Things that end with “R”
Speaking of Twitter, those of you who tweet may want to take advantage of the (finally!) recently-added Twitter widget.
Likewise for those who Flickr. Examples to the left. Knock yourselves out (figuratively).
My internet, let me show you it.
Indexing in Times of Spam
So you may have noticed lately that we’ve been seeing an awful lot (emphasis on awful) of spam blogs here on CW. As fun as it is to login multiple times a day and delete 5-10 new blogs at a given time, or to be frantically tapping away on a borrowed (non-3G) iPhone in an effort to clear away that new porn blog that just reared its ugly head, we’ve implemented a few changes that will affect new blog registration.
Validation Station
New blogs will now undergo a short validation period. Basically this just means we look at a blog when it’s registered, and if the username isn’t something like kdjalskfjewo and the title actually is coherent, we turn it on. Note: don’t just type in random characters for your username. If you activate your blog and don’t hear from us within 24 hours, please let us know. We’ve decided to remove this, for now, as I think the second step outlined below is handling things just fine. We shall see. I was wrong.
Private Public
Also, by default, new blogs will no longer be indexed and publicly viewable until you turn that option on in your admin panel. Again, this doesn’t affect existing blogs!
To make your blog public, follow this steps:
- In the admin panel, click on the Options tab.
- On the options page, click the Privacy sub-tab.
- Select “I would like my blog to be visible to anyone who visits…”
- Click Update Options
And just like that, you’re done! And now, I’m off to rehearse for some show about a barber.
Closed
Last night marked the sixth and final performance of WCT’s Over the River & Through the Woods. It was a show that I am proud to have been a part of, and I consider it a huge personal achievement in terms of my own acting “career”. If somebody had told me a year ago, when I was just beginning to rehearse for West Side Story, that I’d be performing as one of the leads in a non-musical, I would’ve been skeptical. I’ve always enjoyed musical theatre, and it was the love of singing that got me into theatre in the first place.
But it’s funny what a little peer pressure can do, especially when it’s a peer whose opinion holds a lot of weight in your decisions. So I tried out. And not 2 hours afterwards, I was offered the part of Nick, a young New Yorker who visits his Italian grandparents (all four of them!) every Sunday for dinner, until he gets offered a promotion… and it’s in Seattle. In a last-ditch effort to keep their grandson close, they secretly invite a special someone to dinner in hopes that he’ll fall head over heels and just won’t be able to leave.
As with any show, it’s the cast and crew that brought this script to life. Everyone fell so naturally into their characters - it was a real pleasure from the first read-through all the way to the final performance. And yet, this is drama and we were not without drama of our own. But that all melts away when you decide what to remember, and I’ll remember what turned out to be a wonderful experience and awesome people.
What’s next, now that this show has come to a close? Easy answer: we’ve already started rehearsals for Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It’s a sort of polar opposite to this show: huge cast, huge music, subjective subject matter, and at the Grand Theater. But it will be great fun, and I can’t wait.
On Coworking
I had a whole other post prepared as a followup to my last post, one that basically offered some ideas to make Citizen Desk a more attractive prospect. But as I discussed it more and more with others, it came back to this:
It’s an artificial group.
Creatives, especially the web-oriented sort, travel in packs. We have our core group of friends or colleagues that we use as a sounding board for ideas and a resource for solving problems. Most importantly, when there’s a project that’s too much for us to handle on our own, those are the people we call. This is our real group. We’ve spent years developing it and maintaining it without even thinking about it. It just happens.
This is coworking at its most refined, at its most basic. It’s a brilliant system. But when you try to organize that, for whatever reason, it doesn’t quite work. Often the people in a group are not full-time freelancers; they simply enjoy finding projects on the side is a way to flex the creative muscles and make a little extra scratch. I certainly fall into this category, and I can say the same for pretty much everyone in my group. We communicate when we can, via email or IM or phone or Twitter or whatever works at the time, as long as the necessary group members get the message.
But never in person. Almost never. A good portion of my group is scattered about the country, and yet we still manage to accomplish things, which amazes me. I love the internet.
Here’s another thing: no two groups are the same. I might have a group with A, B, C, and D, while D has a group of me, E, F, and J. Overlapping is not guaranteed, so the ideal group for you is not necessarily the ideal group for your groupmates. They may not get along with eachother, or they may just not know eachother. It makes for a tangled web for sure, but who am I to argue with efficiency?
What I’m trying to say is, these workgroups are incredibly organic; they’re constantly evolving as we meet new people or lose touch with others. The internet has made this possible on a national or even worldwide scale. One thing’s for sure, very rarely is it possible to constrain an efficient group to a single place.
Peanut Butter
A good idea with a terrible name attached to a futile business model.
I could stop right there and have succinctly described the Jelly, a gathering taking place at Citizen Desk this week. People in Wausau like social gatherings so this “Jelly” seems to be on track for success in that regard, though I have a feeling more than a few of the names on the list will be absent for whatever reason. My reason is that I wasn’t invited.
But the real purpose of the event is to serve as a sort of “look at me!” for Citizen Desk. Unfortunately, while the idea of a co-working space has merit, the fact that we are in the rural midwest where space is cheaply had (home office, anyone?) and that people value their privacy when it comes to professional matters makes it a non-starter. There may be a few exceptions, but what then?
Let’s say I shell out $150 (or whatever amount) per month for a desk at CD. That gets me a workspace with no storage, up 4 flights of stairs, in an office space with a great view but no cross ventilation and a hard-to-explain location. Internet is included, but wireless, and I have to bring my own tools.
Speaking of tools, trying to design on a laptop SUCKS.
Assuming you get past the architectural and hardware-related issues, we come to the people you’ll be sharing your space with. Because CD is in it for the money first and foremost (as are most businesses doomed to fail), I see it as unlikely that anybody who wants a desk will be refused one. Which means your entire work environment could be completely altered by one person.
Nobody wants that kind of unpredictability when they are trying to get work done. Instead, save that $150 a month and spend it on your own internet, keeping your hardware and software up to date, and if nothing else, on doing nice things for your clients. Meet your friends and colleagues for lunch, and then you can all go back to your respective workspaces, spaces that you’ve optimized for yourselves, and most importantly, get work done.
Clarification (Perhaps)
I’m debating what the best way to explain this is, so I figure I’ll just jump right in and hope that you can follow. It’s not overly technical, but it can be a little confusing.
There have been some questions regarding the functionality of Citizen Wausau’s admin panels (the parts you see when you’re writing a blog post or updating your user information). The whole site is driven by a modified version of WordPress which accommodates a vast number of individual blogs that are all basically on a network.
Because this is built on top of existing software, some of the UI functionality isn’t quite as clear as I’d like. This has become evident in the fact that it’s just downright confusing or complicated at times. The most commonly asked question is “how do I get to my admin panel to write posts?”
The easiest way I can suggest is to go to this address: http://citizenwausau.com/yourblogname/wp-admin/. That will take you directly to the admin panel of your blog.
The site is set up in such a way that your profile links take you to http://citizenwausau.com/wp-admin (note that there’s no blog name in that address), which will put you at the admin area of the main Citizen Wausau blog. From there you can get to your blog using the arrow next to the title on the top left.
For most users this is a non-issue because they only write on their own blogs and comment on the main blog. However, we have a few users who both keep a personal blog and contribute to the Citizen Wausau blog, and they’ve expressed concern about accidentally publishing an article on the wrong blog.
So again, the best advice I can offer: check the title on the top left if you’re not sure where you are! We at CW would love to see this system improved, but for the time being we are at the mercy of the WPMU team.
I hope this clears things up a little bit for those who’ve been confused!
All You Need
(Dino told me I should repost this here, so here goes:)
Bear with me; I’m going to head back to theatre-nerd reference land for a minute. I mentioned a few times that I was just in Gypsy, a show about a young girl who is pushed into burlesque and stripping by her overzealous, fame-seeking mother. There’s an exchange in the show between one of the strippers at the theater and the daughter in which the daughter explains that she “can’t be a stripper because she has no talent.” To which the stripper responds, “to be a stripper all you need to have is no talent.”
To be a designer all you need to have is no talent. Stop and think about that for a second. How many terrible designers do you know? People that have no artistic skill whatsoever but still manage to extract the dollars from desperate clients who don’t know that there’s a better act just down the street.
Near the end of the show, the daughter has accepted stripping and become quite famous for it. She makes a statement during her act about being an “ecdysiast”, or one who sheds its skin, and exclaiming that “at these prices, I’m not a stripper; I’m an ecdysiast!”
With that in mind, there are plenty of truly talented designers out there, and as is often the case, they have higher rates. But at the same time, you’ll find designers charging like they’re ecdysiasts when they’re not, and vice versa. Such is life on the internerd: anybody can claim to be anything.
DNS.O.S.
So yesterday we were able to bring Citizen Wausau back to life after days of uncomfortable stasis. To do so meant we had to change the name servers attached to the domain name. Name servers tell the Domain Name Service (DNS) where to look for your site, and the Oops page and the full site are on two different hosts.
Once the name servers get changed, this information can take awhile to propagate to all the different DNS servers out there, as each ISP has their own. Here’s a “pro” tip: Charter’s DNS is notoriously slow to update. When they caution you that these kinds of changes can take 12 - 24 hours to spread through the entire internet, I believe they are talking about Charter specifically.
What can you do? Well, if you are technically-minded (or at least enough to have found this post interesting so far) it’s a pretty simple solution: just change your DNS address in your network settings (where you set your IP address and other information). Open DNS is a great way to start. You can go through the signup rigamarole on the page to add some enhanced functionality, or you can just pull the numbers from the bottom right (208.67.222.222; 208.67.220.220).
Admittedly this is kind of a nerdy change to make, but if you’re comfortable with this sort of thing and you want your internet to be a little bit better, go for it. Plus you’ll never see Charter-branded error pages again!
Gypsy
Wausau Community Theatre is presenting Gypsy at the end of February. I’m fortunate enough to be a member of the cast, which means I get to hone my acting skills and be with people whose company I enjoy. There’s no dancing or singing for me in this one, which I was kind of bummed about at first but has actually been a blessing in disguise since it leaves me with more open evenings.
Light It Up
Wausau, if you’re driving and it’s precipitating/foggy/dawn/dusk/night and/or your windshield wipers are on, then for the love of God TURN ON YOUR HEADLIGHTS. If you don’t, you’re dumb and I can’t help you.