Sorry? Is something not straight? Is there a bit that’s wonky?! What the heck is a “blog realignment”?

I’m not one for blogging that often, but I do no that this blog has been a mish-mash of content, and that’s really not the best way to go about doing things. There’s content about my personal life, code snippets, pages on spreadsheets and applications I’ve created for games on other sites, guest posts and completely random bits I’ve found on the net and wanted to share. So much for “finding my niche”.

Now I, as my professional self offer website hosting, I’m able to separate these posts into their own blogs. All of the code snippets, for instance, will end up on a subdomain to this one (it exists already, just not ready for launch yet), as will all the Battrick stuff (or I may just scrap them completely).

That will leave the main blog as stuff about my life, guest posts or maybe the random things I want to share. Assuming I actually feel inclined to write anything…

Thích Quảng Đức (alternatively Thich Quang Duc) is the Buddhist monk who self-immolated (burned himself) in 1963 as a protest to the treatment of monks by the South Vietnamese government at the time. He is most widely recognisable from the picture featured on the 1992 album cover of Rage Against the Machine by the group of the same name. RATM’s hit single Killing In The Name is possibly going to be number 1 in the UK music charts this Christmas.

The video below is a recording of the self-immolation. After sitting on a cushion in the lotus position in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, another monk poured five gallons of gasonline over Thích Quảng Đức. He then struck a match a dropped it onto the gasoline trail which led to Thích Quảng Đức. His robes immediately caught fire. He did not scream, and did not move a muscle. His body burned for 10 minutes.

The video left me speechless. More information about Thích Quảng Đức.

Background

Over the last couple of days, an amusing situation has escalated involving me and a model-turned-web-designer/developer Lindsay (aka @idiot_girl – her apt choice of name). Lindsay runs the Web Design For Idiots website, among other websites. She describes herself as:

a 26 female, probably the hottest computer geek you will ever “virtually” meet.

I came across Lindsay in the forums of the CMF Ads network that I trialled on my site briefly. Her Web Design For Idiots site aimed to produce articles that helped new web designers get started with aspects of their blog or site. Her Am i blog-norant page confirms that her site was a journal of her learning, rather than being tutorials from a recognised expert:

And although I am still sloshing my way through all this technicalities, I will be posting tutorials on everything i learn as i go.

In February 2009, she posted about a competition to review her site, and possibly win some business cards and other goodies. I didn’t need the business cards or goodies, but as she’d been pleasant on the CMF forum, and I wanted to help a new web designer, I took the time to write a lengthy review about her site, and emailed her about it. I don’t recall even getting a thank you for doing this.

Post and Comments

In March 2009 she made a new post on her blog entitled Fixed Width Centered Website, that I felt had a few mistakes in it, so I offered some constructive criticism. Lindsay has since deleted these comments – only she’ll know why.

No, no, no, no.

You’re advising at least 4 bad practises here.

1) Use semantic class and ID names. Imagine you’ve called it “centerContent” then you decide you want to have it sitting on the left after all – you can either go along and remove all those divs from all your pages, or you could utilise the power of CSS, and just remove it from being styled centered. That however, leaves you with code that’s illogical? Labeled centered, but aligned left?
Far better would be to label the div up as *what it’s used for*, not *how it appears visually*. e.g. id=”wrapper”

2) The example you’ve chosen suffers from 2 further sub problems:
a) The word “center” is spelt differently in different parts of the world, so British users, for instance, who come to your website, will now have to remember the US version, whereas other parts of their website may use British spelling. It’s best to leave words like these out of all class and ID names, at least as examples.
b) You’ve used two words. Now while CSS isn’t case sensitive, DOM manipulation using JavaScript, is, and while you’re example uses camel caps, the existing usage on your readers’ websites may have other ways of delimiting two words (underscore, hyphen). Far better, in all cases, is to use a single word, all in lower case, e.g. id=”wrapper”

3) You’ve suggested the reader embeds a style sheet in the head element – apart from missing out the type=”text/css” attribute, this obviously means each and every page would need to be changed – far better would be to ensure they have a link element that pulls in an external style sheet, and puts the styling code for wrapper / centerContent in that instead.

4) You’ve gone to the effort of using style sheets (correct), but then said to use a text-align attribute within the body tag? That’s conficting at best. Use:
body{text-align: center;}
within the style sheet to achieve the same thing, and keep your markup clean and pure.

5) The method you’re using to pull off this technique will fail, in that now all of the text with paragraphs and other block level elements will now be centered, instead of the default aligned left. The correct method for centering content would be to apply auto margins (as you’ve done) for the nice browsers, then text-align: center; on the parent element, in this case the body element (for IE), but then to immediately cancel this with text-align: left; on the wrapper element:

body {text-align: center;}
wrapper {text-align: left; width: 900px; margins: 0 auto;}

Not sure why you’ve got a border style in there, and you also haven’t clarified that the 900px value can be changed to whatever the user feels is correct for their site.

While your version may work in some browsers, some of the time, you’re setting you users up for a fall, by introducing bad practises and leaving them with other problems.

There’s quite a lot there, but for the non-technical among you, it simply offers suggestions on how she could improve her tutorial for her target audience, who would know less than Lindsay. Lindsay replied:

First off, I have used this process in 4 of my websites that have been tested on all browsers from IE5 and above and have not had a problem. I do not see this as not being cross browser issue in any way.

Imbedding the style sheet in the head is just a simple way of getting this done. I am NOT going to tell my readers to create a style sheet and link to it considering that fact that this blog is geared towards people who don’t have a clue. I CAN write a new post about how to use a style sheet, and link each post together, but for now, since I do not have one – it would be nice if you just left my posts be and just correct things that are GLARING ERRORS and now “best practices” because we will get to the best practices when we get to them.

The bodg tag is something that is entirely under used. People go div crazy and why even bother creating a div when you have the body tag there already. Again, these are your interpretations of “best practices” and I would appreciate if you didn’t try and scare any of my readers from using this

THIS METHOD WORKS, AND IF YOU ARE NEW TO WEB DESIGN, THEN YOU CAN USE THIS WITH EASE AND HAVE NO ISSUES

OK, so she’s defending what she wrote – fair enough – except the former teacher in me felt compelled to take the time and explain why I thought her view was uninformed:

Yes, if you compare my suggestion (#5) against yours, you’ll see it’s exactly, the same, except that I also reset the text-alignment to the left – otherwise all your readers will be complaining that all their text on the whole page is centered, and that when they try to change it to the left, the whole page is no longer centered. You’ve only provided half of the work for them.

The fact you are so dead set against providing your readers with the full picture (to empower them to let them make the decision) shows that you haven’t fully grasped the needs of your target audience. By all means, show them the “simple” ways to do things, but you should make it clear that there are more advanced ways – the reader who knows and understands a little more more than your target audience, then has the choice whether to attempt the trickier way.

Nothing wrong with the body tag, as it’s required forvalid markup anyway – my point (#4), is that using a styling attribute in the body element, when you’ve created the rest of your styles in a style element / style sheet is counter productive. And if you’re not fussed, then tell your readers to use the element and be done with it.

However, you’ve not addressed points 1-3 – these require no extra code, but does require letting your readers have an insight into the kind of thoughts that should be going into creating solid, future-proof markup.

I fail to see why you are so reluctant to take advice from a colleague – your reply indicates that you have a very closed mind that someone else might understand the topic better than you do.

As the last paragraph alludes to, I couldn’t see why this self-confessed learner wasn’t willing to at least acknowledge that others may just know more than her.

There were no more comments on the post, so I left it at that.

A Few Months Later

A few months went past, and in June 2009, a post was made by someone called John. As I’d chosen to use the Subscribe to Comments feature of the WDFI site, I’d got alerted to the new comment via email:

I agree with Gary. His way is the correct way to put it together. You were correct that this will be the easiest thing you teach them. Problem is that Gary taught it. You shouldn’t be so reluctant to take the advise of someone who obviously knows more on the subject. Given what you are trying to do you should be teaching proper practices and not what you think. These days you should be telling people that their sites should be constructed 100% in CSS. That is the proper way. No one should be using in-line styles. So teach them correctly and actually help them. The body tag is in no way under used. Your not understanding what to do with it. Gary is right, it should be defined in the CSS!

Please do everyone a favor and do a little more research in these areas before you TRY teaching it. You can really show someone really bad habits that will make them crazy trying to figure out why things don’t work.

John

Lindsay then replied to this (which I don’t have a copy of), but it may well have been along the same lines as her previous reply. It may also have mentioned that the technique she had posted about was also suggested on W3Schools – a well known site that often tops the rankings for searches related to web design help.

By the time I’d got around to reading her reply, she’d apparently deleted the comment from John. My reply:

It’s a shame you’ve deleted John’s post, who was in support of my comments, yet kept your own reply.
Your example here is about centring content, presumably over more than one page (if you wish to keep the site consistency), in which case, creating a single-page solution (i.e. inline styles) is completly wrong.
The other drawback from using inline styles (and embedded style sheets) over external style sheets is that you introduce another layer of importance. Lets say you give an example for conflicting styling of an element at three different levels in three different tutorials. The user applies them all, but can’t figure out why one of them isn’t working – you’ve now confused them.
By creating all examples in an external style sheet, with similar levels of selector specificity (that’s a far more advanced tpoic, which they won’t need to know about yet), then simply telling them “the last styles on the page are used when styles conflict” is simple enough to follow.

As for relying on W3Schools for your reference, then really, either, you’ve not got enough knowledge to be qualified to be giving tutorials, or you should just point your domain at W3Schools and be done with it.

OK, so the first and last paragraphs aren’t helpful, but the rest of it is still on topic, and still offering advice.

A day later, the following arrives through the contact page form on my own site:

Gary.
I understand your -well.. whatever it is you have against my blog.. its fine..
But commenting on the fact that i deleted ALL of “johns” comments.. is well,
just none of your business. THIS GUY (who’s name is NOT JOHN) is an asshole that
has been stalking me for THREE DAYS. He is a local guy who has nothing better to
do than to make threats and flood my blog with half baked resistance comments.

Maybe if you read his comments, you would understand… Or maybe you wouldnt..
But either way, if you dont have nothing nice to say.. just dont say it at all.
I left your comments up. Mainly because you had points.. But if you are going to
comment on things that you literally have NO CLUE about.. I will have to block
you from my blog.

So please.. Either comment when comments are due, or not at all.. THAT just
wasn’t any of your business.

Hmmm. My one line about deleting John’s comment invoked that response, which completely ignores all the advice I’ve been offering that was on-topic to the post.

As Lindsay had contacted me off the blog, I replied to her via email:

Lindsay,

I’ve got nothing against you or your blog, except for the fact you seem adamant not to accept the fact that someone may just know a little bit more than you in the area of web design.

I read John’s comments via the email that resulted from being subscribed to those posts. I’m assuming that you would have had to moderate and accept those comments before that email was sent, so the fact it appears these were deleted afterwards is why it looks like you simply didn’t agree with them.

Even if he is stalking you or whatever (3 days is hardly stalking), his comments don’t imply that, and only add to the discussion about the posts.

If you could answer the comments that disagree with you, with “Oooh, that’s an interesting viewpoint, but…” rather than “No, you’re wrong, I’m right because…” then I think you would be seen in a better, more open, light.

I like the notion of what you’re trying to do – some of it will be helpful – but I don’t think that you have a full understanding of the intricacies of giving CSS-related demo code, and it’s this which my comments are trying to point you too.

As well as being a web developer myself, I’ve also taught web design to both children and adults (including prisoners), so I have a good idea of how the learning process works. What you trying to do is not easy – CSS can quickly get advanced in some areas – but by not providing that indicator of where to go next, or giving suitably stable basic code that can be advanced on without making major changes, then it’s just going to lead to confusion to your readers.

One hint is to write an article on the most complex things you can think of in CSS, come up with the demo code, then break it down backwards to get the simple code – create the articles as a series, and then your readers can see how doing the basics right can help later on.

I wish you and your blog success for the future.

I hear nothing more and leave it at that.

Yet More Months Later

Fast forward to this month, and someone else (john?) makes a comment on the blog. I don’t have the exact wording, but it was something in support of my sentiments – that the blog post could be improved, and that Lindsay would do well to listen to free advice – it may even have been from the previous 3-day-stalker John.

Lindsay replied:

I didn’t simply because if you read more of my earlier articles, you will see that he chose to follow around and tried to point out non-existent problems. Where there were issues, I thanked him and went on my way.

The problem here is that there is nothing wrong in this post. The post was meant to teach a very VERY basic newbie how to get a fixed width, centered website.. and it does that well.

As this again had arrived in my inbox, I took a look to see if the post had been altered in anyway (it hadn’t). I then replied (which got deleted) something along the lines of not wanting to reopen this issue about not even acknowledging the advice, but again reiterated that there was things wrong with the post and why improving it would be beneficial to Lindsay’s target audience.

Getting Personal

Lindsay decided at this point that I must be a stalker, and thus proceeded to email me (where’s the logic in that?). I’ve since deleted the email without replying, but it was something along the lines of her being serious, me getting a life, and a threat to block my IP from her site.
OK Lindsay, feel free – I’m not likely to miss out on anything important, so it’s not really a threat now, is it?

I post the following to my Twitter account:

http://bit.ly/7vTnZ2 She’s deleted another of my comments, and threatened to block my IP. Oh dear, some people aren’t willing to learn.

I then have a discussion on Twitter about it, and at one point mention CMF Ads as how I’d met Lindsay. Ben Barden, who knows Lindsay via the CMF Ads network that he co-built, must have found my tweet and tracked it back to the original post on Lindsay’s site. He then commented about an error (effectively point 4 of my initial comment) he’d spotted with the post. His suggestion unfortunately was also wrong, so I commented on the blog that it was also invalid.

Some of my friends and random followers (some developers, some not) who saw the tweets then take it upon themselves to also make comments on the blog post. All of these comments (including the ones from Ben and me) are deleted.

I then get another unsolicited email from Lindsay:

You really should get a life. Its kinda sad that you choose to “sick your internet friends” on a blog post that you had a beef with for a year. Maybe it’s time to get a girl or something..

Great, more abuse.

I then make another post on Twitter:

How NOT to react when someone is giving you solid, free and accurate advice that you just happen not to agree with: http://bit.ly/6159w5

Lindsay then reveals her Twitter identity and stalks contacts me directly:

@GaryJ Gary.. seriously PLEASE get a freaking life. All you have is time to mess with people. You’ve been stalking me for almost 1 year now

So let me get this straight – I make a comment on someone’s blog (that’s assumed to be an accepted practice, yes?), she doesn’t like what I have to say, then she contacts me via my contact form, my email and on Twitter, yet I’m the stalker? Should I have my Facebook messages, MSN and Skype opened and ready?

It gets to the stage that I find it highly amusing how her not agreeing with my comments nine months ago (and not a year as Lindsay currently seems to think it’s been) has turned around into me being a stalker. Taking ten seconds every three months to open and read an email sent automatically via her Subscribe to Comments plugin is not how I would define stalking. Nonetheless, I can’t but help play along:

If I was stalking you @idiot_girl, trust me, you wouldn’t know about it. @tensor and @PeteScuff will attest to my stalking abilities.

Lindsay once again however, feels that this was a threat though, so what does she do? She sends more abuse:

@GaryJ Stalkers always think that they are doing it for the benefit of the stalkee. You are dilusional.

…then threatens me back (go figure):

@GaryJ I’ll take that as a threat and pass it on to your ISP. I’m sure I can match your comments IP to your twitter IP- its not hard

Good luck in convincing Twitter to release the IP address information for me. And even if they did, then what?

Out of curiosity, I took a look to see what other comments Lindsay may have been making via Twitter. I took the following screenshot, as if she’s deleted blog posts comments, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the following be deleted too. Click to enlarge, and obviously read from the bottom upwards:

@idiot_girl

Summary

I was urged by several friends not to write this post – they failed to see what good it would accomplish. Lindsay may just get more wound up and upset, I would be made to look cruel etc. I thought I could use it as a chance to apologise directly and publicly to Lindsay, but I’m struggling to work out what I’d be apologising for.

It’s not in my character to intend to go out and hurt someone’s feelings, but I do subscribe the the comic strip notion at the beginning of this post – especially when the person in the wrong is trying to teach others wrongly, and doesn’t have the open mind to accept others do know better.

I’ve got no problems with people who are learning something, be it web design or anything else. If I think I can help, I will do, as I hope I’ve shown by the majority of my comments and website review to Lindsay, and with others who I’ve helped. My issue here is that, even nine months after being shown by multiple people that there are multiple errors in this and other posts, she has been unwilling to change it – and as such, it will stay as a “resource” for the future that will trip up the very same people that it was intended to help. A tutorial site that is wrong is worse than no tutorial site at all.

Here’s some final thoughts for Lindsay:

• Subscribe to Comments is not stalking, it’s opening an email
• Commenting on a blog is not stalking, it’s blogging
• A write-up of how you think I’m stalking you is not stalking, it’s amusing.
• Please, fix the blog post – that’s all I’m asking.

Update
As if to prove just who is stalking who, Lindsay managed to tweet about this post in the few seconds between me publishing it, and making my own tweet on it – note the lower number in the URL for her tweet than mine, highlighting the order of events. I rest my case.

People:

Gary Jones,

Lindsay

12^th December 2009 in the Thomas Lord Suite, Lord’s Cricket Ground.

People:

Allan Fairlie-Clarke,

Becky Addley,

Gary Jones,

Katie Sell,

Martin Bayliss

The scammers are getting lazy in their attempts to extract key bits of information from what’s known as the 419 scam. Often seen with elaborate tales of needing to transfer money from Nigeria or other African country on the brink of a coup, the too-good-to-be-true offer of giving you a percentage of the amount of money you’d help to move across international borders plays on the greed of every day folk. A variation of the scam, like in the image above, is that one has become a winner of a lottery. I can’t believe that anyone still falls for it, though perhaps some do, else the scammers wouldn’t have moved off of this now. Perhaps then, they just settle for a half-hearted attempt at extracting your details. This is what I just received:

I have a Business Proposal of $21,300,000.00 for you to handle with me from my bank. I need to know if you will be able to handle this with me, if you agree to work with me please send me your: 1,Full names; 2,occupation; 3,private phone number; 4,current residential address. Regards Liu Tia Ling

That’s all there was. I received two copies to the same email address at the same time, so not only is it suspicious by being sent twice, there’s no story to entertain the readers and draw them into their little plan. Come on scammers, get with it!

If you’ve updated from 1.5.1 to 1.6, and now all of your Custom Templates pages are showing two lots of title and content (or other strangeness), then you may be wondering what you did wrong. The answer is, you didn’t.
A change was made in version 1.6 of Thesis, that you’ll need to bypass. Go into your custom_functions.php and add the following:

remove_action('thesis_hook_custom_template','thesis_custom_template_sample');

In trying to be helpful, a template sample was added into the core of Thesis (meaning, it’s not easily available for you to edit), which is set to run for all page IDs, meaning two lots of templates are actually running.

Why this sample template has been added in like this is beyond me. How is it a sample template, if it’s deep within core code somewhere where most people won’t be able see it, and certainly shouldn’t be editing it? If it had to be included, then putting that into the default custom_functions.php where people can easily see and edit it would have been a much better idea in my personal opinion.

I use Shutter Reloaded as my Lightbox-esque WordPress plugin of choice for enlarging images. To work though, it requires a link to an image. The very useful Twivatar application for pulling live Twitter avatars however, uses a non-image link. Here’s how I got them to work together.

The Background

I recently added in a landing page for Twitter and decided to include all of my Twitter accounts on there. A targeted landing page means you can provide the right information to the expected audience – if they’ve found that page via my Twitter profile, then they might also be interested in the other accounts I run.

To make it a little more interesting, I decided to add in the Twitter avatars too. Now, Twitter itself doesn’t make it easy to pull out the live image for an account – there’s no standard URL, as it keeps the filename as whatever it was when the user uploaded it. While I could have cheated and just made copies of each avatar and hosted them here, then whenever an avatar changed, my version here would be out of date.

Up step Twivatar, a single script application whose sole existence (thanks to @rem) is to provide that crucial standard URL for the current avatar of a Twitter account. For the GaryJ Twitter account, we simply use:

<img src="http://twivatar.org/garyj" alt="GaryJ Twitter Avatar" />

Easy.

Displaying The Original

On the rest of the this site, I use Shutter Reloaded, so that when users click on a thumbnail image, the larger ones pops up. For this to work though, we need to make the image into an anchor, with the link pointing at the original large image, add a title to the link (that acts as a caption on the enlarged image), and, depending on your Shutter Reloaded settings, also add a class=”shutterset” so that each of the Twitter avatars could be cycled through without having to close the enlargement each time. For Twivatar, we can just append the word original to our image:

<a href="http://twivatar.org/garyj/original" title="GaryJ" class="shutterset"><img src="http://twivatar.com/garyj" alt="GaryJ Twitter Avatar" /></a>

Now, the problem is that Shutter Reloaded needs a link to the actual image, and digging into the plugin code, I saw that it specifically needed a link with either .jpg, .gif, .png or jpeg as the last 4 characters of the link.
I first tried:

<a href="http://twivatar.org/garyj/original?.jpg" title="GaryJ" class="shutterset"><img src="http://twivatar.com/garyj" alt="GaryJ Twitter Avatar" /></a>

but the plugin code specifically looks for a question mark, and checks the last 4 characters before the querystring starts.

The Solution

The solution, thanks to Twivatar being lenient with the URL it accepts is to add the .jpg bit as a URL fragment instead:

<a href="http://twivatar.org/garyj/original#.jpg" title="GaryJ" class="shutterset"><img src="http://twivatar.com/garyj" alt="GaryJ Twitter Avatar" /></a>

Twivatar, just strips this URL fragment, pulls the image from Twitter, and appends it back on the end, which in this case, does nothing to affect the display of the image itself.

Conclusion

Appending #.jpg (or #.gif, #.png or #jpeg) to the end of the the Twivatar link persuades Shutter Reloaded to work as expected. This technique, although very simple, would also be likely to work in similar situations. You can see a live demo on my landing page for Twitter.

When asked to write a guest blog post for the venerable Mr Jones my initial thought was to write something witty and succinct. However upon realisation that being neither concise nor humorous are my greatest talents the following ramblings seem appropriate.

The majority of those who read this don’t know me and never will, I like that anonymity. There’s something about writing something out for the whole world to see that’s very therapeutic. The thought that someone might read this and find the slightest interest, enlightenment or inspiration from it makes me smile.

I’m going to write about accomplishment, progress, recovery. However you deem to express it for me they all boil down to the same basic principle. That principle to me is (if you’ll excuse my French) getting the f**k on with it. I mean, obviously it’s not that simple, so, let’s give some background here.  Wait for it, here comes the big confession:

My name is Andie, I’m 24 years old, and I’m an alcoholic.

This is something I’ve been told many a time that’s very difficult to say. In reality it’s not. It’s a simple matter of sentence structure and semantics. The obvious difference here is saying it and understanding the consequences, because the thing is the moment that I said those words out loud, it became a problem.

Let’s not forget the fact that the first time I said those words I was wearing a green and pink mini-dress, neon green stiletto heels and sitting cross legged on crisply laundered Sunlight sheets in Basingstoke and North Hants Hospital. The previous night I had washed down 40 aspirin with 75cl of vodka, panicked and called an ambulance. Earlier that evening I’d wandered around the streets dressed in only my night dress and aforementioned green stilettos having to be escorted back to my own house by a friendly neighbour. Despite this though, until I said those words the next morning, that behaviour was not out of the ordinary to me. It was just one of those things that everyone does sometimes? Aren’t we all a little crazy? Don’t we all enjoy the odd drink?

The point I have specifically always struggled with is where does the distinction between ‘enjoying a drink’ end and ‘having to drink’ begin.  The National Library of Medicine defines alcoholism as the following:

“A primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations. The disease is often progressive and fatal. It is characterized by impaired control over drinking, preoccupation with the drug alcohol, use of alcohol despite adverse consequences, and distortions in thinking, most notably denial. Each of these symptoms may be continuous or periodic.”

Now see, I can completely understand that the distinction lies at the point where control is lost, where there is a preoccupation with drinking, where it plays on your mind all day. Relating this back, I can see that despite my perception of myself that I was in control because:

• I never drank before 6pm
• I never drove while drunk
• I always made it to work and was able to hold down a steady job

and finally, and probably most importantly:

• I believed that no-one knew how much I really drank, that I was capable of fooling people, that I could appear sober when drunk.

…these were actually highly contributing factors showing that I wasn’t in control. OK, so yes, as far as the outside world could see I was fine, I wasn’t a danger to others, I wasn’t about to slam my car into a pedestrian or go stand outside Liquid and pick fights with strangers, I turned up to work every day and worked to the best of my ability through constant hangovers, I did my laundry, cooked my meals, showered regularly, anything I could to convince myself that my consumption of alcohol was ‘normal’ and ‘moderate’.

But I digress. Back to, as I put it “getting the f**k on with it”. It’s a basic principle that I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. Something I suspect that everyone finds difficult on some level, whether it’s something as simple as getting out of bed or boiling an egg, the slightly more complicated tasks such as doing the ironing or working out how to use the inner join command in SQL, to the baffling concepts of completing a degree, learning  exactly how to use the | character in UNIX or writing a witty and succinct blog post.

Saying those words though, that was the force of action that made me put my principle into action, and over the last ten days of sobriety it’s a principle that I’ve applied to everything.  It may not be the most efficient or productive principle but so far it’s working, some examples below:

• Get out of bed before 10am.
• Get the flat into a state where you can actually keep it tidy.
• Get all those little tasks done that you couldn’t because your were too drunk.
• Get help.

(I’ve omitted the f-word for politeness, feel free to add it in as you read those back to yourself)

The last one of those bullet points is the by far the hardest, and I know full well that at ten days it’s still early in the process. The thing is though, I’m actually doing it. Getting the F**k on with it and getting help. I’m achieving something, progressing and growing and for the first time in years I’m doing something for me. I’m talking to people, being honest and working through things, and if I can do it so can anyone, because you see, I suspect I’m a lot more ‘normal’ than I think I am. So tell me, what’s your confession? And what can you do about it?

References:
MeSH. (2009). National Library of Medicine – Medical Subject Headings. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/cgi/mesh/2009/MB_cgi?field=uid&term=D000437

People:

Andie

Back in March 2009, I blogged how someone in the US was offering to send people free postcards. I’d signed up, but was waiting to see if anything came of it. Turns out, something did.

Todd Jordan did what he said he would do, and about a week later (delayed as he’d been at SXSW) the following postcard arrived:

Postcard from St Louis

Todd had also suggested that I could send him one in reply. Unfortunately, Basingstoke is a little less touristy than St. Louis and finding a postcard of Amazingstoke took a fair bit of effort. I even had to put a request on Twitter to see if anyone else knew of somewhere that sold suitable postcards. Eventually however, one was found:

Postcard from Basingstoke

People:

Todd Jordan

Back when the web was young and I was younger, I tried my hand at web design. It was the days before web editors and when the early web editors arrived they were often more trouble then they were worth.

I discovered my magazine work had given me a pretty good eye for how a web page should look. It was in the early ‘90s that a friend and I formed a partnership to offer web development.

Our venture didn’t last long. It wasn’t lack of customers; it was the difficulty in supporting them. The web was so new that very few really understood what it might do for a business or an individual.

And like so many things we on the computer, it looks so easy to the uninitiated. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard a client say something like “but I only want you to change a couple of words,” never realizing they were asking me to:

1. Stop whatever else I might be doing.
2. Open my copy of their copy (and maybe an editor)
3. Find the “couple of words” and change them.
4. Read what I’d changed to make sure it made sense, and it often didn’t, which meant I either did more editing or called the client.
5. Checked the page in a couple of browsers
6. Fired up my internet connection (yeah, this is dial up time, back then)
7. Open my FTP program
8. Upload the new file(s)
9. Double check that it had all gone well

Those nine steps often took a couple of hours or more and it was a rare client who was willing to pay for that time.

I dropped my end of the business and went back to writing, something I more or less understand.

But I went back with a better understanding of how to keep track of my time, bill for my time, and, most importantly, give the client an accurate estimate of how many hours I would be putting in. I use the same information when setting flat fees.

I rarely get underpaid these days, and early web design is one of the reasons.

Write well and often,

Anne Wayman writes about writing from her home office in San Diego in the US. Her blog is at www.aboutfreelancewriting.com . She is also a ghostwriter and writing coach. You can view her credits and other information at www.annewayman.com

People:

Anne Wayman