Monthly Archives: January 2016

WordPress Wednesday

Life, WordPress

It’s Wednesday and that means it’s WordPress Wednesday. Every Wednesday a group of my fellow WordPress enthusiasts meet at CoCo to work, hang out, and share expertise with each other and anyone who shows up with questions. Coco is a Twin Cities provider of co-working spaces, providing members with a place for working and networking. My membership gives me 5 days a month to use the facilities. You can do 3 days a week or every work day. I joined so I could hang with the WordPress Wednesday group and so I could get out of the house once in awhile and get some human contact. Working at home can make you feel very isolated.

I got into WordPress as a platform for blogging, actually for this blog. Xanga was going downhill fast and I wanted to have a self hosted platform for Horizontal Ambition. I had some experience with building static websites, having used Dreamweaver to build a portfolio site that I thought was pretty cool, but to blog you really need a CMS (content management system). At the time I didn’t know what that was, but I got myself a Godaddy hosting account and registered the domain and started my first WordPress installation. Not too long after that, I was at the now defunct cigar shop in the neighborhood and somehow fell into building them a website using WP. Then another denizen of that smokey cave told me he’d heard that I was a WordPress expert. He needed help with his site, so I jumped in and quickly learned that I didn’t know jack about WordPress.

From that point on, it was down the rabbit hole. I googled around and discovered that WordPress was actually a CMS that could be used to build just about any kind of dynamic website you could think of. I went to the monthly meetup of the MSP WordPress User Group and sat through some presentations that went so far over my head they had contrails. But I met all kinds of helpful people and heard about WordPress Wednesday. I traded in my iMac for a Macbook Pro so I could bring my work to with me, and I’ve been showing up on Wednesdays ever since. Although I’ve been kind of scarce since I had my unfortunate confrontation with a floor, but I’m moving around much better now and I’m getting back into the groove.

In fact, that’s way more than 300 words and I have to shovel the f**king driveway and head over to CoCo Northeast.

That’s two day in a row! The Timberwolves would call that a winning streak.

300 Words

Writing
springfall 1 digital
springfall 1 digital

Another long gap between posts. You might think my heart really isn’t into this blog. Don’t let me be misunderstood. My intentions are good. So I’ve decided to write 300 words a day. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not much good at following through on challenges like that. But if you don’t try…

That was 54. Now what? I’ve been struggling for a long time to decide what this blog was actually for. It started out over on Xanga (anyone remember Xanga?) and it was fun there because I was part of a group of people who wrote humorous, ironic personal essays. I still am in contact with those folks, but I think most of them are just posting on Facebook now. In fact is anyone doing personal blogs anymore? Does anyone read them?

Lately I’ve been pretty busy for a retired guy, I have a part-time job and also have some freelance projects going as well as prepping for a class I’m teaching. The procrastination of all those tasks takes up a lot of time. I’ve been thinking that most of the stuff I’ve been working on is production. I’m pretty good at production, I have a high skill level in all the software, I’m accurate and when I finally bear down, I’m pretty quick. But that’s not what I really want to do. I want to create content. It could be writing or it could be visual art. If I’m good at anything, it’s making art. I don’t know why I’ve avoided doing it for so long. Dabbling in this and that, guitar playing, chess, web development. Geez, learning coding? That’s pretty left brained for an artist. I guess it’s just the ADD in me.

So for right now, every morning, somewhere between my second and third cup of coffee, I’m going to try to bang out 300 words each day. I’m not going to guarantee that I publish all of them, because some might end up being complete drivel, and others might be about stuff that’s none of your damn business.

That wasn’t so hard.