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The Ditchwalk Indignation Scale

March 19, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Following up on the previous post, about how 90% of the internet is righteous indignation and ridicule, I thought it might be useful to provide some context. While ridicule is of course childish in all instances, there are times when righteous indignation is warranted. Unfortunately, those times are few and far between when compared with the perpetual tide of indignation surging across the internet.

Not everything is worthy of true indignation, though it is admittedly easy to get lost in an argument and forget that what you’re talking about is meaningless. So next time you think you may have lost your bearings, or you’re not sure if flaming someone for their opinion about an espresso machine is appropriate, take a deep breath and consult the Ditchwalk Indignation Scale:

Practically speaking, the benefit of the Ditchwalk Indignation Scale is to remind us all that when we’re arguing about a 1 — which is pretty much all we ever argue about — we’re arguing about a 1. In fact, you can even use that point to express your righteous indignation. For example: “I’m sorry, but I have more important things to do with my time than argue about a 1.” At which point the other person may slug, you, allowing you to continue your discussion on a more substantive basis.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Non Sequiturs Tagged With: scale, social networks

Making the Move to Mobile Web Design

July 16, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

After taking eight of the previous twelve months off from the haphazard blogging I do here on Ditchwalk, I knew when I picked up the mouse again that I needed to redesign the site to reflect a broader but also more personal focus. Less platform and profession, more craft and art. Less business and commerce, more being and seeing.

What I did not fully comprehend until I took up that task in February was that a sea change had taken place in computing over the previous two years, and that I would need to factor that change into the redesign of Ditchwalk. (I had noticed aspects of the change, but because I can be fairly slow on the uptake I didn’t perceive those dissonant experiences as part of a fundamental metamorphosis in computing.)

In retrospect, the loudest and most prominent signal came from Microsoft with it’s release of Windows 8. Unlike previous versions, Windows 8 came with a default desktop environment that emulated the screen of a mobile device, including touch-sensitive tabs perfect for use on tablet displays — then an exploding technology. As someone who has never owned a smartphone or tablet I reacted with a practiced and oblivious roll of the eyes because Microsoft is always trying to drive computing in directions that favor its various monopolies, often with disastrous results. What I did not realize was that the decision to try to kill off the desktop PC was not a sign of active corporate idiocy, it was a sign of reactive corporate idiocy.

During the two years following the release of Windows 8 Microsoft first denied it had made a mistake, then belatedly began trying to undo the damage it had done to its own brand by once again attempting to force everyone that used its products to adopt another self-serving interface metaphor. Watching this ritual inanity play out further convinced me that Microsoft’s initial decision was just another blind lurch by a company that cannot perceive its own meaning in the marketplace, but that was a mistake on my part.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

The Best Blog Post Ever

July 6, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the best blog post ever. Now you know.

You now also know how keywords work. And don’t work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Non Sequiturs Tagged With: blogs

Five (More) CSS Tips for Beginners

February 19, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Even if you’re an absolute beginner, making changes to an existing CSS style sheet is not complicated. Yes, there are things you need to learn, and computer code is often unforgiving, but as I hope I explained in the previous post the basics are easy to grasp. Fuel your own initiative with a reference site like W3Schools, where you can pick up tips and information as needed, or even try out techniques before implementing them, and the only thing standing between you and success will be the bitter realization that an innocent misstep may lead to hours of hysteria because you don’t know how to protect yourself from your own ignorance. So let’s solve that problem.

Whatever goals you have for learning or even just tinkering with CSS, the first thing you need to do is see those goals in context. Yes, finding the exact right shade of green for your hyperlinks is important, but so is ensuring the stability and functionality of your site. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about making changes or even making mistakes when you’re working with computer code as long as you know how to protect yourself from inevitable errors. That protection begins with making sure you can always get back to the most recent stable build, even after you’ve made (and forgotten about) multiple changes.

1. CTRL-Z IS YOUR FRIEND. CTRL-Y IS YOUR OTHER FRIEND.
If you’ve been using a computer for any length of time you probably know that pressing and holding the Control (Ctrl) key, then simultaneously pressing the Z key will undo the most recent action in many applications. Most word-processing and image-editing software uses this convention, and the same holds true for many of the applications used to edit CSS style sheets.

If you make a change to the CSS in your style sheet, then upload the change and get results you’re not expecting, you can usually press Ctrl-Z to undo your mistake. Since mistakes are quite often unintentional you may not even be sure what you did to cause the problem, so Ctrl-Z can be a real lifesaver. Even better, many applications allow for multiple undos, so you can go back through five, twenty or even fifty edits. (Check the documentation to determine the exact number.) Since some mistakes become apparent only after multiple changes, Ctrl-Z may be the only way to step back through the sequence that triggered the problem.

What many people don’t know is that holding the Control key down and pressing the Y key will often redo an action, meaning between Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y it’s possible to go backwards and forwards through your most recent changes. For example, maybe you made a change but forgot what the original value was and suddenly realize it’s important. With Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y you can cycle back and read the value, write it down on a piece of paper or copy it to a separate document for reference, then cycle back to where you were. (What you must not do is cycle backwards with Ctrl-Z and make a change unless you’re sure you won’t need to press Ctrl-Y again. Any change you make when you go backwards with Ctrl-Z necessarily starts a new Ctrl-Y sequence in the application’s memory at that point.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: CSS

The Most Important CSS Tip for Beginners Ever

February 16, 2014 By Mark 4 Comments

This isn’t the first time I’ve tinkered with a website or tweaked a WordPress theme, but as usual it feels like it. While I do remember a few things from previous style-sheet adventures, as with all things tech the horizon is constantly receding, and what once seemed like bedrock knowledge has become obscured by an ever-evolving feature set.

In the face of such inevitable changes the only options are to stay constantly up-to-date or effectively start from scratch each time. Because nobody in their right mind would stay up-to-date on CSS if it wasn’t paying the bills, it’s probably safe to assume that any CSS hacking you intend to do is driven more by your desire to have things just so than it is by a love of code. You want things to look the way you want them to look, but because money is an object you either have to suffer the indignity of off-the-rack blogging or make those changes yourself.

I feel your pain. In order to prevent you from feeling some of the pangs and jolts I’ve experienced, however, I thought I would pass along one tip I’ve never forgotten, which has saved me more time and trouble than the sum of all the CSS knowledge I’ve gleaned from websites, books and kind strangers who took pity on me. For all I know this is a common practice even among CSS professionals, but if that’s the case it’s considered so obvious that nobody mentions it when offering tips to absolute beginners. I stumbled upon it myself by accident and only belatedly recognized it as a means of preventing the kind of frustration and disorientation that can, in more advanced cases, lead to a seventy-two hour psych hold. Sure, you laugh — or at least I hope you do — but don’t laugh too hard because CSS can perplex almost anyone.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: CSS

Construction Notice

January 31, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Spring is right around the corner and that means it’s time to swap out legacy plugins and update the third-party theme I use to modern standards. This will necessarily involve a fair amount of breakage, so if you notice something’s missing or not working (or you hear plaintive wailing in the distance) that’s why.

Phase I will involve changing over to a generic WordPress theme to make sure all basic functions perform as expected.

Phase II will involve installing a new third-party theme and tweaking that theme to taste.

If past experience is any guide the entire process will take, approximately, foreeeeeeeeeever. Then, years from now, I’ll go through it all again.

Because technology.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: Ditchwalk, Wordpress

Two Roads Diverge

May 9, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

I will be offline for a while, metaphorically following a road less-traveled. I expect that road to converge with the online world again, perhaps in 2014, but only time will tell.

The one thing I’m sure of today, after giving the issue a lot of thought, is that I can’t split focus between that journey and posting here even on an intermittent basis. As I said once long ago, my river only flows in one direction. And that’s ever more true as I grow older.

Update: Comments are back on. Whether they work as intended has yet to be determined.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: poetry

Housecleaning

April 25, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

I took a stroll through my blogroll today and pruned sites that are no longer updating or relevant to my evolving interests. It’s been a while since I surveyed the self-publishing ditch to see what may have sprouted, so my plan is to do more site seeing and replace sites that have gone to seed with sites that are sprouting or in full bloom.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: links

Network Solutions Fails Again

January 1, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Last year I wrote a couple of posts about the tech support hell I ended up in with my internet service provider (ISP), Network Solutions. I also wrote a post explaining the tech-support process and how to navigate some of the obstacles you’ll encounter. I stated at the time that I would look for a new ISP, but NetSol performed well until the renewal of my service contract seven months later, so I opted to go with the devil I knew.

That devil has now failed to get one of my sites up and running for an entire week. During that week I’ve been told the problem was related to a denial-of-service attack, and that it was related to an error in the configuration of my WordPress settings, but neither of those knee-jerk diagnoses were true. When tech support came to the same conclusion — after multiple calls from me — they escalated the issue to engineering. My site is still unavailable after seven days.

I understand that Network Solutions can’t provide free tech support to every site owner who uses WordPress. And I have no doubt that they are constantly badgered by users seeking exactly that: free service for problems those users created. So when the NetSol techs told me there was a configuration problem with my WordPress settings I took ownership of the problem. (They stressed that they weren’t even supposed to do that much, and I’m grateful they tried to help within the confines of their internal directives.) In looking into the issue, however, I realized not only that I didn’t cause that problem, but there was clear evidence to suggest the configuration issue was not the cause of the problem I was having.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: fail, Network Solutions, tech support, Wordpress

Ditchwalk at Year Two

September 3, 2011 By Mark 7 Comments

Another year has come and gone here at Ditchwalk. For the second straight year any personal predictions I might have made last August have been completely voided by the intervening 365 days. Takeaway: don’t think too far ahead.

The most interesting thing about the past year, from my own myopic point of view as well as the point of view of the greater storytelling universe, is that self-publishing is no longer seen as even a lifestyle choice. Established/commercial pipelines will always exist, but the indy storytelling spirit is now fully legitimized across all mediums.

I can’t think of a better turn of events. Anything that liberates and validates writing is a good thing. We can worry about the ocean of work that’s being produced after we empower everyone who wants to write.

Speaking of which, I think the biggest problem facing publishing at all levels today is the problem of sifting, curating and reviewing content. I’ve looked far and wide for an appropriate place to submit my collection of short stories for objective review, but have essentially come up empty. Yet I’m not surprised. If the value of most stories — as determined by demand — is zero, then making a living as an independent reviewer is going to be economically impossible.

Unless you’re a part of the traditional New York publishing pipeline there’s little money in writing reviews no matter how you approach the task. Which of course leads to ugly practices like ‘paid reviews’ and ‘promoted reviews’ and every other form of marketing fraud you can imagine.

I don’t have a solution here. Reviewing demands credibility — along with considerable craft knowledge — and there just doesn’t seem to be any money in being credible these days. Better to whore yourself out as a celebrity and cry all the way to the bank.

How all this affects future plans is a bit schitzy. On one hand I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing a month from now, let alone six months or a year. On the other hand I no longer concern myself with trying to fit my ideas into a market or medium. Provided I can eke out a minimal level of subsistence I feel completely free to write what I want to write.

As to output, I hope to be considerably more productive. A Neil Rorke novel, a non-fiction book, and maybe a screenplay or two, along with blogging here and at NeilRorke.com.

I’d also like to end up some place where I can plug my electric guitar in for the first time in seven years. I think I write better when I pick at small metal wires that make loud, screechy noises.

Year One post here. Six-month post here. Inaugural post here. Food for thought here.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: credibility, Ditchwalk, reviews, two, year

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