I have been wracking my brain over this question for the past two days. I haven’t felt satisfied with my blog categories. I’ve felt there were too many categories, that I’ve been categorizing my blog posts improperly, and that the distinction between tags and categories on my blog is blurry. To get help with my dilemma, I searched the Internet for advice. Yesterday, I read Darren Rowse’s How to Choose Categories for Your Blog and today I read Lorelle VanFossen’s Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. They both share sound advice, but I’m still struggling.
I’m going to brainstorm here for my own benefit and yours. What do I write about? I write about ASL, ASL interpreting, the deaf community / world, interpreters, interpreter training, interpreting in general, accessibility, web authoring, web design, HTML, CSS, social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, photography, technology, typography, the Web, and other topics. I review things like gadgets, restaurants, businesses, entertainment, etc. I write opinion pieces about business practices, ethics, society, speaking and writing (grammar, you might say). I post videos of myself singing and signing (and occasionally singing and signing at the same time). I post a lot of photos, some for the sake of art and some for the sake of reportage or lifestyle sharing. I write tutorials and how-to’s. You might think I’m a dilettante, but I prefer to think of myself as a Renaissance Man.
I know I could maintain different blogs for different foci — and believe me, I’ve thought about it — but I already Continue reading →
I finally got tired of the hassle and hours it took me to update my WordPress.org-powered self-hosted versions of two different blogs–danielgreene.com and smithersgreene.net. Trying to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 3.0 was the last straw.
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.”
Continue reading →
Posted in Writing for the Web
Tagged automation, blog, blogging, hosting, ISP, publishing, review, Web, WordPress, wordpress.com, wordpress.org, writing
I got this fortune in a fortune cookie a few weeks ago and carried it around in my wallet. Coincidentally, a story I was commissioned to write for the book eyes of desire 2, a deaf glbt reader was published, and the book came out just last week.
I found this to be an interesting fortune because one usually doesn’t get a fortune this specific. I mean, how many people will become accomplished writers? I suppose many people are accomplished writers in one way or another, but I found especial hope in this fortune for myself.
I’m not particular proud of the story I told in this book– the story of how my first lover was deaf, and how he turned out not to be able to hold adult conversations on a deep level. I was young and naïve, and I didn’t know enough ASL when I first met him to realize that he was incapable of communicating about abstract concepts. I didn’t know what to expect from a deaf person, I didn’t realize how intelligent most deaf people are, and I didn’t even know how to communicate abstract thoughts myself in ASL, so how could I expect him to do so?
My story is not the most bright, cheerful, inspiring, or uplifting story in the book, but it was honest, and it depicts a reality that happened to me, and might happen to others as well. It’s a story I really didn’t want to tell, but I forced myself to, because I had to come to terms with a chapter of my past that haunted me for years. In fact, I often thought that I remained single for so much of my life after that because I was being punished for breaking his heart by leaving him. Who knows? Luckily, I’m long past that now, and have a wonderful marriage with a man I love dearly, a man I truly can talk with about anything and everything. And I still wish the best for my ex, my first lover, the man who gave me the impetus to master ASL and become the interpreter I am today.
I’m creating this as a post on my blog so that people who read the book and look me up through my bio in the book have a space to leave comments on the story. Thanks to Raymond for publishing the story. I welcome your comments.
Please be kind. 
