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Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently learned that a controversy brewed about the real use of the editorial calendar. I’m new to this tool of the writing business, but I never realized that such a tool could have so many sides. Who knew that which deadline date one uses was controversial?

Here you have spreadsheet with columns and rows of items. Columns, for me, relate to the days of the week. The rows house the activities required for those days. Some people use the opposite approach. Call me traditional with calendars. Days belong across the top of the sheet.

Those activities plugged into the spreadsheet range from book chapters that must go to a critique partner/group to poem revisions necessary before submitting a packet to a magazine. Everything goes on the calendar; at least in my work world. I also need to allot for time spent on said activity. I know. I’m a bit anal due to having so many projects on the board.

The one thing that I don’t understand about this calendar debate is why it exists. Yes, some writers use a submission deadline date supplied by the magazine, publisher, agent, etc. Others like me, like lots of cushion to account for unforeseen circumstances, and plug a project into a day prior to the actual deadline date.

Isn’t it a matter of needs?

Everyone has a specific way of thinking about work and deadlines. I see deadlines as finite walls. There are no doors in those walls. If I can’t make a deadline, it’s my fault. I knew it was there. I knew what I needed to do. If I don’t make it, it’s because I didn’t prepare adequately to get the job done. It’s really that simple.

In order to make the deadline, I place a date a few days prior to that of the finite wall. In the back of my mind, I know that cushion is built in. In the day-to-day work, though, that realization tends to disappear. My calendar tells me that I need to have something done on a specific day. And that’s what I do.

Others may not need that cushion. They work better under pressure to make deadline. That’s how their creativity erupts; but a sense of immediate need.

I work on a monthly calendar and a weekly one. One gives a longer overview, especially because of coursework I need to keep in mind. The short week calendar gives me detail on upcoming work and deadlines. They operate in tandem to give me all I need to keep my activity level constant.

I haven’t been doing a calendar prior to May. I don’t enjoy the time spent creating them. For me, it’s tedious, but the hour or two I spend on those spreadsheets saves me tons in frus

I am tidying up here because it is just starting to feel like Autumn and I was looking at a friend’s website and realizing that not only was their About page out of date, it had them living in the wrong country. Now, for a lot of people a personal website is basically just that, personal. For me since I sometimes solicit or receive work through librarian.net I figured I’d maybe do a little tidying, look professional, that sort of thing. So I updated my about page, am reading through the FAQ, made sure WordPress was up to date and updated my plugins. I also disabled the theme switcher which was a fun thing when I wanted to have four different looking versions of this site, but I’m not feeling that way any more. Apologies to people who enjoyed the other themes. Next on the to do list is getting my Talks page a little more streamlined. I don’t think it has to be an eight year list of talks I’ve given and it’s not really sending the message I want.

So, just a little inward-facing user experience stuff and a reminder that to many people our web presence is an awful lot of what they know about us. May want to make sure it’s looking okay. Otherwise I’m trying to relax in the spirit of the Virgo Month of Leisure and get ready for my teaching and drop-in time to start which is happening next week. The cooler winds are starting to blow in and I am ready to start hunkering down.

Recently I’ve been importing the ancient Librarian Avengers archives to live within WordPress. Because the site goes back to…hrm… 1997, there’s some data munging to do.

Right now I’m concerning myself with the period after Graduate School, when I moved to Ithaca, NY for an ostensibly-cool digital library fellowship. I couldn’t talk about how much I hated it at the time so the entries are mostly tangential to the work I was doing, but there’s still some fun stuff.

Importing ancient blog posts involves a bunch of tagging, titling, category-setting, and general modernization. I’ve been progressively making my way through the old posts, adding images, fixing spelling mistakes, and generally adding a bit of polish.

Part of the reason I’m taking on data scrubbing as my One Designated Personal Thing to Do this evening, is that today has been a study in helplessness. My daughter has a (small) fever. It’s the first time she’s been sick, and I’m trying to direct my need to control something (anything!) in a positive direction.

Also, cleaning data is pretty therapeutic after some of the body fluids I’ve encountered recently.

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Yes, folks, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. There is yet another challenge for the writers who just can’t stand going without one.

I found this particular one when I joined the BlogHer Network a couple of days ago. The challenge is to write a themed blog post each day for the given month, in this case, February.

BTW, this should in no way intimidate or discourage any writer from picking up the gauntlet of that have beaten back many a writer. After all, there are many writers and other bloggers who already post each day. I know, because I used to be one of them.

According to the BlogHer challenge, February’s theme is “Relative,” meaning that each post must have something to do with family in one form or another.

Now, having redefined what constitutes “family” many times across the span of my life, I don’t seriously feel challenged as to topic. I have entire state’s worth of pseudo-family to draw from.

What might concern me, if I allow myself to think about it for more than a nanosecond, is the fact that I have three blogs—not counting an inactive one in the UK—which might, technically, fall under the auspices of this challenge.

Should I be held accountable for only one of my blogs each day, or, do I have to include all of them in the challenge?

That’s a big question and one I have only a few days to answer before beginning the keyboard shuffle.

I’m counting on all of you to help me with this decision. Am I supposed to do all three—that includes Trailing Inspirations on WordPress—or can I muddle through doing only one of them? And if only one, which one—Claudsy’s Calliope on Blogspot, or Claudsy’s Blog on WordPress?

Comments are encouraged, indeed, required on this one, peeps. HELP ME DECIDE!

Claudsy

Are you experiencing issues when you post a comment on our blog?  If so, you’re not alone.  A couple of slicers emailed us last night to tell us they couldn’t post a comment on yesterday’s call for slices.  Therefore, I’ve checked the WordPress Forums to see what’s happening and the good news is that it’s [...]

Are you experiencing issues when you post a comment on our blog?  If so, you’re not alone.  A couple of slicers emailed us last night to tell us they couldn’t post a comment on yesterday’s call for slices.  Therefore, I’ve checked the WordPress Forums to see what’s happening and the good news is that it’s [...]

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

So I’ve decided to switch to ProgPress by Jason Penny as my Wordpress plugin (see my right-hand navigation bar, partway down the page) because I can list multiple writing projects within the same widget.

I avoided the plugin at first because (at first glance, at least), it looked more complicated than the other choices, plus the user documentation needs a bit of help. However, I like the flexibility and customization possibilities of this app. Here’s a quickie tutorial on how you can use it for your own Wordpress blog:

1. Download the plugin.

2. Activate the plugin (Appearance -> Widgets).

3. Adjust the settings to what you want (Settings -> ProgPress):

Here are the settings I used to show the progress bars in a text widget. I’m assuming that checking “Display in posts” will add the bars to ever blog post, which I didn’t want.

Here’s what I put in the text widget:

I couldn’t figure out what that third numeric field was for. It’s labelled as “PreviousCount” but it didn’t seem to have any effect so I just put “xxx.” I’m going to e-mail Jason for info.

I’ve haven’t done much customizing yet (colour, size of bar, etc.), plus I’ll probably add some text at the top of the widget with a link to the graphic novel blog I maintain with Beckett Gladney.

And you can see the results at the top of this page. Um, I haven’t started the rewrite of my new sf/fantasy novel yet.

Anyway, it wasn’t as complicated as I had anticipated. If you’re still intimidated by the above, however, you may want to stick with a plugin like the Scribometer, though it currently only supports one project at a time.

ibrarian?

Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.

It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.

Drop me a note if you are going. :)

-Erica

This post is going to be random and all over the place- you have been warned.

I thought using WordPress would save me time to paint more but I have become more than a little obsessed with it.

I’ve been really busy working on a web site project for a local Parish Council as well as tweaking my web site some more (I know I should stop at some point), so I haven’t done that much painting lately.

I can’t show the Parish Council website yet because it hasn’t been officially launched yet, but I’ve really learned a lot from working on it.

I have also been learning a lot more about web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). It is very interesting thinking about how many people may view one web page in a different way. I’ve implemented many of the techniques on this web site and the Parish Council project I’m working on.  I’ll have to write up an accessibility statement at some point I guess.

Yesterday I went to the Festival of Quilts ¹ at Birmingham International with my aunt and mum. There were loads of really beautiful arty quilts everywhere and I had a good time looking at all the buttons and beads. I might be inspired to do some more sock monkeys at some point. There was one thing in the whole place that really caught my eye- it was a Korean exhibit: Chunghie Lee: Pojagi & Beyond – My Cup Overflows, I just thought it was beautiful.

Today I mowed the lawns and saved a butterfly.

Now for tea.

I’ve been scooting around a little bit lately and here are some things that have been crossing my virtual desk. I’ve also dealt with two wordpress issues [a hack! and an outdated sidebar navigation element] and I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. If you’re on a Summer schedule, I’d suggest upgrading before things get hectic.

• A small and to the point help save our library blog from the William Leonard Public Library in Robbins Illinois. More about their library’s financial crisis.
• Ralph has some space for a new library at the Canadian Aerospace Warfare Center and no idea how to do it. He’s built a little wiki. maybe people have advice?
• Bernie Margolis, now the State Librarian of NY after leading Boston Public Library for a long time, is quoted in a library Journal article saying that ALA and its allies should be stepping up to demand more library access for the scanned books that will be made available via the Google Books Settlement, if and when that happens.
• LSW fundraiser for the LFPL, one week left. Don’t know what those acronyms are? Click the link!

This is a little update to what I’ve been doing in the past months involving art, WordPress,  coding and life in general. There’s a few links to useful things I’ve found recently as well.

I now have a new part time job which I am enjoying very much: it’s easily the best job I’ve ever had, and am also in the process of getting ready to move to another area of the country to be with my fiancé. Lets just say life is looking a lot better than it was 2 years ago. I may write a post/essay on that one day if I have nothing better to do with my time (perhaps not then).

I took up my martial arts and yoga again over the past 2 years and sorted a few things out with my confidence and fitness in general which hopefully will one day reflect on my artwork. I can nearly kick my head again, but not quite.

I’ve also been working since last year on a WordPress CMS website project and a picture book project to keep my skills up and learn new things. I will go into more detail as the projects develop later in the year.

Here’s a few useful things I found on the inter-web recently for you as you’ve read this far:

Useful WordPress plugins

PHPEnkoder (automatically encrypts emails on web page to stop email spam)

WP-Cycle (J Query image slide show)

Members (I’m keeping my eye on this one, looks very promising for user management)

Free Software

Backup tool, FreeFileSync (useful for flash drives and secondary hard drive backup)

Password manager, KeePass

Some minor changes to the header.php and a new template for a portfolio index added.

Download the updated theme in the resources section.

Copyright © 2010

New illustrative website design and build for a water chlorination company in Shropshire: Water Clean Services Ltd.

Completely customised and original design. A content management website based on open source content management system Wo

WordPress.com has grown into one of the most amazing cloud architectures in the world. This has enabled blogs hosted here to have features unavailable on self-hosted WordPress installs. This makes us sad, since here at WordPress.com we want every WordPress install everywhere to be amazing.

In this spirit, we have great news. We are now making the power of WordPress.com available to almost all WordPress blogs, regardless of where they are hosted.

With Jetpack, a new plugin from Automattic, people not on WordPress.com can now access features that depend on WordPress.com. Jetpack also provides convenience features that don’t use the cloud, but are now easier to install, or were unavailable as plugins before.

To start, go to http://jetpack.me and read the backstory from Matt on why Jetpack is so important for WordPress.

(Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on the use of the name.)

Children’s book illustrators,  like all artists, can reach their markets and audiences more easily than ever before, thanks to the Internet!

And I believe that WordPress, the open source content management system is one of the best ways to establish a presence on the web.

Erik Kuntz, designer, web consultant, instructor and web comic artist feels the same way I do about WordPress. Except he knows tons more about it than I do.  He consults with small businesses and big companies on this stuff.  (He’s also the intrepid webmaster of our Austin, Texas SCBWI chapter.)

Erik (standing, right) is joined by Austin illustrators and writers Don Tate, Christy Stallop, Amy Farrier, Torran Anderson, Louise Shelby, Ross Carnes and Martin Thomas.

A couple of weeks ago he conducted a special online workshop session for my Make Your Marks; Make Your Splashes class.

He did a brilliant presentation, showing us different ways to put up our illustration galleries on our WordPress blogs.  By galleries  I mean the tiny thumbnail pictures you click on to see much larger higher res versions of them.  After showing us a trick for doing it on WordPress.com blogs, he showed us how to do it on our WordPress.org blogs using the free plug-in, NextGen Gallery.

Alas, things do not always work out perfectly.  The recording did not take.

We were all so counting on the replay.  Erik shared so much with us that it was hard to get it all down in our notes!  I did what I had to:  Asked him if he’d be willing to walk us through the workshop again.

He agreed to — characteristically, because he’s a helpful soul.

So we’re doing the same w