Daily Prompt: There’s No Place Like Home

Daily Prompt: There’s No Place Like Home. Moving. Not quite, just camping.

This was the back of the truck after packing for a single weekend for two of us.

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Daily Prompt: A to Z

Daily Prompt: A to Z. Here’s orderly for you!

Guards outside Buckingham Palace, London, England

Daily Prompt: Random Word then Google Image Search

Daily Prompt.

Another daily prompt that I have yet to post asked us to pick a word we had never heard before and use it in a sentence. I am now prompted to post that one shortly, but here is the image I found when I searched “Sapiosexual”. Love this word.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far.

Near and Far – A High Five With Buddha

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary.

My pet Betta, PhilGor

What one feature do you wish WordPress.com had?

What one feature do you wish WordPress.com had?.

I was just about to write one of my Follow Friday posts and wanted to add a number of photos to it. There isn’t going to be all that much text, but putting a gallery into it would be a great way to showcase all those lovely photos. I know that we can add a plugin to the wordpress.org sites, but I wish that there was a way to have a simple built-in gallery.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside.

Inside looking out. Taken in Beijing at the Great Wall of China in January, 2008.

Inside looking out

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement.

It wasn’t just the fact they were in motion, but the expression on his face. Taken on a boat tour in Hong Kong, October 2007. There were a bunch taken that day, but this is one of the best.

Movement

How do you find your muse?

How do you find your muse?.

Finding My Muse – Borrowed from “Wrestling The Muse”

I’m not sure if I actually find it. I think it comes to me at the last minute and says: “Hi! yeah, just kidding. I’m here.”. I also think that it comes in waves, which is why I do a lot of scheduled blog posts. I’ll sit down one day and decide to go through all my challenges, both the text ones as well as photos. This is how I create my content. The WordPress Post A Day Challenges have helped a great deal. I’ve had subject matter floating around in my head and haven’t really found the question it should answer. The Challenge has allowed me to do that and helped my business too. When I meet with a new client, I give them a challenge of their own. Depending on their business, they have to give me a 250-500 word blog post on a topic I give them. Most people smile and then say: “Yeah, I can do that.”. Sometimes, it is truly that simple.

I’ve also decided today that I’m going to start a new menu item and call it challenges so that you can see what challenges I’ve completed. I haven’t done them in the order they were given to us, but I find that when I look at a list of options, something comes to me, such as this topic.  It’s like crossing things off a to do list. It needs to be written or, if absolutely necessary, turfed. I’ve done that with very few posts, but I have not yet mastered the art of letting go. Not sure which one is harder: writing it or letting it go.

I’ve also found a new service that prompts topics everyday. It fills the void left after the Post A Day Challenge ended in December 2011. It’s called Plinky and though I’ve only received one email from them yet, I think it will help with feeding the muse. One of the topics I’d already written on, but you can add a link to the post and share what you’ve written which is kind of cool.

What have you feared that turned out to be much easier than you expected?

What have you feared that turned out to be much easier than you expected?

WordPress

One of the pieces of my consulting work is setting up WordPress installations. I thought it was going to be extremely difficult, like retraining everything I’ve learned. But in fact, it is much easier than originally thought.

As I wrote in one of my book posts, I picked up WordPress last year when a friend of mine suggested that they thought this would be something that I could do fairly easily, given my previous experience in web design and programming. In our program at Ryerson University, we were given some of the basics of programming so that we would at least know what we were looking at when dealing with some of the issues that might be put in front of us during our careers. Some of us have actually become pretty decent programmers, such as Wes Bos, head instructor at HackerYou. Once I got into it, I realized that you didn’t really need to know any programming to get the site up and running. When dealing with design of the site, some knowledge of web design is helpful for coming up with the structure, such as the categories, but very little if any programming is needed. A little research might be needed when looking at plugins or themes, but the WordPress forums help a great deal with this. THere are also a number of groups out there, including the Toronto WordPress Group and the Developers group that are amazing. This month, I’m helping launch a website built entirely on WordPress for the MRBS. The challenge that I’m hoping to overcome: getting the contributors to the community to own their respective areas and post it to the site with little technical knowledge. Will let you know how well this worked in my follow up post. 😉