Last night I did something crazy. I committed myself a grueling, month-long excursion into authoring an entire novel in one month. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I will be joining the thousands around the world participating in this crazy write-off. The goal is a 50,000 word novel, from scratch, in a month. But I think I can do it.
NaNoWriMo.org sponsors the event and has a little community going on on their site during the month of November. Jessica is going to be joining me in this quest. I’m really thankful for that. I am not sure I could make it through writing fiction every day for 30 days without some help and motivation.
There’s still time to sign up if this sounds like something you’d like to do. If you decide to, let me know here and we can be “writing buddies” and hopefully get through this huge challenge. I am really excited for it as writing a novel is something I’ve started and stopped several times over the last couple of years. This time, I’m going to finish.
I’m just guessing here, but I would expect my blogging to slow down a bit, though I will try to post excerpts from what I’m writing–that aren’t complete trash–to this blog. And if you are going to be writing for this, I’d love to give you a link in my blogroll and follow along with what you’re doing.
If you’ve stumbled here and are already a participant and need a writing buddy, click here to go to my NaNoWriMo author profile.
The writing starts tomorrow! I’m excited, nervous and a little intimidated. But let’s do it!
…is a little more humour. Laugh with me!
***JibJab’s player was killing Flash 9/10. But you should go to their site and watch the video. It’s hilarious.***
Diamond Rio PMP300
When my mom shipped presents to Jessica for her birthday she also included some of my old items left at my childhood home. The prize in that envelope was my Diamond Rio PMP300. One of the earliest MP3 players ever on the market and definitely the first in the US to gain ground in sales.
When I first got it it was awesome. Pretty large, but really great. Then one day it just stopped working. I always thought it was something with the battery bay because it just stopped powering up. It was pretty sad. Given, it only held about ten songs on its 32MB. But after it broke I moved on to a TDK Mojo MP3/CD hybrid player which, coincidentally, also broke after accompanying me to Europe and then to college 2002.
In any case, I worked on getting my PMP300 working again today. I opened it up and everything, but apparently I just needed to push a new AA battery into the battery bay. And it worked! There were nine songs still in the memory. Now all I need to do is see if my mom has the cable (which I think was serial… crap) and get a Win98SE virtual machine running… hmmmmmm.
Maybe it’ll replace my iPod Touch! Okay. No. Never. But I am going to take it to work tomorrow.
I convinced my boss to let me do something awesome. Something that’s right and good and will make everyone’s life easier.
I am moving our school’s news to a WordPress install in the coming month or so. Our current site is built in Joomla! which I absolutely hate. It’s not that it’s a bad CMS, it’s just not designed to do what we need it to, and we don’t have a full-time developer on staff.
So, I will be moving and then importing all of our archived news stories into WordPress and then using syndication feeds to target news content on the main Joomla! site. It’s going to be a lot easier for me.
See, WordPress by default builds an RSS feed for each category, tag, or everything. Which is great. That means I can place a story from the Management department in the “management” category as well as in the “School of Professional Studies” category and it will be included in both feeds. On top of that it will be included in our main news feed. When I want to place news from that department on their information page on EDU, I just have to grab the feed, shove it into a module and the latest stories will automagically show up on their pages.
And I can do that across the site. The other benefits I see are being able to add a more social element to our news content, adding more media – photos, video, podcasts, etc., and breaking away from our current habit of posting only news releases. Rather, we’ll be able to run a sort of year-round online magazine highlighting what our students and faculty are doing. This will go beyond our current alumni publication – I mean, there’s only so much you can put in a 26 page print publication. Instead, we can expand on that and drive people back to our website.
Can you tell I’m excited? One guy I met at the HighEdWeb conference handles his school’s news in WordPress already. And it’s working out great.
I’m excited to start developing it and see where I get. At the very least we’ll have greater control over our content and that will make me a happier camper.
I work for a small college (1600 total) in Southern Illinois, about 45 miles East of St Louis, MO. I work in the Office of Advancement which includes PR, Development (giving), Alumni Relations and Web. My entire department has 14 people in it at the moment. Everyone is in everyone’s business.
This also means that I end up working a lot of weekends. Not only am I the web guy but I’m also videographer and photographer for events. Such as Homecoming this weekend. I have to get up early in the morning tomorrow and go take photos of the Panther 5k run, then the women’s alumni volleyball game, and finally an alumni luncheon.
Jessica and I are also very nice people. We let our friends stay with us when they come out for these things. Even if it’s over, say, Jessica’s birthday which happens to be today. Yes, tonight we have a friend coming to stay with us. Which is fine. I really wanted to take Jessica out for her birthday at some point near the actual date.
We also need to go buy coffee. This has been a blah week. But the election is less than two weeks away, which means I won’t have to listen to arguments and discussions anymore. Or get stressed out by them. Instead I can read and study more history so that I am even better informed for the next election.
I’m tired. I’m tired of my work and of being blocked from actually making improvements where they need to be made. I haven’t heard yet about my grad school app and probably won’t until after the first of the year. Maybe as far away as March. But I’m praying all the time I’m accepted so that we can leave here and start doing something more fun/worthwhile.
We read Twilight. It was “eh” – we’ll read the second one but I might actually write a review of the first novel in the saga. I think I might start doing book review/reports here. That might be fun. And an incentive to finish reading the mountain I’ve already started.
I have pretty much finished moving the wgrn.net WP template from Sandbox to stripped-down, cleaned-out, custom code. It feels good.
Now I’m just waiting to be able to http in at work. Seems to work outside of our network but not inside. I think the admins are working on that.
Check the site out later on if you feel like it. I’d like to hear your comments on it. I call the template “Green Modern” and will be releasing it to the WordPress template directory at some point.
***UPDATE
It’s up. I can’t ftp in unless I’m on campus (vpn’s been acting up lately), so I’ve got a couple of things to work on tomorrow. But it’s up and you can see it. Click here.
So. Automattic, the company that created and maintains WordPress (which this blog is built upon) also owns a technology called Gravatar.
Basically, Gravatar.com serves up universal avatars to a ton of sites, including this blog. In fact, my current gravatar can be seen in the header, behind the cloud. Also, you’ll notice pictures or grey boxes next to comments. Those are all served up by gravatar.
And the cool thing is that you have one account that handles your avatar for every site that uses Gravatar. And the list of sites is growing. WordPress now features gravatars by default in all of their blogging services.
In any case, the service is free, you can link different avatars with different email addresses, and it makes sites look better! So if you don’t have a Gravatar yet, click here to get one.
Hearsay