Changes to this blog

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Quitting?! Me? Never. 

Okay, so it crossed my mind. Then I realized that in hard times we don't quit, we adapt. Over the past week I've been doing some assessing of my own goals and have taken a hard look at what I've accomplished. I also got some great feedback from readers, which I'll share with you since it mostly came off-board.

My dear friend Amanda had some great ideas about formatting:

Hey David,

I was just reading your post today, and I have a suggestion that I thought might help. Maybe it's not the length of the post that's keeping people from reading, but the way it's presented? It reminded me of what job coaches tell you about a resume - you only have a few seconds to sell yourself; no one wants to read a block of text, they want bullets and titles that stand out so they can see what you're about at a glance. There's one blog that I frequent (http://www.facebook.com/l/29918;zenhabits.net) that takes advantage of his reader's short attention span by doing just this. Here's an example: http://www.facebook.com/l/29918;zenhabits.net/2009/09/the-habit-change-cheatsheet-29-ways-to-successfully-ingrain-a-behavior/#more-4644

Les Edgerton wrote in with this bit of wisdom:

Hey David,

I just wanted to comment on your post about cutting back on your blog. My thought when I see a blog that comes out as regular as your does is, "When does he ever have time to do his own writing?" A good example is a couple of weeks ago, I was gabbing with agent Don Maass and we were talking about Nathan Bransford and his daily blog. We both wondered when the heck did he find time to do any agenting. Well, he does and he's a great agent and somehow finds the time, but I just know I started a blog once and had to quit fairly soon into it as it was eating great chunks of my available writing time up. I think if you post, say once a week, you'd find it worked better for you. I had a similar problem years ago when I was a hairstylist. I'd talk about the novel or whatever I was working on all day long to clients and when I got home at night found I wrote very little. The reason? I was "writing" all day long when I was talking to my clients! Since I figured that out, I quit talking to anyone about what I was working on, including my wife. That helped a ton. Hey, if you think this will help anyone, please feel free to post it on your blog. I just can't figure out how to do that!

BTW, I really enjoy your postings!

And my writing mom, Viki, had this to say:

First of all, a lot of the stuff you've written here has been tremendously helpful to MY writing. There have even been a few of those "coincidences" that what you've written DIRECTLY speaks to an issue I'm having with my story, or my process, or even my motivation for writing at all! So, for me, your blog has often helped me get back to a writing mojo....& it has also made me smile & then laugh out loud. AND, I have quoted it to many writing friends.

And cos of that, I'm probably not truly objective. But that's okay too. Inspiration & direction is subjective, and your blog has provided both for me. I don't think you need to change a thing about it. (so sue me!)

That said, & purely for the sake of trying to at least offer SOME kind of suggestion: Would it be feasible to decide on one subject/thought/theme for each week, then write about it over 3-5 days? Each post building on the last to a conclusion? Giving you an opportunity to expound? Is this a way of telling you that there have been many times that I wanted more? Yeah.

What I learned

Formatting: I need to spend more time on it

Time: I don't have it

Loyalty: Just because some folks are forced to take a break doesn't mean they aren't coming back and I should be here when they return

Length: It's the length of my posts that's killing me

Goals: My main goal is to write and publish, but I'm spending a good chunk of my writing time putting together posts

Comments: Sometime in the near future I might have to abandon this blog theme for one that is better about comments

Friends: I've got a lot of great people out there that love and support me and I appreciate all of them

And the Verdict Is:

I'm going to keep the same format. Five days a week, extras on the weekends if the mood strikes me. The difference is going to be in length. Rather than struggling to put together four fully developed posts, I'll have small thoughts like yesterdays for three of those days and then one post a week will be a well developed article, complete with formatting, witty headings, and pictures. It's all that extra stuff that I try to put into the articles to make them easier on the eyes that really eats away at time.

This should free up time for both you and me to get our writing done. You won't be trying to wade through long posts, and I won't be spending all my time writing them.

Did I miss anything? If so, and you weren't able to comment before, you're always welcome to drop me a line and share your thoughts. If there's something you'd like to see more or less of, say so. After all, it's the feedback that I get from you guys that makes this all worth while. 

Hope everyone's lives are getting a little less complicated and that you're finding adequate time for your writing. 

Critique this Blog

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So, what’s going on with the blog? Good question? I think I’m posting too often and I mean that with regards to everyone involved, both you, and me.

For you folks, I’m just way to wordy. I find myself doing it on other people’s blogs too. I tune in, look to see how much I have to read, sigh, tell myself I’ll come back to it later, and then don’t. I do that all the time with David Farland’s Kicks. They don’t work as kicks anymore because they’re too damned long. Save for when his brother does them for him. In those instances they act more like kicks.

For me, I’m just not getting things done because I’m spending all of my free time working on posts. Last week, ahead of our trip to Colorado, I was busting my butt to get posts done ahead of time so that they would be ready while I was gone. That meant that while I was on the plane I was working on critiques for my critique group and posting those things late.

My reward for all of this hard work? Another low readership week. The lowest in six weeks.

Obviously something has to be done. I just don’t know what it is. So I need to test out some things. The first thing I’m going to test out is posting less often. For a while the numbers seemed to say that I should post as often as possible, but I think that has oversaturated readers. That and there seems to be this collective busyness taking over everyone’s lives right now, my own included. It’s not summer anymore, and we just don’t have the time.

So, here’s the question, what is a good posting schedule for Divining the Words? Should they continue to be every weekday but broken up into smaller segments, maybe spread an article out over a week? Post one full article a week? Every other day? You tell me. You are the reason I do this after all because it sure as hell isn’t for the money. J

There you go. I’m opening DtW up for critique. If you don’t want to publically broadcast your opinion, send your thoughts over to noceti.david@gmail.com. And remember, I can handle criticism of all shades, so send your nastiest and most kind, I’ll take them all.

Thanks,

Your humble servant,

David

Adding A Word Count Status Bar

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My thoughts get a bit fragmented at times. Has something to do with being a creative type of person. So, one minute I’ll be thinking “gotta get the dream blog finished up,” and the next I’ll be thinking, “oh man, that’s a really cool word count status bar, I’ve got to figure out how they did that.” And so we have today’s blog about a status bar rather than finishing up dreams. I’ll post that tomorrow. Really. No, I promise. I really, really promise.  

 

Now, I could do a bunch of research on all sorts of status bars, and in fact, at one time I did. I looked at a bunch of fancy graphics and the like but in the end decided on nothing at all. They all required me to fiddle around with html coding and updating manually on the blog, so I scrapped the idea. There was also the added risk of the site vanishing and your word counts vanishing with it.

 

Well, in my blog meandering, I came across a blog post [here] at nixyvalentine.com on this very subject. She used to use something called Zokutou until they vanished. Then she happened upon honorless.net. This progress bar is completely code generated; therefore, it does not vanish when the site vanishes. And because the webpage is also completely code generated, you can save it to your computer and run it without being online.

 

Simply type in your parameters, click the “Refresh Code” button and voila! Now copy that updated html in the box below and you’ve got your code. Drop it into an html box (in blogger or wherever you can use straight code in on the site of your choice) and you’ve got a status bar.

 

Want to title your status bar? Just type the title in before the coding and then add a break (a < followed by br followed by >) to get the status bar to appear below your title. After that string of code is done, add a couple more breaks and start over again with your next project. You can see mine in the crowded sidebar to the right.

 

By clicking on the “Appearance” button you can change fonts, colors and all sorts of other stuff. For mine, I changed the height to 4 pixels, the colors, and the font. I also changed the width to 100%. The percentage on the width will be how much of the column your status bar takes up. Because mine is appearing in a rather thin column, I had it take up the entire space whereas if it were appearing on a webpage (like it does when you are generating your code) it would need to be scaled down, like to 30% the way they have it on the site.

And there you have it. Now interested parties can keep up with your progress. You’ve also got a nice reminder that you’re actually getting things done, or conversely, you have a reminder of how much you’re NOT getting done. J  If any of this doesn’t make sense, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to clarify things. When it comes to coding and the like, I’m like a two year French student trying to travel France without the aid of a translator.