I changed my WordPress blog, danielgreene.com, to the Mystique theme. I love it! It has this widget on the top with links to my RSS feed, Facebook Page, Twitter profile, Flickr photostream, and YouTube channel. It has a combo widget on the right that shows recent comments, top posts, archives, tag cloud, and category lists. And it uses a beautiful font that has true italics. I like!

I first spoke with Amanda, the conference organizer, on Thursday afternoon, January 14, and offered to interpret and coordinate. She told me the budget was $2,000 for a four–track conference which would need a maximum of eight interpreters. I figured I could get four professional interpreters to earn $50 an hour, get four students to volunteer their services pro bono, and that would still leave $400, half of which might go toward compensating me for coordinating services, and half of which might go toward gift cards for students.

That same night, I found out that Amanda had un–registered a deaf registrant because she didn’t like her attitude. I advocated for the ousted registrant, emailing Amanda, “Deaf people routinely face discrimination and have to fight for their rights. In light of this, I find the registrant’s demands assertive rather than aggressive.” I even followed this up another day and asked Amanda if she would please consider reinstating her. Amanda was immovable.

I should mention that the first deaf registrant had approached me around Thanksgiving about interpreting for WordCamp. I had said I would be interested and asked him to send me more information, but the holidays came and went before I saw an announcement from Amanda on the Arizona RID Yahoo Group. I knew how important it was for this deaf person to attend WordCamp, so I decided to provide for him even though I was not happy with Amanda’s handling of the other deaf registrant.

By the end of the week, I had offers from two other professionals and at least four other students. At this point, all I needed was one more professional if (and that’s a big “if”) there were deaf attendees in all four tracks on Saturday.

In the meantime, I wondered whether there were any deaf attendees registered for Friday. Amanda had not told me it was overbooked, only that she didn’t have the budget for it. I figured if we didn’t need eight interpreters on Saturday, we could provide services on Friday as well. On Friday the 14th, I emailed the attendee I knew was going Saturday and asked him if he were going Friday. Note that I didn’t “offer” to interpret Friday; I merely asked him if he had registered. I heard back from the Tuesday after the MLK weekend, and he verified that he had registered for Friday and Saturday both. He knew that interpreting services had not been promised for Friday, and I did not promise them.

Later that morning, I told Amanda that she did indeed have a deaf person registered for Friday, and I proposed that we leverage the budget designed to employ four professionals and four students for one day and instead employ two professionals for two days. Two pros working for $50 an hour for eight hours on Friday and nine hours on Saturday would cost $1700. I could take an honorarium of $200 for coordinating and still come in at $100 under budget.

At the very mention of providing interpreting services on Friday, however, Amanda blamed me for encouraging the deaf attendee to register for Friday and then accused me of promising him interpreting services. I assured her that I had promised nothing, and for all I knew he had registered long before I asked him if he were going (later he confirmed that he had registered for Friday way back around Thanksgiving). She told me the room was too small, was overbooked, and there would be no room for interpreters.

What’s more, she told me she was considering un–registering the deaf attendee for Friday because she would not be able to provide him with interpreters. I told her that we interpreters often fit into cramped spaces, that one of us could stand while interpreting, and the other could sit on the floor. I reasoned with her that it would be a shame to tell a deaf person he couldn’t attend a conference because there wasn’t enough room for his interpreters. She relented. She adamantly refused to let me work with another professional, but she would allow me to provide services on Friday as long as I worked with a student both Friday and Saturday. I relented. Such is the nature of negotiation and compromise.

Yet I was not satisfied, and it wasn’t about the money. I was unsatisfied with giving the client less than the best. This sort of “highly technical” conference is best suited to seasoned interpreters, so I didn’t want to use a student volunteer if I didn’t have to. We weren’t talking about an eight-interpreter deal anymore. We were talking about two interpreters working work two days. I had agreed with Amanda that I would provide all this for a total of $1050, so I was in a quandary: do I earn a normal wage and work with a student or do I see if I could get a pro to split the money with me so that we both made only about $30 per hour? I negotiated with one of the pros who had offered to work on the conference. We were each certified, licensed, experienced interpreters who had worked many “highly technical” events before. We were, if I may say so myself, a “dream team” for WordCamp. I offered to sacrifice my coordinator fee to supplement the two of us to work for 60% of our normal rate. I gave up a job Friday morning and s/he gave up a job Saturday afternoon so we could provide continuous coverage all day on both days. We were in it for the service to the deaf consumer, not for the money. I thought we had arrived at a great solution.

Then I read Amanda’s blog post.

This is what I wrote to her:

I am more interested in providing the *most* service and the *best* service to the deaf attendees than I am in making money. The way I saw it, if you could afford to give less than the best for one day, you could afford to give the best for two days. If I had “taken direction,” I would have made $650 in one day, the deaf attendees would have gotten less than the best, and they would have gotten no service on Friday. Since I advocated for *more* and *better*, I am earning only $525 for two days, the deaf get the best, and they get Friday as well as Saturday.

Call me greedy.

I thought over what a mess this had become. How uncomfortable I had felt ever since finding out that Amanda had un–registered a deaf attendee because she didn’t like her attitude. How Amanda had almost un–registered another deaf attendee because the room was too small. And, finally, how she had let loose upon the world this gross misrepresentation of what actually happened. I talked it over with colleagues. I slept on it. I discussed it with my team interpreter. We decided it would be best to remove ourselves before things got any worse.

Please, hearing readers, do not let Amanda dissuade you from providing interpreting services to the deaf. It doesn’t have to be this hard. And please, deaf readers, consider both sides of the story before you lay the blame on interpreters. (I only wrote that because ridor9th was the first commenter on Amanda’s blog post, and he said, “It is not your fault, the interpreters in Phoenix are to blame. Lately they are intimidating Deaf ppl all over Phoenix on many things” (I have no idea why he said what he said about interpreters in Phoenix, but I was hoping that other deaf people would not blame interpreters without at least hearing my side of the story first). There’s a lot we can all learn from this and still respect each other.

I would hate for the takeaway message from any blog post to be, “Don’t provide interpreters to the deaf if you can possibly avoid it.”

Edmund Berke once said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Take a look at John Pozadzides’ 2009 blog post “An Open-Source Look at the Cost of WordCamp Dallas” and the comments that ensue when someone suggests “If you cut out the T-shirts and interpreters, you would break even.” You will learn a lot about complying with the ADA and providing accessibility to a public event.

I hope these two bits of history will help people make future events better for all.

Edited January 22, 2011 for clarity.

The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:

• It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
• It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
• Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
• I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.

Typekit Web Fonts

I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because:

• Frank Lloyd Wright is associated with the Valley of the Sun because of his Taliesin West architectural school and the Arizona Biltmore, the latter of which he did not design but did inspire. To me, Wright’s letter forms are emblematic of the southwest region I live in. (The letters that inspired the Eaglefeather font were from the Eagle Rock project in Los Angeles, California– still a part of the “southwest.”)
• The southwestern themed font ties in with my blog’s current title, “Just Singin’ & Signin’ in the Sun,” which itself is a takeoff on the lyric “Just singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” from the show Singin’ in the Rain. I’m singin’ and signin’ (American Sign Language interpreting) in the [Valley of the] Sun. Get it? I know. I’m so clever.
• This is a full-featured font with real italics, bold, and bold italics.The font’s swash S’s and distinct forms capture the viewer’s attention and have a certain “wow” factor. When you see a blog in a font you don’t have on your computer, you think, “how did he do that?” and the answer is Web fonts.

Typekit Revisited

If you remember when I wrote why I wasn’t using Typekit Web Fonts yet, you might wonder why I changed my mind. Well, it’s basically because I learned from Matt McInerney, the designer of the font I tried, that his font looked bad bolded and italicized because it was a regular-only font. I should know all about regular-only fonts and why they don’t look good bolded or italicized, but I experienced some temporary synaptic leakage.

Once I tried fonts that had a complement of regular, italic, bold, and bold italic variants, I was quite happy with the way they looked on my blog. And the problem with the CSS selectors was mostly solved by David W. Bole’s list of CSS selectors for the Twenty Ten theme. I’m now happy with the way this and my family blog look with Typekit fonts.

Related Posts from Daniel Greene

• Choosing the right font styles & variants
• Why I’m not using Typekit Fonts yet
• The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)

content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6

UPDATED:  July 4, 2010 I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn't simple or intuitive and since there really isn't any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You star … Read More

via United Stage

Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.

Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)

I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.

The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this:

For example, my twitter name is danielgreene, so my shortcode for “_# of_ tweets / retweet” button would be

It’s really quite easy. Facebook “Like” buttons, on the other hand, are not so easy. There is no shortcode for Facebook links that I know of yet. There are a few ways to get that “Like” button on your WordPress.com blog posts, but these services, such as GetSocial Live, require you to individually enter blog post titles and URLs into a web form to get a different button for each blog post. Then these buttons send the visitor who clicks them to a different page where they have to click something else. Sorry, but no. Not easy and seamless enough for me. I will wait until WordPress comes up with a Facebook shortcode; until then, I’m happy with the TweetMeme shortcode for Twitter.

Do you have a favorite method of helping your visitors spread the word about your blog posts?

I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.

This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.

Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”

So I did some searching and found out that I could import my whole site–actually both sites–to WordPress.com, manage both sites from one Dashboard, and port my domain names for only $10 a year per domain. That’s when I decided to move over to the gentler, easier version of WordPress.

Yes, there are limitations. But there are also benefits. And for me, the benefits far outweigh the limitations. I should have moved over a long time ago, because I wasn’t using the advanced options of WordPress.org anyway.

Another reason I moved over is because I’m just enough of a stupid geek to get lost in hours of trying to figure out how to make things work, and I need to stop doing that. The important thing is for me to create content–be it writings, photos, videos, or updates–and publish it easily. So, here’s to my being more creative and less geeky!

What do you think? Any reason why I shouldn’t turn danielgreene.wordpress.com into danielgreene.com and move my blog over here?

This guy subscribed to my videos on YouTube (thank-you-very-much!) so I checked him out. He has several ASL videos, and one in particular caught my eye because my new blog is “powered by WordPress.” In this video, he describes his 10 favorite WordPress plugins. I’m glad I watched, because several of the plugins he described could improve the functionality of my blog.

While watching his video, I felt so happy to understand ASL! Ah, the benefits of knowing a second language!