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Wondering if I’m capable

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I’ve been asked to present at a conference and as the time looms closer my foe – self doubt – is creeping in. I’m trying not to let it take over but it’s almost crippling me to the point of paralysis. I’m presenting on the importance of effective information architecture and I don’t want to regurgitate the mountain of information that’s already out there.

Even though I’ve nearly reached the point of paralysis about what to say, I have started putting notes together. Finding examples takes lots time so if anyone knows of any websites that present their information extremely well, or not, please let me know. As it is I will be finalising this presentation during my holidays which is not what I had planned.

Then of course there’s the delivery of the presentation. I have presented before, but don’t do it very often and haven’t done it for ages. I would rather get up and sing them a song than present to them. Having said that, I used to be scared of doing that but because I’ve done it a few times I’m not so scared now. Again, any tips here would be good.

In the meantime I’m well into my secondment at work and crossing my fingers that everything will work out okay there too.

All I can say is be careful what you wish for. If I remember rightly I was saying a few months ago that I was ready for a change. Now changes have been thrust upon me and it’s kind of overwhelming.

I’m hoping I will look back upon this time and think that I freaked out over nothing.

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WordPress stylesheet help, and some feedback

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Karen at Misc Mum has asked for some WordPress help and feedback. I thought rather than just reply in her comments, I’d do a post incase others might find this type of information useful.

Some people have mentioned that they find the font too small. Indeed, I’ve had this thought too. Is there somewhere in the template pages that this can be modified painlessly and with little chance of me buggering everything up and leaving a Misc Mum hole in the websphere the size of Chernobyl?

Yes, this is really easy to do by editing the style.css file but before fiddling around with this back it up just in case.

In your WordPress admin, select Presentation, then Theme Editor as shown in the diagram below. (click to view larger image) The style.css file is the one that opens by default and this is the one that you have to edit to change the look of your website/blog. Look for the style about ‘body’. You might have to scroll down a bit but you will know when you see something under ‘body’ that has a font-size element included. The ‘body’ information in the diagram below is actually copied from Misc Mum’s site so if she changes .9em to 1em to start experimenting with her font size it should change the font size across the whole website.

I haven’t got admin access to Misc Mum’s website files, but anyone can see anyone else’s stylesheet information if they know how to look as it’s clearly defined within the <head> </head> tags of websites.

Edit style.css in WordPress template

Important to note is that this can affect all the other font size styles across the website like headings, which she might not want to do. However, upon looking at Misc Mum’s stylesheet she has a ‘content’ div which as far as I can figure out defines how the content in her blog is displayed. The current content div looks like this (it’s also in the above style.css file):

#content {
  float: left;
  width: 480px;
  display: inline;
  text-align: left;
  border-right: 1px dotted #4c7578;
  margin-top: 10px;
  padding-left: 10px;
  padding-right: 10px;
  margin-bottom: 10px;
  padding-bottom: 10px;
  font-size: .8em;}

If she leaves the body font-size alone, and just changes the font-size in the content div above from .8em to .9em or 1em, then it should just change the information within the content section of her blog and leave most, or all, other font sizes alone.

When I’m editing my style.css file, which is what I did to considerably change my blog’s theme, I usually change one thing, save it, view the blog and see what else it has affected. I’m a big experimenter and as I said at the beginning, if you completely stuff up, then you’ve got your backup all ready to copy over the stuff-up so you’re back to square one.

Back to Karen’s feedback request, she says,

Adam thinks my sidebars are too cluttered. I went “Huh?” I thought they were okay.” What do you think?

Personally I’m in for a fairly clean look and this site does take a little too long to load for me at home with my not so fast broadband connection because of what has to load. I think it’s good that the content is on the left column because at least people can read this while the rest of the site loads.

Therefore I would suggest moving the ‘Proudly supporting’ graphics to a new page, perhaps the About me page? Also as bloggers get various awards, these can clutter up the sidebar too. I’d suggest as the awards are over, move them into their own page too. Personally if I want to find out more about a blogger I’ll go and read these pages to see what they’ve achieved and so on.

I note that there’s a blogroll on the main pages and Blogroll also has it’s own separate page. From a usability perspective this is immediately confusing because it’s not obvious if they’re the same or different, so I’d consolidate the Blogroll. Similarly is it necessary to have Quick archives in the sidebar when there’s an Archives link at the top? I’d also move the Site info to the footer.

Lastly, Karen asks about some plugins she’s using. I don’t use any of them so can’t comment, but if I can’t get a plugin to work I just leave it and find something else or just don’t bother. Keep in mind that some plugins are flaky and they can also add to the time it takes for a site to load so tread carefully with them.

I hope this information is useful and if anyone has any questions about it please let me know.

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Paper bag over head

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Every now and again I look at my weblog stats – who am I kidding I look at them far too much. This month there was a definite theme in the search terms so I thought I’d share one of my older posts with you again. The search terms were along the lines of ‘paper bag face’, ‘paper bag head’, ‘paper bag on head’, you get the idea.

I found I used to get way to caught up in arguments with my son. Every parent knows, or has learnt, that it is pointless to carry on arguing with someone who hasn’t developed the skill of logic yet.

Read all about how a brown paper bag over your head with an ugly face drawn on can diffuse these pointless arguments.

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Fantastico updating – hrrrrmpphh!

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I thought I’d update my version of WordPress. One click install they said. Naaaah, didn’t work for me. I’ll be doing it the manual way which is much quicker if the steps are followed correctly. It just took me nearly four hours to restore this blog because of my failed update. I probably did it the long way, but it’s worked.

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Headaches

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Yesterday we had a work conference. The conference included a dinner and I’d organised childcare so I could stay. What’s not to like about going to a restaurant with adults and eating dinner without having to content with a child, even if it is with work colleagues. So at around 4pm when the headache I’d had on and off all day started to kick in with a vengeance I was quite annoyed. I’d just taken more headache tablets which weren’t working and the current speaker probably thought I was quite rude because I sat there with my head in my hands for most of the time. I went to the next breakout session just incase the headache might go away and it did not, and I went home.

I still got my sister to pick JJ up from after school care so I could lie in bed. At6.30 I got up and had some vegemite on toast which I had a real craving for all of a sudden. My sister went home and JJ and I sat up watching Friends. I still had the headache.

JJ, bless his heart, wondered if I was sick because he’d been a grumpy bum that morning. I can’t even remember why now, but it was while we were out walking Monty he became whiny and grumpy. I told him it wasn’t because of that. He was very helpful though. He put iceblock rubbish into the bin, he put my plate on the sink, and filled up my water bottle. In addition to my headache, my head was whirling with pride and wonder at this really good boy. But I couldn’t sit up any longer and we both went to bed.

I woke up this morning still wearing my shorts and t-shirt I’d gone to bed with and felt like I’d been hit by a truck, well maybe not quite but I definitely had a headache hangover. Or was it a migraine? I don’t know the difference between a headache and migraine. I never used to get these incapacitating headaches. Like my hayfever it’s only developed recently and I don’t like it.

Today I helped JJ out with his swimming at school. He did just fine until we got into the changeroom then he started crying and saying that his head hurt. I asked him where it hurt and he said it hurt inside his head. He kept whinging and carrying on so I ended up bringing him home, giving him some headache medicine and putting him to bed. That lasted about ten minutes. He’s now eating his lunch and will be going back to school when he’s finished. I don’t know what it was all about. He didn’t want to get out of school because he’s quite happy to go back.

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Moving from Typepad to WordPress

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About one month ago I moved from a Typepad hosted weblog to a WordPress.org hosted weblog. There were a few reasons for this. I wanted to consolidate my blogs. I only have two, but one was on WordPress and this one was on Typepad. This meant that I was paying for two lots of hosting. Also I wanted more control over my blog, ie being able to put stuff where I wanted, using some of the great WordPress plugins and I couldn’t do this on the Typepad plan I was using and I didn’t want to upgrade.

It took me a few months of just thinking about whether I really wanted to do it or not and I finally bit the bullet, sought out a web host and read up on how the best way might be to move my blog so that links still worked. I wish I’d done the move at the same time I bought my own domain which would have made it a bit simpler but it was still doable.

I researched lots on the internet and while there is some information out there everyone has a different story so the articles I found usually didn’t quite fit what I wanted to do and these weren’t as detailed as I would have liked. This is understandable as people don’t have to write detailed how-tos but it would have been nice.

I spent a lot of time finding a WordPress theme I liked. I wanted a clean looking, SEO friendly, three column theme and didn’t feel quite ready to do my own. I ended up using the Seashore free WordPress theme and changed it fairly considerably. While I didn’t want to build my own theme I am quite comfortable fiddling around with stylesheets and templates.

The most applicable set of instructions I found was at scale|free. Instructions at WordPress.org were quite useful also.

  • I found a web host I hoped to be happy with, and got a plan where I can have more than one weblog. They have an easy WordPress install feature which takes less than a minute.
  • I exported my blog in Typepad (Manage, Import/Export). This feature saves a .txt file. I opened up this file and changed all the jaycee.typepad.com references to www.semanticallydriven.com – a hangover from before I started using my own domain.
  • Because I wanted to keep using my blog’s address while I was setting up and testing the new site I had to come up with a domain for testing. scale|free said he added a virtual host and an alias but no manner of researching this and asking questions helped me figure out how to do this so I was lucky that I’ve got a parked domain which I used instead. The downside with this is that when I imported my Typepad content, people thought my blog content was being scraped. I then notified readers that I was moving and testing and to watch out for funny things that might happen.
  • Importing the Typepad content was really easy and quick. Then the hard work started.
  • WordPress and Typepad use a different permalink structure. Follow these instructions for changing the permalink structure to be what it was.
    • However, some of my Typepad permalinks used dashes and some used underscores. I don’t know why but I guess this is something Typepad did. After I’d imported the blog content, I managed to do a printout of the post names from one of the SQL tables so I could see what WordPress had called them. I then sat down in front of the computer and compared them to what Typepad had called them. To change underscores to dashes I ran this SQL Query on the wp_posts table in the WordPress MySQL database 
      UPDATE wp_posts SET post_name=REPLACE(post_name, '_', '-')
WHERE post_date > '2007-21-07'

      So, on Typepad, until 20 July 2007 my posts used underscores in the permalink, then they started using dashes but the import into WordPress and the underscore permalink plugin changed everything to underscores meant I had to change the posts from 21 July onwards to dashes. It took me ages to figure this out and if anyone can see any flaws in this please let me know because I might have it back to front. As with anything like this, do a backup for goodness sake so you can restore if need be.

  • When testing, I noticed that my categories had the word ‘category’ in the URL and I didn’t want this. I therefore installed the Top level categories plugin.
  • I did as much testing as I could handle while rejigging the theme as mentioned above.
  • When I was happy enough with it for releasing I did a backup before I changed the domain name to www.semanticallydriven.com. It takes a day or two for this to make itself known on the web but this has to happen before you can change the original feed details in Feedburner.
  • I’d also installed the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin.
  • Other plugins I’m using:

I’m still going through the blog and fixing up images as I didn’t copy all my images from Typepad. They might never all be fixed.

I think I lost some RSS subscribers who’d subscribed using Typepad’s RSS feed and not my Feedburner one as my subscriber numbers did drop around this time. Of course, this could be due to other reasons.

My final word of advice to you would be if the thought of doing this frightens you to bits I’d suggest finding someone who can do it for you. It will be worth it. I spent quite a bit of time doing all of this.

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Christmas presents

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Christmas presentSome people might think that blogging is a waste of time and if you’re blogging you’re not doing anything else. This is partly true but I’ve found that blogging gives me the impetus to get off my ass and do stuff too. The other day I was wondering if I ignored Christmas would it go away? The main reason for this was that I hadn’t started Christmas shopping and had no idea what to get people.

The very next day I went to the shops and started. It was a slow start but a start nonetheless. Yesterday was pretty good though too. I went to the local huge shopping centre which I hate doing because of all the people and because it’s awful trying to find a park. I would have caught the bus but lugging shopping on a bus and not being able to dump some stuff in the car as I went wasn’t an option. I also had to do some food shopping.

I drove into the car park and went to a part that I never normally go to and a woman leaving pointed down to where she’d just been and I drove straight into a vacant car park space. This hardly ever happens for me so I went into the shopping centre on a positive note. I think this helped make the difference.

Christmas tree lightsI still had no clear idea of what I was going to get people, apart from my son, but I ended up buying for nearly everyone, except my son, and am very happy with my haul.

I got inspired by games, outdoor lights, novels and dvds. I also want to do a donation to a charity. For the last couple of years we’ve bought a present to donate to the Smith Family christmas tree which we’ll do again this year and it’s something I can involve my son in. I’ll be looking at doing something else as well.

To fully start getting into the Christmas spirit, the tree has gone up and I’ve got the cards ready to write in and send to those who live far away.

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