Death by blogging

A story in the New York Times, In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, caught my eye today.

I went to the NYT's website to recheck some facts and hit the reg wall! Talk about stressful.

Lighten up, will you!

Wordpress all done

All done and no troubles. Wordpress updates are easy. Still, there's a new widget page that took some working out. I managed to delete all my traffic tracking scripts. I've got them back now. Of the tracking sites but that pissed me off a bit. As you can imagine. So be careful if you try this at home.

Back up the important stuff and upload the content of wp-themes and wp-plugins separately. Otherwise you are going to overwrite these folders and loose your custom content. Oh, this isn't in the book. Upgrade your plugins and themes to the latest version before you upgrade Wordpress. Saves you being stuck with a plugin or theme that doesn't work with 2.5.

Otherwise, it's a doddle! (lnk)

De-enginering the web

Writing about the 25 most valuable websites is very clever. Not including one single link to a mentioned site is not.

And it's a good article, but not linking to original sources on the web makes publishing on the web pretty pointless.

I came to the article from another website but I know some publishers are reluctant to link away from their own site. Unless it's another site of the same media brand.

This is de-enginering the web back to, well, what? Something less than useless. How would you find anything?

You can swat flies with a paper when there is no more information to be had.

But like I said, It's a great article so don't let me hold you up (lnk)

Be careful what you learn at school

I just wrote a post on my Swedish blog about writing and web publishing. I was all about getting harassed by teachers for writing to well! I got accused of copying an essay out of a book because it was so well written! That screwed my writing up for years.

I'm glad I'm over that but it has certainly taught me to be more careful when I give opinions around my own children.

I was so happy when my youngest daughter came home and told me she had a special exercise book at school for writing. Just for writing, whatever she wanted. The teacher never corrected this writing. Not spelling errors or grammar, it was just for the love of writing.

Of course my daughter had learn grammar and spelling and all the rest of it. She is quite good at that, better than me :-) But above all she is not afraid of expressing herself.