Faraway, Nearby, very cool travel/nature/photography site that I intend to start following. Also discovered in this month’s installment of I and the Bird, are some really interesting and compelling sites that will likely become regular reads: Nature Remains, a celebration of the natural world by a gifted writer; the unclassifiable Via Negativa, which is definitely worth a detailed exploration, and Teach me about Birdwatching!!! where I hope to learn more about South American birds.
A few weeks ago, I discovered two really good sites: Flint Hills, Tall Grass and Coyote Crossing. And, let’s face it, blogs with coyote in the name are just cool.
Today, I learned from drivelocity how to put a favicon on my site.
Well. That all makes for a good day of reading.
For several months I’ve been wanting to change the look of the blog. I searched high and low for a theme that would have a simple, uncluttered look. I wanted compatability with WordPress 2.7’s new features as well as image pages and a larger content area to display larger images.
Then, inspired by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (see my post about Zen and the Art and its impact on this blog), I decided that it would be of higher Quality to learn CSS and do the theme myself.
I used some pieces of my old Gila theme (which I had heavily modified over the years), but rather than thinking thoughts like “what can I make Gila do?” I tried to focus on making the site look how I want it and then learning how to do it myself.
More than anything, I wanted something that had a clean and simple design, if not exactly minimalist. The home page, my book page, stories & poems page, and the about me page reflect that. The blog page differs because there’s just more that I like on the sidebar there.
Click the photo below for a look at the image page. Most of the photos I’ve posted since mid-November will link to their own pages now.
Additionally, I wanted to minimize sidebar clutter and focus on sidebar info that’s actually used by people who visit this site. Archives and most of the links on the blogroll now have their own page (friends/family/favorite links are staying in the sidebar). I also rewrote the about me page to make it more personal.
I’m pleased with the end result, but I’ll probably tinker with it a bit more as things come to mind.
Please let me know if anything looks wonky in your browser or if there’s something obvious that seems to be missing.
The other day Mike from 10000 Birds left a comment here. What startled me was the fact that there was a picture of him next to his comment in my admin interface. How the devil did he do that? I thought.
I checked the image properties and found that it was served by gravatar.com, a site that allows you to upload a picture and associate it with an email address. Then whenever you use that address to log into a forum or blog that supports gravatars, your picture comes up by your name.
The latest WordPress versions support this, and so I studied the default theme and adjusted my comments.php file to show gravatars. A little CSS styling to tweak and there it was.
If you comment here, consider visiting gravatar.com and signing up for a gravatar, then leave a comment and your gravatar will appear alongside your comment.
If you don’t have one, WordPress will just generate a little pattern. I can also set it to display cartoon monsters for each commenter. Should I do that? Hopefully nobody would be offended.
Want to add gravatars to your WordPress theme? Here’s how:
Simply open your theme’s comments.php file and add the following code (the 40 gives the size of the image in pixels):
< ?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 40 ); ?>
Before this line (assuming your comments.php is based on the default theme):
< ?php comment_author_link() ?> says:
You’ll probably need to make a few adjustments to your CSS as well. I just lifted these lines from the default theme’s style.css and adjusted them to suit my theme:
.commentlist li .avatar {
float: right;
border: 1px solid #eee;
padding: 2px;
background: #fff;
}
Easy as can be.
For more, visit the WordPress codex.
Last week, while trying to fix a plugin that had stopped working after the last WordPress upgrade, I noticed an odd bit of code. Upon further investigation with the use of Google’s text-only feature on their cached page search, I found that my blog had been hacked and turned into a spam blog.
Didn’t notice did you? Neither did I. I think it happened back in April. Basically, the hackers get in and hide hundreds of links in your header or footer that are then rendered invisible by some kind of CSS trick, all accomplished through the use of an invisible plugin.
Then your blog looks and works like it always did, but the Googlebots see hundreds of links to sites selling porn, gambling, and various pharmaceutical delights.
This appears to have happened back in April at exactly the time I quit blogging regularly so I never noticed. It seems hundreds of WordPress blogs were affected and so there is plenty of info out there about fixing this hack, both on the WordPress support forums and elsewhere.
Here’s what I discovered:
After reading up on this, I deleted everything from my directories that was not put there by me. I also deleted all the old subdirectories left over from my site’s first pre-blogging incarnation (while rediscovering the cool sky you now see in the background) and a very old test blog I created and never upgraded.
Then, I had to go into the mysql database, which forced me to learn a lot more about both mysql and phpmyadmin than I had ever known previously. Messing with the database is risky. As the warning says on the WordPress site, “with great power comes great responsibility.”
I figured it out, though. I was able to go into the database and delete the phantom user, turn off the phantom plugin and delete a mysterious table that shouldn’t have been there.
Had it not been for the following sites, I would not have had the foggiest idea how to do these things so big shout-outs to: BlogBuildingU.com, WordPress Philippines, Marketing.com, Ms. Adventures in Italy, and especially to Get Rich Slowly for their detailed instructions on dealing with the database cleanup. (How odd that 2 of these sites are from The Philippines and Italy, both countries in which I’ve lived).
The WordPress support forums were also helpful as always.
Once the database was cleaned up and the directories cleaned, I reinstalled the latest WordPress and changed every password associated with my web host and this blog. Probably a good thing to do from time to time anyway.
Now that the site is cleaned out and the hidden links are gone, I have to get back into Mr. Google’s good graces. The Googlebots have apparently determined that my site is a spam links blog and so my site no longer shows up in Google searches. I had noticed that my traffic dropped tremendously back in April, but I had assumed it was because I had slowed down on posting. Fortunately, Google has a tool in Google Webmasters to have a site reevaluated, so hopefully, my traffic will come back.
This wasn’t an awful experience. I was lucky and I managed to learn alot.
I am no longer afraid of phpMyAdmin and the mysql database (even if I don’t totally get them yet).
I was reminded of the importance of regular upgrades.
I was reminded of the importance of keeping my directories neat and clean.
I learned to periodically check over the code in my theme files and look at cached pages for anything that might be awry.
I learned about Google Webmaster Tools and the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, both very useful for anyone running a website.
I wrote a few months ago that one of the things I like about running a self-hosted WordPress is that I’m running more than just a blog, I’m running a website. That still holds true even if I have to spend a week dealing with the mess created by some worthless waste of skin who decided to use my blog as a tool in their nefarious link scheme.
For those who may be wondering about the missing comments issue this week, that was a totally unrelated thing. Two days after cleaning up the hack mess, my host had a problem with their mysql server that temporarily ate the comments and caused a few other problems, which they have happily fixed. Thanks to Kevin Dewalt and whooami for their help in figuring out that issue.
And, now, everything seems right with the cyberworld and hopefully, Mr. Google will come back too.
I’ve been at this blogging business for 3 years now so I mark the day with a post linking back to my first one, which originally was, and still is, on Blogger with my original blue look and everything.
Thursday’s post on Zen and the Art of Blogging is probably a better reflection of the whole blogging experience so I won’t delve back into that today.
Mainly, I want to think about obligations and hobbies. Or how this blog tried to become a blogligation. It was the Weekend (and later Friday) Hound Bloggings, the Monday Movie Roundups, the Friday Random Tens, the Old Photo Fridays, the write ups of every book I read from the time I started this blog until I made a conscious decision to stop back in March of this year.
Each day, I had a to-do list and the only remedy seemed to be a to-don’t list. And so the hobby, which had been fun, became more of a chore. I posted because I had to, not necessarily because I wanted to.
The lesson here at three seems to be that unless you’re doing this for money, do it for fun. For me, obligations are not fun. It’s something I try to remember but sometimes forget. It’s why I think carefully about setting goals involving things I love.
I know several people who try to read x number of books per year. I could never do that. I would begin to feel I had to do what I originally wanted to do, thereby crossing the line from having hobbies to hobbies having me.
Perhaps that’s why this blog became more and more about birds over the past year. Birds are a reminder of freedom, and while their lives are full of their own have-tos and necessities, there is nothing about the act of birding that makes me feel I have to do anything. Or be anything. I suspect I enjoy birding for many of the same reasons fishermen fish. I may not see a single bird, but I never consider it a waste of time.
Birding and writing have a similar effect on me as well. When I am through for the day with either activity, I am always surprised by the time, how much of it has gone by. It is like waking from a dream, and I feel refreshed and at peace.
Back to the top, and I can see that this site was a hobby that became an obligation, but by stepping away from it for a while, and only using it to express another hobby, the obligation seems gone and now, at three, I’m back to one.
I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His quest to understand Quality and his thoughts about the joy he finds in keeping his machine running have gotten me thinking about all kinds of things I do: writing, teaching, teaching writing, photography, blogging, and blog maintenance.
Mostly blog maintenance. First, I want to think about keeping it running as a piece of software on a machine as opposed to writing the content that appears on the screen.
Pirsig writes eloquently about the process of maintaining a motorcycle:
The thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind that does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.
[…]
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
The difficulty lies in the various traps that Pirsig labels value traps, truth traps and muscle traps. Falling into these traps steers one away from Quality, the idea the book explores.
The more I read, the more I realized I actually understand most of what he writes about motorcycle maintenance, but not because I know anything about motorcycles – I don’t – still, I’ve been there and have intuitively come to similar conclusions. Doing the backend maintenance necessary to run a self-hosted blog or any website, I assume, is exactly like motorcycle maintenance.
A question I frequently ask myself, though, is why bother. There are so many blogging platforms out there where all I would have to do is write and put up my posts. Why go to the trouble to maintain the thing myself? Why deal with upgrades that don’t go as planned and potentially could screw up the database? Why mess with plugins that sometimes gum up the whole system? Why bother with themes that break?
I think the questions led me to the same issue Pirsig wrestles with. It has to do with Quality. With the relationship between the machine, the user and the process. Spending hours tinkering with the backend code and pieces of this blog are not really about the blog. It’s never even noticed by anyone reading it.
It’s about learning. It’s about growing.
Pirsig writes:
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
It all has to do with “living right.”
There is beauty and joy… life… to be discovered in doing things fully and completely. The more I approach life’s tasks with a quiet peaceful mind, the more fully, I think, I live.
Now I need to think of maintenance in the broader sense as it applies to this blog. Like Pirsig’s motorcycle, the blog is a machine with an engine that makes it go (the WordPress software), and it is a vehicle that takes me places, in this case the writing, which transports me into my head as I do it.
(I must admit I wish it would transport me physically to the Montana Rockies like Pirsig’s bike, but all good things must have their limits, I suppose.)
Maintaining (in both senses of the word, now) my blog suddenly seemed more important because I came to see that it is through this process that I can stay in tune with these lessons about right living. It is because of the hours spent working on it, that I have been able to relate so easily to what Pirsig writes.
Further, he reminds me that:
If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?
[…]
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be as sloppy as the preceding six.
And so because maintaining a blog is two things – keeping it running and writing, I’m back.
For the backend aspect of maintenance, I upgraded to 2.6.2, which is why some things are a little off while I work through the kinks.
Because maintaining the blog also means writing, I am reminded that through writing here, I ensure that my thinking is at its sharpest and that I approach closer to true Quality whenever I write and especially when I am sitting down to focus on a manuscript.
I never really thought of this silly blog as a way of thinking about life, but as I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it is because of this blog that I know and understand exactly what Pirsig is talking about in his book.