All posts by Jen D

Philosophy

Niches

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One of the things I’m trying to work out is my niche in the greater world. What do I do? What do I have to offer?

I really like working with WordPress, but when i think about theme design, or writing a plugin, there are so many good ones that I have no idea where to start, what I can bring to the table to stand out. What is my place, where can I get my thing?

That’s the next level, and it’s a level i need to find my niche and get into it. I want to find ways to be more than just this guy poking at things.

I’m realizing that I may not know enough about that level to know how to get there. so that’s my next step: learning enough to get there. otherwise there’s no way to get there.

Reviews

Comic Referral: Ekwara

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Ekwara is a comic drawn by my friend Tod Wills. Tod is a rather prolific artist – there’s 153 pages of Ekwara story, and a the equivalent of full single-issue comics just about how the world works. There’s a lot of solid worldbuilding in Ekwara, even if it’s not immediately obvious – because you learn as you go on.

Tod’s also doing an anthropomorphic version of Dracula – yes, the Bram Stoker novel – as well as other comics, art by commission both full-size and user-icons, and in general doing art. Because Tod does art, and that’s what Tod wants to do.

So I would suggest going and reading Tod’s things. You might find something there to impress you. I know that i usually do.

Philosophy

Differences.

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I’m from the East Coast – the New York City area – originally, now living in Seattle. And there’s differences – not as many as you’d think, but more than a few.

And right now I’m seeing a big one: the weather. It’s horrible back on the East Coast right now, crazy snow, ice, slush… all good reasons to just stay inside for a week.

In Seattle, it’s 35 degrees – cold, but clear. It’ll get into the 40s, and that’s good enough to go for a walk.

I think I like this a bit better.

What I'm Up To

What I've been up to.

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It’s January 17 and I haven’t posted since before Christmas. It was a busy time – I am in Seattle now, but my family is on the East Coast, so I went back there for a couple of weeks, seeing family and friends, catching up on things, and doing the whole visiting-family thing you do when you live on the opposite coast.

In other news, my development machine – my older MacBook Pro – is currently running on its MAMP install the WordPress 3.1 beta, which I am poking at to find holes. I’m also working on some stuff with theme design, learning that, which involves learning PHP.

I’m also working on a new header graphic for the page, but my art skills, well, don’t really exist, so this is becoming interestingly difficult.

In short: visit back East, now working on more skill enhancements, some of them coming from farther behind that others.

Hope things are good for you! Have a good day.

I’m going to try to write here more often, so that I can keep myself going with my writing.

Hope all is well.

What I'm Up To

Hello again.

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I’m sorry for no updates lately, but I’m traveling for the holidays and that’s put a dent in my thinking time.

Once the new year starts, my hope is to do some more setup tutorials on things
Wordpress, so that the mistakes I make can help other people not make them.

See you in 2011!

Technology

The Twitter Tools Setup Quick Walkthrough

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Twitter Tools is one of the top plugins for a WordPress install that wants to interoperate well with Twitter. It includes a widget you can put into a space on your WordPress site, the ability to have posts you make auto-notify Twitter, the ability to send tweets right from the WordPress Dashboard, the ability to auto-create the tweets with hashtags, the ability to choose only specific tags and categories to be automatically tweeted… a very powerful tool for social networking.

It can also be a little confusing to someone trying to set it up for the first time.

With that in mind, and making some mistakes along the way, I wrote this walkthrough for people who may want a more guided setup from someone who’s made the mistakes.

The walkthrough can be downloaded (as a PDF) from here: the Twitter Tools Walkthrough.

I’m working on one for Wordbooker, an interconnector plugin for WordPress and Facebook, and hopefully that should be up soon as well.

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My great thanks to my friends Vivian Withnail and Matthew Wagner for their gracious and kind reviews of my writing, and especially to Ms. Withnail (who can be found bibliophiling at Withnail And Books for formatting assistance to make it look considerably better.

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If you find this helpful, and want to toss me a little bit of money to offset my hosting costs, here’s a little something to use: