the air

Any blogger will tell you that unless you have great content, your blog will not attract readers nor retain readers. With great content comes great responsibility, wouldn’t you agree? The problem with many blog authors is that they don’t bother to meticulously redesign or create a new theme/layout. Little do many people realize, but in addition to great content, you have to have a great layout so that it is visually appealing to visitors and grants them easy access to the information on your blog.

Learn some HTML and CSS

Honestly, HTML and CSS are extremely easy to learn. If you harness the power of Google or any other search engine, you can easily learn the basics of HTML. In my case, I compose all of my posts using the HTML editor in WordPress, hence, it forces me to learn some of basic HTML tags and write my posts in code. Did you know that the CSS (cascading style sheet) that comes with your theme is where most of the customization takes place? This is where you can define colors, margins, images, and much more. Think of CSS as a library that has a list of all the “decorations” your website can use. Once you start editing the PHP files (the PHP files are where your layout is actually coded), you can call upon certain elements within your “library.” If all of that sounds confusing, don’t worry, it’s not at all. I happened to learn CSS just by reading my own CSS file and experimenting, not to mention that I also used Google.

Study other blogs

Spend some time looking at other blogs. You don’t necessarily have to look at blogs that have good layouts, look at the bad ones too. See how blogs that run ads look and what kind of layout they use. Thousands of blogs use the MistyLook theme, which is a very good theme to start out with. One of the things you may want to remember is the fact that implementing ads does affect layout and how your posts look, so be aware of that. Compare the benefits of three column layouts versus two or one column layouts. My blog is now using a three column, fixed-width layout, which is far more versatile than a two column layout, in my opinion.

Start with something

I spent a few hours trying to design my own theme from scratch and guess what? I could not do it! It’s not because it was too hard, but it was very time consuming and required way too much creativity that I just could not muster. So what did I do? I did the next best thing and spent some time trying to find a theme that was as close to what I wanted. For the most part, I was looking for a three column layout that would have my posts in the middle and a left/right sidebar. Once I found the theme, I then went about and customizing the hell out of it. I changed the colors, graphics, width, layout structure, and even added new pages. By no means am I done with everything, but I am learning quite a bit about how WordPress works.

Is it all worth it?

Is all of this work really worth it? Well let me ask you this, “how serious are you about your blog?” Are you blogging because you want to make money? Unless you are willing to blog seriously, you have no reason to spend so much time to make your blog look nice. However, in the event you are serious, spending the extra time modifying the theme and personalizing your blog will complement your content greatly. In addition, if readers like the content and layout, the better the chances of them coming back regularly. There is nothing wrong with using someone else’s theme, but personalize it to your preferences. Your blog is your thoughts, so it should display your mind as well.

Resources

HTML & CSS Guides
• HTML Tutorial
• Introduction to HTML
• CSS Tutorial
• The Complete CSS Tutorial

WordPress Themes
• WordPress Theme Viewer
• Additional WordPress theme resource

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When my site underwent a new design, I also made the jump to WordPress 2.2. Although I upgraded kind of late (just a few days ago), the time to upgrade again is already here. Apparently, 2.2.1 is another major upgrade to 2.2 that every user should follow. 2.2.1 is not only a security release but also fixes numerous bugs that were found.

A sampling of what can be found in the new 2.2.1 update:

• Atom feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for IE7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

More information on the details of this upgrade can be found by visiting WordPress’ 2.2.1 release notes.

If you have yet to upgrade from a previous version of WordPress, namely 2.1 or earlier, now would be a great time to upgrade. My upgrade was seamless except for the fact that the modification I had made to my ExecPHP widget plugin had to be undone. This modification was posted on John’s blog and the plugin can be re-downloaded from the original site.

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If you could change any law, what law would it be? Why would you change it? What impact do you think that law might have upon you, your friends, or society in general? I know that there a bunch of laws that I would love to change myself. For starters, I would definitely change the darn speed limit laws. However, that story is for another post for another day. One of the laws I would love to change is the public radio censorship laws.

Radio censorship is useless

Radio censorship laws were designed to protect families from profane language on the radio airwaves. Shock Jocks such as Howard Stern are key victims of the censorship laws in the United States and have moved on to satellite radio, which is largely uncensored. My question is, what exactly does free-to-air broadcast censorship really do? Sure, the songs on your local radio are censored, but any kid who wants to hear the song can download the uncensored version easily and can even stream those songs with profanity. If kids want to listen to their favorite artists’ songs, they will find ways around these pathetic censorship laws. Besides, terrestrial radio stations have short playlists that keep playing the same 10 songs over and over again with commercials.

Why not remove TV censorship?

This one should be obvious. Most of the raunchy shows on broadcast television, such as Nip/Tuck or The Shield, air late at night. However, there can be more harm on TV than good if there is no censorship. Unlike radios, TV’s can illustrate pornography, excessive violence, and profanity. Radios, on the other hand, are only good at portraying profanity. Hence, if there was no censorship on TV, you can easily expect more nudity, sexual content, abnormal violence, and excessive profanity. However, it is easy to see that if there was no censorship on radio, then many people will argue for zero censorship on television. Maybe our society isn’t ready for all that just yet.

Maybe satellite radio?

What do you think about zero censorship for terrestrial radio? As popularity for satellite radio increases, more and more terrestrial radio stations are looking for ways to combat a declining listener base. Is that true? I know that I want to move to satellite radio because of all the “talk”, advertising, and censored music on regular radio. However, I am sure that satellite radio will increase in popularity as soon as device and subscription prices fall and become far more reasonable. Do you subscribe to satellite radio? What do you think about it? What don’t you like about it?

So think about what law you would change and why. I would like to know what laws some of you guys want to change or feel is quite useless.

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My first day at work was absolutely amazing. I am a distribution supervisor that manages seven different temporary workers. I do all of that as an intern at Elgin Industries. Now that is what I call an unique internship since I am technically a manager and I do no “labor”. It definitely is a learning experience.

The two hardest things about this job are the long hours (I have to work about 10.5 hours) and the ability to recognize work that needs to be completed. Although there is plenty of work that needs to be done, it is hard to find all the necessary components in one spot so that the workers can get it done. To give you an idea of how much work is there, if incoming shipments stopped, the company has enough work for about three business weeks. That is basically 15 days worth of work just sitting there. Ideally, the company would want only one weeks’ worth of work, but they are so backordered and growing rapidly that there are just not enough hours and workers to get everything done.

Hopefully my manager is happy with the performance of my workers. Just last night, they processed close to 32,000 units, amongst six of them. I was missing one worker, the forklift driver, because he/she had failed their drug test. Without a fork-lift driver, getting components off the top shelves of the bulkracks is extremely tough. It’s a great experience and I’m finally making some cash. Definitely a great time to start saving!

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While driving home from work this morning, the DJ on one of the local radio stations was asking his listeners what their biggest fear is. Rather than making the announcement as something spooky, his goal was to see what people did or were doing to overcome their fears. In retrospect, he wanted to outline how people got their strength to overcome their fears and give hope to those who are struggling with their fears.

My Fear Is…

My biggest fear is falling back to the same dark place where I was just a few years ago again. I remember when I had little hope and could not expect much from anything or anyone. To me, it always seemed that no matter how hard I tried or struggled, no good came out at the end. There were a few instances when I would see limited success, but often, the price would be high. So what exactly am I talking about? School!

Just a few years ago, I was struggling to make ends meet in terms of academics. I remember I would study all night long for major midterms and finals only to see that I barely got a C or even a D on some of them. Regrettably, I would end up receiving a C or D, sometimes F, in some of my classes. At this point, my parents were really discouraged with me, my own school was sending me warning letters asking me to improve or else. One of the hardest things was to see my own “friends” shy away from me because they did not want to associate with someone who wasn’t going to be successful. Luckily, there were a few who stuck around and worked with me to improve my academic career.

I overcome my fear by…

It isn’t easy overcoming this fear given that I am doing very well right now. Everyday, I wake up reminding myself that my success is because I have struggled to make things right and that if I don’t continue making things right, I will only end up back where I don’t want to be. The Kaizen principle has played an integral role in ensuring that I am always evolving and learning new things. It has taught me to make mistakes in good faith but spend the extra time to learn everything about those mistakes and move on. Plus, the kaizen principle also teaches me to change and improve. Essentially, everything I do, I tell myself that I can do it better. If I get straight A’s, I tell myself that I can always do better by trying new ways to get straight A’s. This way, I have more than one tool to find success and continue to build on it. What more could I ask for?

So what is your biggest fear? How did you overcome your fear and how do you continue to keep your fear at bay?

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