Writing Viewpoints

You’ve started over, haven’t you? Even if it is not the entirety of your life, you’ve thrown something out — a writing project — and just started over.

When I started blogging, I tied everything to my personal site at scotherrick.com. I had a business site, writing site, and a photo site (which was surprisingly hard to maintain!).

I thought at the time that everything should be tied to my name — my brand, so to speak.

But after a lot of hard looking, I determined that it would be better to separate out my named site with new sites associated with unique brands. Consequently, I went out and got a domain name for Cube Rules, a business site about Career Management for Cubicle Warriors; Ten Keyboards, a writing site about Technology for Writers; and my K9JY site, a ham radio contesting site which I carried over as part of my ham radio hobby.

Scot Herrick hangs out there as a chad, though I am in the process of turning into my site that will have my business and writing resumes as well as a place to (finally) put some of the personal stuff that fits my brand as a blog.

As I am writing this on Sunday night, I am deleting the files associated with the old blogs — BizBlog, WriteBlog, and PhotoBlog, as part of the old Scot Herrick site.

It is like saying goodbye to old friends. When I started blogging over two years ago, I did not know where it would lead, how I would blog, or what I would learn.

Blogging has turned into something wonderful — the discipline, content, connections and new friends are incredibly fulfilling. But the beginning, the original start, was built on my best thoughts at the time and, as I am writing this, the FTP program is deleting the files, the folders — my work — into the electronic ether, never to be seen again.

Those blogs helped me grow. They helped me get to where I am now. It is sad to see them go.

I never thought electronic folders, thoughtfully placed thousands of miles away at my hosting site, would have me pause and reflect. But, it’s the work, the effort, and the learning that passes by in the electronic night. It is the realization that I’ve moved on.

A toast to the past! And, with no regrets, continuing to move on.

Scot

Mind mapping software allows a writer to construct information around a central topic and then add sub-topics with details or other sub-topics. It is a structured way to document unstructured thinking.

Mind maps are used all of the time in business, but what about for writers?

Over at Grow Your Writing Business, Yvonne did a review of a mind mapping program. It was a standard review of a software program and her mind map example has a great illustration of a mind map in action, using the mind map to help decide if she should change the topic of her blog.

In the comments, I offered five ways mind mapping software could be used by a writer. After looking at the comment, I decided it should really be an article here on Ten Keyboards because that’s what I do here: write about how technology can help writers.

Here are five uses of mind mapping software for writers:

1. Build out the characteristics of your characters in your book. You can have a branch for “John” and sub branches for work, family, history or whatever you want to build out about a character. Add to it as you learn things and refer to it when writing the book. Same thing with places as settings in your book.

2. In a non-fiction book, build your topics. At some point, you can put them all into a table of contents, but at least all the information on the topic is in one place.

3. Take notes at a writer’s conference (or any meeting). I did this for each of my sessions in the last writer’s conference I went to and then took the last five minutes of the session to highlight those things that I wanted to do myself based upon the session. It was very easy for me to refer back to the notes and, based upon the amount of highlighted topics I identified, which sessions were most useful to me.

4. Project plans. Usually, projects have some general areas that need to be done and then specific steps that need to happen. Each of the branches on a mind map can be used for a particular subject area of a project (think of all the things to build a writer’s conference session, for example — subject areas, resources, leave-behind materials, etc. — all can be a branch off of a central project of “Technology for Writers“ session)

5. Brainstorming on any particular subject of writing. Capturing these ideas and then subsequently organizing them into coherent possible actions is perfect for mind mapping.

The cool thing about mind maps is that they allow you to “just get it down” and then easily move what you have written around into something that makes sense for you. It’s not the fact that things go into a particular bucket that has mind map appeal; it’s the fact that you can get whatever out of your head and then effortlessly arrange what was in your head into a way that you can organize it and understand it.

Consequently, people with very different ways of organizing things can be very successful with a mind map because the software flexibly organizes information the way you want to see it.

Hat tip to Yvonne for writing the article that inspired this: Choosing Another Blog Topic — Mind Map Review.

Scot

Every blog gets spam comments. These are the weird machine generated comments that proclaim Viagra is the best thing ever and it’s attached to your blog article about dangling participles, so to speak.

Fortunately, there are some very good spam control plugins for your WordPress blog. Here are the ones that I use for controlling (not eliminating) spam:

Akismet

The standard anti-spam plugin most all WordPress blogs use is Akismet. Akismet checks your comments against their database and see if they look like spam or not. You can look at your spam (woo-hoo!) for 15-days and then the program will delete it from the database. If your WordPress installation doesn’t come with this standard, go grab it.

Bad Behavior

I tried this plugin just for the name! Bad Behavior operates a little bit differently than Akismet. Instead of after-the-fact seeing a comment and then comparing it to a spam database (everything is past tense, so to speak), Bad Behavior instead looks at the behavior of the “spambot” as it is looking at your database and denies access. Spambots, believe me, operate differently than cool users.

Obfuscate E-mail

I loved this name too. Since all of us would like to have people contact us via E-mail, spammers come into a site looking for e-mail addresses to spam. I don’t like that. What Obfuscate E-mail does is take the html coding of your E-mail addresses and turn the address into hexadecimal idiocy known only to the plugin. E-mail passes wonderfully through the system, but machines can’t translate random idiocy any better than humans can.

TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter

A plugin that does a simple sanity check to stop really obvious comment spam before it’s processed. Why waste your blogs resources on obvious spam comments?

Does spam still make it through the Ten Keyboards blog in spite of four plugins for controlling it? Yes. Humans are very inventive when it comes to creating code to sell or phish you. So the last thing I do for comment spam is that I moderate comments. All comments need to be approved by me before making it to the blog.

Now, I have no issues with real comments — they are encouraged. But, if I left the comments to be done without moderation, I’d end up with Viagra competing with dangling participles — and my Mom wouldn’t like that.

Scot

One of the great options for WordPress blogging software is the ability to add in “plugins” to the software to provide for extra functionality — usually functionality that a nice code person has done and then provided an interface for the rest of us to easily use the functionality.

Since plugins are used in many different functions, there are literally hundreds of them out there.

For example, one of the plugins I use is called “Democracy.” It gives me the ability to easily set up a “poll” on the blog. I can write the question, determine the answer options to the poll, decide if I want users to be able to add answers outside of the one I’ve written, and after voting, see the results.

Pretty nifty, isn’t it?

It really is. The problem with plugins is that they don’t always work. There are some reasons for this:

• The plugin is not compatible with your version of software. Right now, the recommended version of WordPress for your blog is 2.2. Of the hundreds of plugins out there, few have actually documented testing on version 2.2 so that you know it works. If your latest plugin is OK with 2.+, does that mean compatible with 2.2? Only installing it will let you find out. The deal is, you usually need to upgrade the WordPress software and will do so without knowing if your plugins will break. A conundrum.
• The plugin is not compatible with your theme. Off the shelf themes, modified themes, or custom themes, it matters not. Something between your theme and the coding of the plugin makes things not work right. For example, I installed a comments theme that would allow a bit easier writing of comments by my users. But, the plugin broke my theme (different one than the one I’m using today) by not displaying the comments correct in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• The plugin is not compatible with another plugin you are currently using. Similar code, similar structure, accessing the database…it’s a conflict. Again, you won’t know until you try the plugin out.

What’s a writer to do?

The key on plugins is to match what they do with the functionality you want for your blog.

If you have a lot of pages that are nested and want a plugin that manages the nesting (putting a plus out there and then clicking on the plus to show the sub-pages, for example), make sure the plugin says it will do the function.

Check the compatibility of the plugin.

If the web page says that it works in WordPress 2.2, that’s a good sign. That doesn’t clear the other two hurdles of working with your theme or all your other plugins, but it helps. If the plugin says it’s compatible with 2.+, you pick your cards and take your chances.

Install the plugins one at a time.

It’s tempting, after devoting a day to finding cool plugins, to simply upload all of them to your blog, activate them…and then find nothing works. Did you add five plugins all at once? You have about 25 possible problems. The way around this is to activate one plugin at a time. Then check the functionality of the plugin on your blog in Firefox and Internet Explorer to make sure it works as advertised.

Plugins are really a great help. But, help yourself as well and safely install your plugins to ensure they do what you want them to do on your blog.

Speaking of the Democracy Plugin…here’s a poll:

Scot