Posts Tagged ‘writing’

You need a blog, not just a web site

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Whenever somebody comes to me and wants a web site, this is what I tell them. Many of my friends who are internet professionals or general hipsters are already sneering at this and saying something like, “Blogging is so five minutes ago.” Maybe at the cutting edge of the cutting edge, that’s true. But I deal in my freelance and personal life with plenty of people who are resistant to blogs, Twitter and what have you, and it’s my job to help get these folks on board.

If you have a web presence of any kind for any reason, you need to be able to update it yourself, easily and frequently. Unless you know what HTML and FTP are, you can’t do that with a traditional site. However, you can easily learn to update your blog yourself, even if you’re a relative novice. You can do it from any computer in the world, and for the major blog platforms, you can even do it from a cell phone.

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Hip-hop and electronica literature review

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

So as part of the competitive analysis for my developing book proposal, I’ve been looking at books about electronic music and hip-hop. I’m interested in books about the music itself, its production and content, as well as the lives of people making it and listening to it. Among the books I’ve read, the two real standouts are both about hip-hop. There’s Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, the most ambitious and best work on the subject that I know of.


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I use WordPress because the editor of Gawker told me to

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

I’m a jazz guy. I like improvising in front of an audience. I like publishing a post while it’s still only a third finished. It keeps the fire lit under me to get the rest written. I was looking for a blog platform congenial to this method of working. Then I read a PC Magazine article, Succeed At Blogging The Gawker Way. Like a Gawker article, it’s funny, frank and packs maximum useful information into a minimum number of words:

“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”

The article gives Gawker editor Nick Denton’s reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.

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Visual outlining with Flickr

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

I love everything about Flickr except its name. First of all, creative misspelling is so five minutes ago. Second of all, the word ‘flicker’ has no conceptual connection to a photo-sharing social network that I can think of, except, I guess, in the very literal sense that a computer image flickers thirty times a second to produce the illusion of motion. And there my griping ends. Once you’re past the name, Flickr is everything you could want in an image site and more.

As I develop my book, I gather a lot of images. I’m a visual thinker with an art background, and through playing with Flickr, I stumbled on the idea of a visual outline to complement the written one. (more…)

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How to write something long and complicated

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money. So I needed to step up my game in terms of workflow and file management. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in college, using Windows 3.1 and good old Wordperfect 6. Then the Microsoft hegemony set in and I switched to Word, along with the rest of the industrialized world.

Word started off pretty useful, but each successive version was a bigger and bigger drag. There were more toolbars and menus and animated characters giving unwanted advice. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I followed the geek example and switched over to plain text editors and HTML.

But this year I wrote a book proposal and some other long-form, complicated stuff. It got to be difficult keeping track of which thoughts were in which text file. Then I read a blog post by Steven Poole called “Goodbye, Cruel Word” that hipped me to Scrivener, and I’ve never looked back. (more…)

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A better word processor than Microsoft Word came free with your computer

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

If you use a Mac, that program is called TextEdit. You can find it in your Applications folder, under Utilities. If you use Windows, the program is called Wordpad, made, ironically, by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it’s in there somewhere, depending which version of Windows you have.

Until I got Scrivener, I used TextEdit for pretty much all word processing, from little notes to myself up to epic research projects. Macs come with a program called Stickies expressly for the purpose of writing yourself little notes, which has the virtue of autosaving your every keystroke. But the little stickies aren’t congenial to serious word processing. Textedit is a better general-purpose scratchpad. (more…)

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