Nancy Kamp's
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Disclaimer: This weblog contains many tedious and repetitious bits as well as a few gems of useful web lackey info and amusing turns of phrase. It stands as a monument to the need for editing and is a glimpse into a simple but over-tired heart trying to succeed when pitted against the giants of the Internet. Nancy Kamp
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July 30, 2001: I Begin the Diary I should have started these notes months ago, but I didn't think of it until recently, and of course, I can be lazy.
Virus-Protection, PC Maintenance, and more!
August 2, 2001: E-Mail Signatures & Spam I've been changing the signatures on my e-mail accounts again. Unfortunately for me, I have lots of e-mail accounts at most every place that offers a free one - the better to sop up spam, my dears. Like everyone else, I hate spam. But if you send e-mail or sign up for anything, the odds are good that you will be spammed with porn, useless offers and junk mail of all types. Thus my many e-mail accounts. I use them for newsletters and writers' groups and entering contests.
Signatures. Most e-mail programs and free e-mail accounts allow you to add a standard message at the end of your e-mails. And this is where you promote whatever it is you're selling - not in the body of your message, or you've just written spam. Update your signatures as soon as you've read every word on our site. And don't spam me, please. Please. I always read the signature and/or the PS at the end of a message and studies show most people do as well. Sell me there.
August 3, 2002: I Hate FrontPage Today's title says it all.
August 6, 2001: Domain Forwarding Busy little weekend. Here's the scoop: Besides <greenlightWRITE.com>, I also own <nancykamp.com>. NancyKamp.com seemed like an obvious purchase because unlike Tigger, I'm not the only one. Since purchasing those names from freedomainnameregistration.org, which seems to be affiliated with bulkregister.com rather than Internic, I hadn't done anything except sit on them. I did investigate a free domain forwarding service, but it didn't work very well or easily and I've forgotten who it was. Several weeks ago, I made a plea in a newsgroup at Office.com for help with domain forwarding, but there were no responses, and I was forced to take matters into my own hands. I stumbled across ispcheck.com. It lists tons of hosting companies by attributes like costs and services. And there I found my solution: hostica.com. PS Sadly, neither Jane Marie nor I own <janemarie.com>. Do not go there. Really, we mean it.
August 8, 2001: Go Team My sister, Jane Marie, is a genius. I've been concerned for months because we don't own the domain <www.janemarie.com>. (Don't go there). [#1] Yesterday, Jane Marie said, "How about <www.graciousjanemarie.com> and now we own it. It will point directly to Jane Marie's homepage (within this very site for those of you who haven't been there). The Gracious Jane Marie offers recipes and romance, safety and sweetness, plus everything else you need to escape the rigors of everyday life. Try it, you'll like it. [#2] It's always a pleasure to work with a creative, reliable team - whether there are two or 20 or 2000 of you. And of course, it's a relief to stand in front of my teamwork classes and practice what I preach. If this sounds like a commercial for us, consider that I used two trite, but true taglines in today's text. Your lesson: keep the clichés out of your content. Or at least be aware that you're using them. And don't forget to tell your team members how much you appreciate them.
August 9, 2001: Delete and Die For years, my friend Gail has been telling me, "Delete and die," but have I listened? Well no, but this time I was sooo sure and deleted three pages from the website. Fortunately, I back up everything these days so once I realized what pages had disappeared, I imported them to the FrontPage folder list and uploaded in a matter of minutes. Why so many backups? Our second PC was a Gateway 486 that went through three Western Digital hard drives in it's first year. Last January, my (?name brand?) hard drive froze. I'm not enough of a geek to unravel it's mysteries so it sits in a drawer - I'm not about to donate (my usual method of old hardware disposal) a hard drive full of personal stuff - waiting, just waiting. I probably haven't learned my lesson. I just deleted a file for an article on globalization I'm writing that I'm certain is useless - the file not the article. If I made a mistake, there will be hours of research to duplicate. And my howls will echo around the world. I told me so.
August 13, 2001: Links within Pages Ah, Monday the 13th. Never fear. All our links are working and the site is rich with original content. What's not happening are the links within web pages. I understand the concept, but I can't make this type of link work. I was going to illustrate the process here, but it occurs to me you don't want driving lessons from someone who can't figure out the ignition system. Instead I will simply say my inability to successfully install some basic HTML is the reason you have to scroll through all these pages. Someday soon I will master this skill. Or my name isn't Madonna. And I could also stumble on a new version of FrontPage that makes these links happen.
August 15, 2001: Freshening Content Several months ago we put some spam into Jane Marie's Safety section. I never read the cute things friends and family plague me with, but for some reason, I read this e-mail. I liked it so much, we published it without knowing the original source. We did, however, include a notice saying we would immediately seek permission to use the material when we learned who the legal owner was and how to contact him or her. Yesterday, I spoke with safety expert Pat Malone, whose workshops inspired someone to take copious notes and flood the web with the first useful spam I'd ever received. Pat gave me permission to keep his personal safety advice online. Anyone who wants his $25 video, Taking Control, or more information should call 1-800-316-2186 or visit his website at taking-control.com. Our content has been updated to reflect this information. Fresh content and copyright are mandatory on this website and should be to everyone who values the usefulness of the Internet.
August 20, 2001: Error Watch You would think that a person, moi, who edits the work of others would put up a flawless website, but no. For example, I woke up this morning thinking this weblog was ready to go. When I gave it a final look, I threw out everything but the first sentence, and that had spelling errors. You'd be scratching your head right now if you were trying to read what I might have posted. Jane Marie does a great job of catching a lot of my mistakes though we don't work in the same physical space - she's in Florida and I live in Oklahoma. E-mail and phone calls keep her pretty much up to speed, but neither one of us has the time to run everything by the other or anyone else. Kids and dogs and onsite family are no help so that leaves you, the visitor. If I've screwed up, I want to know and make it right. If something doesn't look the way it should, please let me know by sending an e-mail to: nancy@greenlightwrite.com. I used to do freelance work for a site whose motto was something like "Every site needs to be edited." I couldn't agree more, so have at us. Unleash your inner English teacher.
August 22, 2001: Link Testing As I went to set the bottom of the page "back" link for this page, I saw that FrontPage had automatically changed it to: File:///E:diaryofamadweblackey82101.htm. [These pages have been compressed since this weblog entry was written so this sentence only makes sense if you assume each entry had a separate page.] Well, guess what? That would be a dead link after publication. Why does FrontPage insert bad code in front of a perfectly good link? Who knows? The only cure is a pre-publication check of the entire HTML of the site. Go to Edit, then Find. Type in File:///, select All pages and Find in HTML. You'll get a list of any pages that contain this coding. Double click the first one and you'll be able to delete the bad code systematically - one character at a time. Yesterday, I had over 1300 bad links. And you ask why I grumble.
August 24, 2001: Growing Pains Today I get to take a course on travel writing, which like all types of writing has it's own special skills. Perhaps I'll be the road warrior in the window seat the next time you're flying down to Rio (wasn't that a movie?), but with any luck, my trip will be a freebie. And if we're really lucky, so will yours.
August 29, 2001: Be Careful What You Ask For Whenever you make a decision, you have to weigh things. In sales, they refer to this as the Ben Franklin close because you allow the prospect to list the pros and cons of two options (or the purchase itself) just as Ben himself always did before making a decision. This works very well since the prospect is investing his or her time in making choices about your product or service.My point is that visitor feedback forces the web lackey to examine site decisions very closely. Sharon, a TV professional who gave us some great advice, said one thing I've spent a lot of time thinking about. She thought the green banner across the top of every page of this site is distracting. She said her eye went directly to the bright green box*, which was too busy and had too many words. And she's right. So I've slowly been making changes in the banner as it appears on all the Jane Marie pages. They do/did have too many words. But it's important for visitors to know they're still on this site, whether they're reading my article on the history of downtown Oklahoma City or Jane Marie's recipe for deviled eggs. We may not have a niche, but we do have that banner. It's the closest thing we have to a logo. It stays, but I'm glad Sharon forced me to think about it. *Sharon finally won. Read all about how we changed our logo by clicking HERE for the illustrated story.
August 30, 2001: Still More Feedback Adrea wrote, "What about having a message board? A place where members of your community can post a problem they have with a recipe or something else that you have on your site."This is an excellent idea, but -
The whole idea of community developed from the theory that in order to make money from a website, it helped to have two things or content + community = commerce. In other words, if they come for your content, they'll stay for the community and then buy something. Jane Marie and I wish we were in a position to implement your suggestion, Adrea. Others have shared this same advice and we like to keep our visitors happy, but it isn't possible staff-wise.
August 31, 2001: Consistency & Positioning The neighbors are into decorating their gardens with strings of in ground, low voltage lights, but we only have one solar powered light. My husband has taken to moving it around the yard - sort of like those kidnapped garden gnomes that are pictured in front of the Empire State Building one day and the Great Wall of China the next. In more or less the same way, I've begun inserting things into interesting places around the site. You'll find book reviews tucked among the quotations, and awards and other oddities wherever they seem to fit. This is a pattern that makes perfect sense to me so keep your eyes open.* *If anyone understands how to say, "No shirt, no shoes, no service," in Romulan, please let me know.
September 4, 2001: Praise and Pans (Feedback) As we welcome Elmo, the hamster, to the team, we also introduce a new Praise page (now gone). Elmo's duties include avoiding death by dog bite*, while we actively solicit your nips and growls. *Ratboy, the Millennium Hamster and Elmo's predecessor, was savagely mauled - twice - by a dog (Junior Canine Editor) who thought she was defending home and SOHO from an evil, marauding rodent. The hamster cage has been upgraded for anti-escape security since Ratboy's unexpected demise from unrelated causes on December 31, 1999. Pics of Our Staff
September 5, 2001: Frames and Fun This site is built around frames. That means that unless you type in the URL of a specific page, you're actually looking at two different web pages at once: the skinny navigation column on the left side of your screen and the fatter page on the right with whatever content you've chosen. From a web lackey's point of view, that means I didn't have to put complete navigation links on each page. But it also means the right hand content pages are not very wide on a 13" screen so sentences and headlines may be cut in awkward places. And if you've entered the site through something other than the greenlightWRITE home page, you may be looking at a very wide version of the page you've selected. The same pages will stretch and contract, giving a range of possibilities over which I have little control. Great. In an effort to make viewing our pages into a good experience for all visitors, we're beginning a project we could call Operation Page View if we had the time and were anal enough to bother to name our tasks. We'll be checking the spacing and line breaks <br> on each page from several perspectives. Since we've passed the 170 page mark and we're growing daily (whew), please bear with us.
September 6, 2001: Link Madness Page testing turns up all kinds of ^&$% things. Bad spacing, useless text and today's problem, weird link colors. FrontPage tools tell me I can reset these, but the new settings don't take and the ugly links are using the same color codes in HTML as the good links. Also, deleting and redoing the links makes no difference. I know I'm missing something, but what? Oh, and please don't tell me links are supposed to change colors when they've been clicked. The links we're having problems with go purple as soon as they're created. We want blue, which is more or less the Internet standard. This is probably related to the bold copyright info at the bottom of some pages. I know there must be open links <?> ? </?> somewhere that affect the entire rest of those page, but I can't find them. Since the regular bold/unbold command doesn't solve this problem, nor does copying in a new section from another page, I'm stuck. I'll keep trying to get these things corrected. But have I mentioned that I HATE FRONTPAGE?
September 7, 2001: Ragweed Madness Most days, there is so much to record about the progress of the site that my little fingers can hardly keep up with it all. However, when allergy season kicks in, my sinuses rule and I can only be grateful that I don't have a major client project lined up for today. The big projects can thankfully wait until there is room in my head for my brain. And if I should be doing Big Things for the site, they can wait too. When the nose is in command, it's a good day to continue the never ending struggle of spacing and other FrontPage fun and games. Oh joy!
September 10, 2001: Fonts and More Fonts Whenever I go through one of my this-site-looks-looks-like-Elmo*-threw-it-together (when-he-got-tired-of-stuffing-food-in-his-cheeks) fits of site tweaking, I end up focusing on another aspect of site development and realize that I coulda/shoulda done things differently. Today I'm wishing I had made other font choices. Several experts whose names escape me (although I'm pretty sure one was Dr. Ralph Wilson) have said that the very best font is Verdana, followed by Arial, which you're looking at right now. When I started the site, I was aware of this, but chose Times New Roman as the default (that means everything goes back to this font on certain browsers) because I knew we were going to have a lot of content (180+ pages and counting) and I had some weird idea of saving space by using a skinny font. A while ago, I made some changes toward Arial so now we have a mixture of those two plus Comic Sans MS for my signature and Sylfaen for Jane Marie's. I just don't have the time to eliminate the Times New Roman on every page, and some of those Quotation pages are getting long. Sooo, unless and until I get more motivated, we're stuck. But the good news is our content is getting better and better, and that's what you come for, right? *Our newest team member. See diary for September 4th (scroll up) and Pics of Our Staff.
September 11, 2001: Oklahoma City: Time Warp Again Terrorism is stupid and cruel. Terrorism in the name of any cause is shortsighted, immoral and wrong. Terrorism is evil.
"Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies." Edna St. Vincent Millay
September 13, 2001: Mailing Lists Our mailing lists have vanished into the ether. Some technical glitch or other has swallowed them whole. Not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but a nasty loss to us. We will begin again.
September 14, 2001: Marketing Changes When I first fumbled toward the launch of this website, the Internet was a very different place. Marketing via search engine did not involve signup fees and costs per click. It is still possible to be listed with giant AltaVista and smaller engines like AllTheWeb at no cost, but the process takes time and the results are not wonderful. I can't help looking at this through gray lenses this week though our personal news has not been tragic: our cousin's daughter had scheduled her appointment at the World Trade Center too late to put her on the scene in time to become a victim. My husband is stranded in Richmond, BUT HE'S SAFE. So good things and bad things, great and petty will continue to unfold. We can wait for what will come or look forward to making the best of every minute.
September 17, 2001: Personal Publishing We expect to launch our newsletters in mid October, but I responded to Janet Roberts', of <http://Ezine-Tips.com/>, question about publishing during a national crisis with reference to this weblog, and was surprised to be included in her follow-up article* - principally because I didn't think my e-mail to Janet went through in the first place. I've noticed personal references creeping into this weblog and am coming around to the same concept for my newsletter. They were always a part of Jane Marie's concept for hers. This is a better thing. We aren't skimping on information, just adding a dimension so you get to know us just as we are getting to know you through your feedback to us. It helps to make the world a little warmer, a little closer for us all. And that's a better thing. *This is what I wrote to Janet on September 12, the Day After:
September 18, 2001: Uncommon Customer Service I taught a customer service class last night so naturally you get to read about it - or at least what it led me to think about. For about the last three weeks, I've been trying to set up our membership in the Internet Writers' Guild. My technical skills have not been equal to the task, but head honcho James S. Huggins has been holding my cyberhand all the way, and neither of us has given up yet. James' actions contrast sharply with those of so many online. No response, or worse yet keyword generated responses are often the norm when an e-mail from a real person could solve a problem and leave a positive impression of a site and those who support it. Sure, good customer service costs time and money, but if you've already got my interest, why not help me complete the transaction?
September 19, 2001: Clipping Art We snagged some free clip art yesterday. It's all over the Internet, which means everyone else has it too, but neither one of us can draw and I haven't had time to scan pictures onto my PC - although that is the plan. In the meantime, I guess this stuff will do. Aside from the fact that the same clip art is everywhere, I keep trying to figure out how the artists make a living. Is designing clip art just a hobby, or is the art I've seen leftover from the early days of the Internet when free was the norm? What's even stranger is most clip art clearly took some time and skill to design and execute. Do these artists all have trust funds?
September 20, 2001: Creative Efficiency When I don't want to work, I play Solitaire or its idiot cousin, FreeCell. The lessons here are four: Just do your work, plan your strategy as far ahead as possible, know when to quit and a wrong decision can waste a lot of time. I can't count the hours spent fooling around with website stuff that didn't quite succeed. But if I didn't try, I wouldn't learn, and the site wouldn't be improving at its endearingly (my word) jerky pace. By the way, the answer to yesterday's question about free clip art is obvious. (It came to me while I was playing FreeCell.) These days, if anyone gives you something for nothing, the big sales pitch is coming at you. Look at us. And good for them. Also of course, some of the sites ask for links, which seems only fair.
September 21, 2001: Planning Ahead Adding new sections to this site is a huge pain because I often have to make link changes in many, many pages - one at a time. Jane Marie's Fun section is coming, but I dread having to set it up because of this. On the other hand, I stupidly thought it was time to give some organization to the book reviews before there were too many to sort out. Too late. The new Book Review page is coming along slowly because I waited too long to start. Clearly, business planning doesn't just involve the document you prepare when you're looking for financing. You will save time and mistakes if you think twice before you begin a project. Anticipating and allowing for future needs is a concept we all need to do more of. Especially me.
September 24, 2001: Bandwidth Theft I'm still having trouble copying images to my server. If I don't do it right, anyone who clicks helps use up the bandwidth of the site where the image originated and can, I think, slow down their loading time instead of ours. There must be an easy system for this, but I swear I don't know what it is. That's why if you were to monitor greenlightWRITE.com 24/7, you'd see images popping on and off the site as I have time to experiment with this. The learning curve is steep, but who is smarter here?
September 25, 2001: Tuesday Rants Good news and bad: Last November I wrote an article on FleetBoston's inner city PC giveaway for Publish that has just now appeared in the ezine for the E-Business Communication Association. Publish has suspended publication - no doubt because of the horrendous advertising situation, and other magazines are also biting the dust. Everyone wants fresh, free content, but who will pay the bills? It's been two weeks since September 11 and now that jumped up, cowardly twit Bin Ladin is comparing himself to the great Saladin. Spending daddy's money to have innocent people killed does not a hero make. Actual SOHO Rant: The search engine battles continue. We are ranked 201,456 on many a large and powerful search engine, but at least we are ranked. Oh for the good ole days of the net when quality alone counted. Vow: Tomorrow I will write only nice things, or may Dale Carnegie rise up and smite me.
September 26, 2001: 200 and Growing! We did it. We've passed the 200 page mark, and I still haven't sent out the Hey, We're Here press release. It must be time to warm up the fax machine and let a few editors know what they've been missing. In the meantime, we've got a ton of fresh, new content that's screaming, "Put us online," so Jane Marie is hard at work on her first Gracious Newsletter, and I'm doing whatever it is I do. With any luck, we'll meet the target launch date of mid October, and then, well, there's my content-based newsletter and some books and whew. "Plan your work and work your plan." Unknown
October 1, 2001: More Useless Coding A simple copy and paste session to gather some of the ad copy I've written into a web page turned into a major marathon packed with HTML gibberish thanks to FrontPage's special brand of weirdness. This is what I wanted to appear on the HTML pageview: This is what I got:
<p class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-weight:normal"> <o:p>
The result was a very wide page overflowing the screen instead of a flexible page that adapted to whatever view the visitor's monitor would provide. I had to delete all the extra coding for each of the 20+ ads on the page. But what can I say about FrontPage that I haven't already said? Lessons:
October 2, 2001: The Shame I've done it again. I got a great tip from one of the newsletters I receive, and by the time I'd begun to implement it, I'd forgotten who to credit and the Trash folder had destroyed the source. From now on I'm going to write these things down so I can give credit properly. Here's the deal: Microsoft released Office XP and beta versions of Internet Explorer 6 with Smart Tag technology. Scott Ard and Steve Musil said on CNET.com, "With Smart Tags, Microsoft can link any word on a Web page to another site chosen by the company. For example, if a person were reading a story about traveling, the word 'airline' could include a link that would divert the reader to an airline or travel service chosen by Microsoft." The negative buzz caused Microsoft to remove Smart Tags from some Windows XP beta versions, but not all of them. I'm not quite clear on whether Smart Tags will be part of the Windows XP release this month, but I do know I don't want them messing with this website. The cure is this tag inserted at the top of every page on a site you want to protect: <META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" CONTENT="TRUE"> My punishment for forgetting my source for this info is I will have to paste this tag into every one of our 200+ pages one at a time. I swear I will never make this mistake again. Credit will be given promptly.
October 3, 2001: Too Many Hats, Only One Head I am not a notary so when I need to have a contract notarized (like today), I have to leave the security of my SOHO (small office, home office) environment to do my errand and be tempted by the twin demons of lunch (You probably eat a real lunch on an almost daily basis, right?) and shopping (Everyone needs stuff and I went to a grocery store closing with 60% off everything - honest.). The beauty of the SOHO world is that you can make your own hours, but if a client needs something yesterday that they didn't hand over to you until today, you gotta do the time. And make their project your priority. That means website chores and weblogs take a back seat. If only we could afford a staff so we could all do what we love best. (Lunch and shop.) Err, improve our websites. And serve our clients.
October 5, 2001: Seek and Ye Shall Find We don't have the bucks to buy listings on the major pay per click search engines - the ones showing an amount right after the listing. The experts agree that buying your way into the hearts and minds of the surfing public is the way to go. What to do? Well, we are ranked, albeit in the stratosphere, wherever we can be ranked for free, but once again my flood of ezines pays off. Trafficology, a real gem of an ezine, said that some of the new pay per clicks were giving away FREE MONEY - you open an account and they give you a credit for visitors to draw upon. So I did it. I set up all my little accounts using the single keyword "quotation." Our content is not exactly focused. We could use lots of keywords, but I wanted to test this pay per click process with a word that could be related to just about anything in a visitor's brain. On each and every search engine, I was informed that there were no bids at all for quotation and I could have the number one position for a penny (except in the single case that required a three cent minimum bid). Once we were accepted by the various search engines, I went back and did my own searches using our keyword. We never even showed up in the listings. I would like to think that the process takes time, but if no one else is even using our keyword, who are these folks that surfers are directed toward?????
October 8, 2001: Loved Him, Hated Him You'd think with all the editors who've slashed their way through my precious literary gems, I'd have a thicker skin, but not quite. The editor of The Weblog Review had a few choice words to say about THIS weblog and my first reaction was, "Oh noooo, Mr. Brent." He hated the layout and the "big green table that acts as a logo* of sorts" as well as the links at the top of every page. Now of course I can justify every design decision, but I really thought my sweet baby site looked wonderful, and here's this stranger telling me my kid is ugly! Worse, he's probably right. What to do? I will start by checking all the links at the bottom of every entry. The big green table could use the gentle touch of a graphic designer, but the wallet says no one is going to be laying a finger on it any time soon, The links at the top stay. I have to go with easier navigation over a pretty face every time. As for the general site layout, I haven't got a clue what to fix - or how. It functions. It tries to be clear. On the other hand, Brent likes the weblog content. So I love him. "If you are starting a small business or have one and are looking at putting it on the web, this is a definite read." Brent Todd, The Weblog Review PS Brent was right about the bad links. I hope I fixed them all, but FrontPage says this site has exactly 8000 links as I type this so the odds are not with me. PPS I couldn't wait until tomorrow for this. *Please visit our LOGO page and tell us what you think.
October 9, 2001: A Scream in the Night Allergies attack in the middle of the night. You get up to take the generic pseudo-quill "so you can rest" medicine you resisted swilling at bedtime because you knew you had to get up at 5 a.m. to take your husband to the airport. You trip over a suitcase you yourself left in the middle of the hall. You are bloody but unbowed - but everyone else is awake and cursing. ("Oh &$%#^! Etc.")
October 10, 2001: The Big Green Blob No question about it. Everyone says the logo/table/piece of ^%& at the top* of the page must go. I have put up a logo page and a possible new home page with a small and much needed format change as well as my favorite candidate for replacement logo. The possible new home page** has column width issues, but it is an improvement. Problem is my favorite candidate for new logo isn't much better from a design standpoint. It's tables and cells and borders - boring. Jane Marie's suggested logos are very good designs that would probably appeal to most people who dislike the big green blob. I like her designs too (and I'm trying to get them on the logo page - no success so far, but she's sent directions that might work). But I am very much married to the name greenlightWRITE.com - I've been using variations on it for years - and that means my color choices are limited though I'm going to change the red to copper on the new home page and see what everyone thinks.*** AND then there are those pesky catch phrases that I hope will stick in editors' minds: One Brand, Multiple Solutions™ and Freelance Writing: On Target, On Time™. They have to be right where they are for marketing reasons. Every business, no matter how small should create magic words that (could with luck) stick in peoples' brains like "Buy Pepsi, Get Stuff" or "The Real Thing." Having done so, I gotta use them. I just gotta.*Click here to see the actual logos and their evolution. **This page is no longer available. ****I couldn't get the color I see in my head so have settled for CC3300****, a sort of rusty red. Hmm. It does soften things - just as :D suggested in a recent e-mail. ****HTML colors are coded by HEX Triplet values. These are combinations of six letters or numbers.
October 11, 2001: Winning the Logo Wars* You won! You won! The big green blob is toast! Or it will be within the next few days. My thanks to everyone who hated the blob: Jane Marie, who has always wanted a softer look, and all the visitors who took the time to tell me my design sense sucked. YOU GUYS ARE GREAT. You got me to think outside the table. The easiest thing would have been to use one of Jane Marie's designs. I wasn't able to get them to show up on the site so last night I opened a book, and guess what? Microsoft Image Composer made everything happen - albeit slowly because it's from Microsoft and because I don't adapt quickly to new software - even when I read the directions. My next step will be to create versions of the new logo that will highlight whatever portion of the site is appropriate and work with the colored backgrounds on the Jane Marie pages. Then I'm going to redo the top of the page links because the layout needs tweaking. By Jove, I think I've got it. *A month ago, who knew how lives would change. I almost didn't use the word "war," but that seemed phony.
October 12, 2001: Little Miss Sunshine I wouldn't be making such a big deal about the logo thing except that once so many of you brought the awfulness of the big green blob to my attention, I knew how important it was. As a child, our cousin - also named Jane - closely resembled the symbol of some kind of bread from the Sunshine Bakery. I still remember the bread wrappers, and can't actually picture this cousin as she really was - only as she appeared on plastic bags. And while you won't be seeing our names anywhere near your morning toast, we do need to have a logo that won't harm your eyesight. Since yesterday, Jane Marie has improved the green circle/black rectangle image that seems to be the best of the bunch. We are now considering the colors of the copy within. A small SOHO victory seems close at hand. But the struggle to improve the home page layout remains. Bottom line: we're writers, but there is no excuse for driving visitors away with bad design. Everyone starts out even on the Internet. If we don't have the advantages of money or staff, we do have your feedback and lots of determination. Stay tuned. PS Our thanks to Linda for all her help.
October 16, 2001: Serendipity?* As I was redoing the Quotation pages, I found I needed to come up with some kind of horizontal line or page break in a color that wouldn't irritate most people. And then while cleaning out a bunch of old magazines, I came across the May/June 2001 issue of Publish** with an article by Eileen E. Flynn about color. Flynn said Bondi Blue is universally popular because "experts agree [it] conveys trust and has a calming effect." Of course I couldn't find a hex code for Bondi Blue in my books. I did a fast search and came up with www.dreamartists.com/hexcode.html, a site that lets you slide color bars to get most any color and its code. I couldn't make Bondi Blue. Then I went to Apple.com because they invented/recognized/named the color. No luck there. Suddenly I realized I don't like Bondi Blue. It's a bright, sort of but not quite very, very deep turquoise. It hurts my eyes. So I made these horizontal bars and am popping them around the links: \\\.\\\\.\\\\\\\.///////.////./// Feel free to tell me how much you hate them. PS Maybe it just looks ugly in the magazine. *I know you know this because you've seen the John Cusack movie called Serendipity (a yawn), but I didn't. According to Webster's Dictionary, the word "serendipity" was coined by Horace Walpole (remember him?) from a Persian fairy tale called Three Princes of Serendip, aka Ceylon and Sri Lanka. (It's the big island nation at the tip of India.) The princes apparently showed some aptitude for making accidental, but fortunate discoveries. **No longer with us.
October 18, 2001: Link Swapping We're the new kid on the block so we're almost always pleased to trade links with another, more established site. But some people are so easy to work with you just want to slap their logos all over your pages. My case in point is Diana of In Mama's Kitchen. She and Jane Marie have been exchanging e-mails recently and have developed a cyber friendship that reminds me of how nice people can be despite this new era of hate and mistrust. Things must have been like this in the early days of the Internet, the good old days. Sigh.
October 25, 2001: Big Day for Microsoft Whoppty-do. Windows XP, Microsoft's newest operating system is now Out There. I wasn't one of the faithful standing in line to buy an upgrade at midnight. (An Upgrade at Midnight sounds like a bad movie from the 1940s.) And I won't be making a purchase any time soon. Why, you ask?
With all the computer problems I have, a more stable operation system would be nice, but that's why I upgraded to Windows 2000. So I'm going to hold out until everything crashes, which it will - it always does, and buy a shiny new PC or a laptop with all the bells and whistles. How about you?
October 29, 2001: SOHO Lament When you work alone, you miss some real perks that others take for granted. You won't be having dynamite post-TV blockbuster (??) discussions around the water cooler because there is no one to gather around your water cooler - if, in fact, you actually have a water cooler. (I have a kitchen sink.) You can't blame anything on co-workers because how much heat can pets really take before they need counseling? And you don't have group health insurance anyway - especially not for a group that includes Elmo, the hamster; three dogs; some raucous birds and whatever fish haven't been eaten by that suspiciously marked snake. [Pics of Our Staff] But most importantly, there are no neighboring desks stocked with attractive dishes of Halloween candy in SOHO-Land. The world of small offices, home offices does not include co-worker provided treats. "And that has made all the difference." Robert Frost
October 30, 2001: Taking Stock Just when you think all the evil in the world is hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, you get a news flash from the The Hague about the specific charges in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. You wonder how it is that monsters exist when most people just want to get on with their lives, whoever they are and wherever they are. The majority of us just want to live and let live. Most in SOHO-Land simply want to do our jobs and keep our sites running smoothly so in that healthy normal spirit, I'm taking stock.
October 31, 2001: Digital Cameras Last night's class on digital photography confirmed my belief that digital cameras aren't up to the 35mm standard. The instructor said 8 mega pixel cameras would produce magazine print quality images, but they will be unavailable until February. So unless a juicy assignment comes along, I will wait to upgrade. And even then, I'll take my trusty 35 mm (with slide film) as a backup. Bonus tip: Remove the batteries from your digital camera while traveling. The couple who sat beside me in class said their batteries corroded in the camera on a two day flight (immediately after September 11) from Hawaii to OKC. A recent BBC piece suggested that digital cameras will destroy our photographic history as photojournalists are forced to delete images in the field in the interest of storage. The author said sometimes the shots leading up to the printed image are invaluable in telling the complete story. I'd include a link to the article, but I've had to reboot in mid blog and have lost the URL. It did not turn up in a quick search of the BBC site. Sorry, it was an interesting piece.
November 2, 2001: Networking Not all life is virtual. Sometimes you have to get out and meet actual people to stay in business. Here's the method my friend, Marcia, and I used at the opening of a Small Business Administration center: The key is that everyone wants to talk about themselves so you look a stranger in the face, stick out your hand and say, "I'm Nancy Kamp, freelance writer.* What do you do?" That's it. Just listen and nod your head while they talk. And hand out business cards. Bonus trick: one woman I met kept her own business cards in her right pocket and those she collected in her left. My pockets were sewn shut (fake) so I couldn't manage that one, but at least I brought a stack of cards. Two people actually attended a business function without business cards!!!!! *Please use your own name unless you are attending a gathering of editors. In that case, make sure to take a stack of my cards. And be charming.
November 5, 2001: Cognitive Dementia I had the title way before I had anything to write about because I overheard an NPR program about cognitive non human animal dementia and realized that our senior canine editor, SCE, was exhibiting symptoms of the condition like gazing at nothing for hours. She's very old, had a terrible puppyhood* and deserves a nice retirement on her big, fluffy cushion, which in no way interferes with her duties.** My tentative diagnosis changes nothing. Unfortunately, the subject thrust itself forward in a time wasting, %$## way because I too may have the malady. While I've always prided myself on my spelling, there are words I never fail to misspell like "weird," "appetizer" and "merchandise" - so I look them up. But I almost always fail to remember that I never seem to get "desert" and "dessert" right. And when I put together the bottom of the page links for Jane Marie, I not only misspelled dessert, but I also forgot to make the actual page. That meant I had a misspelled link with nowhere to go AND I didn't figure this out until I was almost through with inserting the corrected links. Now my DSL from DirecTV is down, and anyone who chances on our pages will think we have no editorial standards because I can't upload the corrections. I wish I had a big, fluffy cushion too. *SCE and her siblings were found inside a box (nailed shut) near the dead body of their mother. They were rescued by Free to Live Animal Sanctuary of Edmond, OK. **Barking when I'm on the phone and stealing food from the junior staff.
November 6, 2001 Mea Culpa I owe a big fat apology to DirecTV. Yesterday's problems had nothing to do with their DSL service and everything to do with Cedant's web hosting. Never assume. DirecTV's tech on the phone, Ben Kaufman, was nice enough to suggest that I make my frames non resizable so people wouldn't be messing with the sizes of the pages within the frames. And I actually figured out how to do that with FrontPage's Frames Properties tool, I think. (There is a check/uncheck box.) Naturally the limited books I have on hand say it's a good thing to have resizable frames. So since I am currently swamped, I'm going to learn more about frames before I make broad spectrum technical changes whose implications I haven't the knowledge to understand. I told Ben, to whom I am most grateful for alerting me to a situation I didn't know existed, that I would include a link to his music (?) website today, but the URL of <www.thumper.lefty.ca> does not work any better than <www.thumper.lefty.ca.com>. And a quick search on Dogpile, my favorite metasearch* engine, turned up nothing. Alas. Sorry, Ben. *A metasearch engine allows you to search many search engines at once. They save tons of time.
November 7, 2001 Falling Scree Problems travel in packs. It isn't enough that we somehow sent an unedited version of an article to another site that quickly put it online. Now we're faced with an outbreak of FELINE TONGUE SCRATCHING (FTS) in its most dreaded form. The afflicted kitty, normally the brilliant leader of our elite Florida Feline Content Advisory Board, is actually using office equipment (the paper shredder!!!) to work through the manifestations of this rare disease! What to do? Jane Marie, head of our Florida office, has taken the drastic but necessary step of hiding the paper shredder. Will that prevent reoccurrences of FTS? We don't know. The cat in question, who asked to remain anonymous until he gets a handle on his craving, has developed an interest in some scissors and a dull set of steak knives - both of which have been locked in a drawer. We'll keep you advised. The good news is that I received an e-mail from Ben Kaufman who said his correct URL is http://thumper.lefty.ca. His list of "Strange places I have called my brother from" is so wonderfully bizarre as to invoke the story of how John met Yoko - she was hammering nails in the wall of an art gallery because she could. Ah life.
November 9, 2001: Top Level? I was pleasantly surprised to find I'm the proud owner of eight top level domains or TLDs. However, this means absolutely nothing since none of my choices are short and snappy. Short and snappy translates into lots of random visits by people who type in "anythingatall" followed by "dot-com" to see what will materialize, which means free traffic for a site. Internet Marketing Chronicles says business.com sold for $7.5 million!!! But since none of my domains have received an offer to buy, I believe I will keep working.
November 12, 2001: Déjà Vu It's very hard to compose a weblog when another plane has fallen out of the sky. Who cares if we now have over 300 pages and more than 15,000 links? I'd rather know there were survivors.
November 13, 2001: Publicity We're gonna be famous! First we get word from Ann Taylor Boutwell of the Atlanta Intown Newspaper that she wants to quote Jane Marie in a story about Atlanta's Fox Theatre - which JM graciously wrote and forwarded for mid January publication. (Read it here now.) Then we hear that the Idea Cafe will be featuring my Profile on November 30th. This is so exciting. But do fan clubs come with these gigs or must we furnish our own?
November 14, 2001: Gain is Gain The stupid scanner isn't working again. (I have checked all the cables and reinstalled the software, and the printer works just fine on the same port - I have a Belkin Data Switch so the printer and the scanner can share ports.) $#^&%# But on the plus side, I think every single page on this site finally has an anti-Smart Tag - at last. And there will always be something I haven't gotten around to yet until I hang up my dinner pail.* I could keep on complaining, but at least I won't get stoned for taking off my veil. And besides, we have a Jane Marie newsletter to get out! Plus I have a ton of work. *I'm still reading P. G. Wodehouse. Try him. (Life With Jeeves: The Inimitable Jeeves,...) You'll like him.
November 15, 2001: Teamwork Day Because of a weird combination of circumstances and most especially because I am LHE* and I said so, today is Teamwork Day. *Isn't it time you discovered Gilbert and Sullivan? Or checked out our FAQs?
But please visit Despair.com because even if you want to be all that you can be, sometimes you've got to accept that you've failed. (Failed gloriously, no doubt.) But you must first acknowledge to yourself that you didn't hit your target or achieve your goal before moving on. And before you try again, you may as well have a good laugh at your own expense. After all, if ^%#$*& spam can provide something of value, then so, perhaps, can the depths of despair.
November 29, 2001: Snow Day SOHO (small office, home office) dwellers plan for summer vacation. We can look in our planners and determine when school breaks will occur to steel ourselves for the problems to come. But snow days are acts of God as interpreted by school superintendents, and we are powerless against them. The litany of disruptions grows swiftly. Office supplies disappear at an alarming rate. The canine staff becomes raucous, excited and unproductive. Plus, there is little defense against the noise factor. Loud, alien music and really bad cartoons echo through the SOHO. Children remove cordless phones to their hideous and foul smelling dens, only to answer business calls with a grunt followed by "Mom, it's some guy for you." And then there's the food issue. By 7:45 a.m., someone else has eaten the leftovers you'd been looking forward to enjoying for lunch. And another someone else has eaten every bit of food in the house by 10:36 a.m. It soon becomes clear that if you want to survive a snow day, YOU have to go to the grocery store. Now. Oddly enough, snow days are often very productive. And if you finish up early, you too can don every bit of clothing you own and build a snowman - unless you live in Oklahoma where a snow day is called when there isn't actually enough snow on the ground to build a snowman.
December 10, 2001: I'm Baaack Who knows what evil lurks in the microprocessor of a PC? I certainly don't, but when my computer died recently, I felt the pain. It's amazing how much stuff vanishes when a computer hands in its dinner pail.* And it's interesting that for all the sales hype, new computers are not cheap - unless you want a Celaron processor and dinosaur equipment. So here I sit today with my shiny new PC, a Gateway because I thought (ha) their customer service would have improved since our last transaction. I'm way behind schedule, but catching up rapidly. Life is full and rich. *P. G. Wodehouse, one of the great writers of the last century, never handled tragedy without sweetness and light. "Handing in one's dinner pail" was his euphemism for death.
December 27, 2001: Office Party Woes 'Tis the season of raucous office parties and unprofessional behavior. Sadly, our Senior Canine Editing team lived up to tradition by consuming an entire Whitman's Sampler and a giant Nestlé's Crunch. These had been moved to the top of a desk instead of being left where I put them (way up high - I know these staff members all too well). Since chocolate is toxic to dogs, we are very fortunate to announce that our team suffered no holiday losses. But be warned. Few staffers will say no to temptation.
December 31, 2001 Keeping Up with the Canines Interoffice rivalries can tear a team apart. Generally we hear about internal groups that are pitted against each other in the hope of improving production, but occasionally word surfaces of feuds stemming from causes that should bring in investigators from the Department of Justice who would be interested to know why federal laws on Diversity are being flouted. Sadly, such is the case in our own ranks. The Florida Felines, shocked that the Senior Canine Editing staff not only ingested mass quantities of chocolate, which is toxic to their kind, but also survived their holiday ordeal, decided to begin celebrating New Year's Eve early at a traditional Southern Barbecue. Alas, one feline, who has asked to remain nameless in his shame, managed to get so high on the catnip he'd found in his Christmas stocking that he was seen leisurely walking away from the festivities with his tail smoking!
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