Postcards from the Funny Farm

Ok, so you want your blog to have more value … scratch that, you want it to have mega-millions of value … you’ve come to the right place. We’ve been outlining value on a blog through the acronym: “v.a.l.u.e.”. Let’s do a quick review:

1. “V” stands for visceral
2. “A” stands for aphoristic
3. “L” stands for linkage

Now, as promised, we probe the mysterious area known as “U.” It stands for “Ubiquitousness.” If you don’t know the meaning of the word, check this out:

ubiq·ui·tous
Pronunciation:
\yü-?bi-kw?-t?s\
Function:
adjective
Date:
1830

: existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : widespread <a ubiquitous fashion>
— ubiq·ui·tous·ly adverb
— ubiq·ui·tous·ness noun

In theory, if you could post a link to your post everywhere on the interweb at one time, then you would have “U” down pat. Obviously you can’t. The more I think about the hundreds of millions of blogs out there the more fatigued this letter can become. So you can’t do it all? What CAN you do? Here are a few suggestions to increase the ubiquitousness of your post (all of which I do on a pretty regular basis).

1. Make a Google Alert for 2 things: 1) your blog’s url through the Google Blogsearch feature ie: link:http://www.postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com and 2) the title of your blog. This will send you an email whenever someone links to you and whenever your title shows up on a page on the web.
2. Create a Tumblr.com tumblelog and use the Tumblr bookmarklet feature to post the link with a description. In the description of the permalink, include a standard linkback to your blog’s main url. This will help your backlink count and with some online measures, your rank and authority.
3. Create other blogs on various “subtopics.” Link to your post there, sometimes through a related short article using the text: “More info on this topic at: (your blog url)”
4. Use social bookmarking. DIGG and Stumbleupon only work if other people submit. You can ask friends to on the posts you really want to get out there. But most all the rest it is “kosher” to bookmark your own posts.
5. Guestblog and link back to your article.
6. Post to AC or Blogcritics and include a relevant linkback to your article.
7. Get the free info on backlinks and blog promotion at socialmediadaily.com
8. Other ideas out there?

Getting your posts link out there so many people have access to it is key to producing value for your blog. Being “ubiquitous” is a full time job. Get ready!

Ok, now for the last frontier of this series. We’ll be looking at the letter “E” in the next couple of days. While you wait, why not pick one thing at a time and work on it. These are all equally important to gaining value for your blog.

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A few people have asked me about my recent theme changes so I wanted to address it here in one place rather than in several emails and comments.  It’s been a very good thing.

Most people who read my blog know that I have been a theme changer since the beginning. Shelly Tucker even addressed it when she interviewed me. I have to experiment, it’s part of my nature. Ironically however, I have come full circle after literally hundreds of themes and am quite content with the best theme (for me) I could find: The Wordpress Default: Kubrick. Let me give you the top five reasons I have chosen to use this theme:

1. It is always updated state-of-the-art: When WordPress updates, they update 2 themes with the software: Default and classic (which you may see me use from time to time as well now for this reason).  Many other themes break and lose their look when you upgrade Wordpress.
2. It’s simple and clean.  Because I have tried so many themes and gotten carried away at times with graphics and layout, it is refreshing to return to my primary priority: content.  I want to write a daily column that works on all browsers and computers.  Default does that.  Writing was my motive to start doing this in December of 2006 and I think the scattered themes got in the way of that energy.  I may tweak here and there, but I have decided that clean is better and energy into the writing is best.
3. It has a big header for my wife to help me make Photoshop png’s on.  Do you like the one we made last weekend?  It is very special to me being my home town of Victorville (retro) and a postcard I used to have on my tumblelog.  Thanks to Sarah for the work she did.  I styled it somewhat after the “My Diary” theme I found a while back by Gecko and Fly.  It’s one worth checking out if for nothing else, graphic ideas.
4. Last, It’s familiar and what I started with.  Before I even knew how to change or upload a theme, I was writing ecolumns (as I affectionately call them) on Kubrick with the blue header.  To me, it feels like coming home.  I feel like I have so much going on now with this blog … I am right where I want to be.  I don’t want to get confused with flashy themes anymore.  I will limit my creative innovation to Photoshopped headers, sidebar features and links, and the artistry of writing these ecolumns, or articles, or posts … what have you.

My hope is that it will free my energies up to write even funnier, more creative and innovative stuff while presenting it to you in a dependable and accessible format.  In short: It’s a focus issue. I hope you guys like it and keep coming back often!  You won’t see much more messing with themes here, and if you do, my 12-step sponsor at Themeaholics Anonymous says I have to write a really long post to you explaining why every time ;)  What do you look for in a theme?

If you’re like me, you love the mall and its food court. There are 10-15 choices on what to eat every time you go there. “What the heck do I get?” is the question I always ask myself: Kun Pao Chicken? Pizza at SBarro? McDonalds? A sub? With the shining neon signs and the wonderful aromas all mixed around me, I have really hard time making a choice.

Blogging is often the same way for me.

With so many items begging for my attention, what should I write on? I have literally sat for 20-30 minutes before in front of my laptop screen before unable to decide what was worth writing about. So how do I handle this? Simple … I limit my choices. I have gone through after 400 posts and analyzed the tags and categories I assigned the most. Then, I’ve made those into my categories and resolved to blog within those most popular, and obviously the ones I like to write the most, posts. Then, for myself not for my readers, I developed and wrote down 4 kinds of posts that I write on this blog. They are:

1. Journal entries,
2. PayPerPost (or blogging for hire),
3. Howto and Reviews, and
4. short “Tumblelog” styled posts or “asides.

Now, I don’t get as overwhelmed. I ask myself if I have done too much of one or the other and it makes it easy for me to limit my choices in what to write on. This frees me up to focus completely on blogging quality posts. If you watch kids learning and playing you will see the same thing in both instances: they are focused on one thing at a time. Note the picture of my daughter learning and playing below. But we aren’t kids anymore. We can’t blog it all. As bloggers we must be disciplined and choose to have only one item in front of us at a time. All other things are a distraction to good blogging.

How do you discipline yourself to write good blog posts?

I’m pleased to release my first publicly available WordPress 2-column theme entitled: “Deck Shoes.”

I chose the name due to its simplicity and reliability and I made it as a teaching start-point for CSS but it works out-of-the-box as a powerful and cool theme. Deck shoes is a culmination of all the tumblelog and specially css styled themes I have dissected over the past year along with features I have found useful to my style of “tumble-hybrid” blogging. Its features include:

Specially styled CSS options*
Rotating images in header (customizeable with your own)
Gravatars show up in comments
RSS links by category with RSS images
Customized Adsense areas under header and in posts
Chunky big blockquote graphic
CSS comments throughout as tutorials for changing options

*The specially styled CSS options add variety to your posts. To use them, simply use the div or p class calls in your post (in the code entry editor only. They will not work through the rich text input editor). e.g.,

Will look like this:

This is a test of an aside and now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party whether Democrat or Republican we all have toes so we should all wear deck shoes.

NOTE: due to Wordpress self correcting feature, once a DIV special style is inputted it will revert to a P if opened for editing after being saved. You have to change it back if you choose to re-edit. ALSO: To get the photo styling to center with a border, just add class=”center” in the img line. Questions? Leave a comment.

Here are the p, div classes included out-of-the-box:

aside, thought, code, notepad, photo

When you get the hang of it, it is fairly easy to create your own special styles. I made this theme for beginners mostly to learn css and special styling from my examples. Enjoy! I appreciate your feedback.

Demo it here

Download latest version of it here

I’ve tweaked my theme from this:

To this:

This is getting to be a familiar ritual. When I change themes I have to extend the name character limit to accomodate my good friend’s long name: Jessica the Rock Chick. Most themes come out of the box with 20 charcater limit so I have to go in and make it 30. I hope she knows I am not bothered by this in the slightest. It serves as a great example though of how much is really invloved when you see me change a theme.

Every time I change themes I have to adjust many other things beside name character limits in comments. things. I’ve tried and tried but there is absolutely no theme out there that does what I want and need without a good amount of tweaking. A friend Nick Mercer asked me once, “Have you considered making your own theme?” The answer is yes and I have made several themes. I don’t offer them for download because frankly, they aren’t that innovative. You can get the same out there far more styled and strongly built. That’s why I work with simple themes and tweak them to “make them my own.” For example: The latest theme here at my blog is called Simplr, here are the credits directly from the CSS stylesheet:

/*
THEME NAME: Simplr
THEME URI: plaintxt.org/themes/simplr/
DESCRIPTION: Single column and content-centered. A different type of theme. For WordPress 2.3+.
VERSION: 4.0
AUTHOR: Scott Allan Wallick
AUTHOR URI: http://scottwallick.com/
*/

Here’s just some of what I’ve done to it so far:

1. Added background img url to via css
2. Used a container DIV to separate the header.php from the index.php template files.
3. Added Adsense Ads to the header.php template file
4. Created a custom css DIV to make the sidebars (at bottom) have a white background.
5. Added blogrolling.com javascript to the primary sidebar with a li id. (Blogrolling.com javascript allows me to add my blogroll to all my blogs the same and as I edit with one click, the add or deletion shows across all my blogs through the script. I’m a big fan of tossing the “link” php within Wordpress in favor of Blogrolling.com)
6. Added a li id for ‘Credits’ where I post image button links to my various”condos” online where I hang out. I also posted a typewriter image button to ‘Cheese Enchiladas’ my Best of Weekly Writing blog.
7. Added the Gravatar code (my hope is that many more of my readers down the road will join the free avatar generator Gravatar.com.

At this stage in my blog career, special styling is a must. Therefore, with a new blog, I paste in the many class elements I’ve created into the style.css file - I am posting them below for you to tweak and/or borrow as much as you want (giving back ya know). When I migrate themes, I post this (or parts of it) at the footer and it usually works. Because CSS is “cascading” you can have overlaps/etc so some styles need to be put right under the element they are modifying. Usually I don’t have to do this though. These all worked pasted at the bottom of the Simplr stylesheet. They allow me to make postcards, post-it type posts, specially framed photos, and anything else I can dream up.

What kinds of tweaks do you make to your blog? How’s your css hangin’? I help people for free, so if you have questions or want to do something feel free to ask. Are you happy with your current theme? Would you like me to post the best ways to find and tweak themes in future posts?

Press Release:

Damien Riley is an author/teacher in Southern California. He writes on psychology and inspiration and keeps an online diary. Many of his writings are based on experiences as a teacher.

Longer Bio:

Welcome to “Postcards from the Funny Farm.”  I’m Damien Riley: dad, teacher, author in Southern California. I’ve been interested in creative writing since I was in the 4th grade and my interest in the guitar started even sooner. I started teaching elementary school in 1997 after a run with my band and a try at commercial songwriting success. You can read more about that time and hear the songs on my Myspace page. Now, after 10 years of teaching and publishing both online and off, I am pleased to produce three blogs I update nearly daily. Postcards is my most infamous with a loyal base of readers and new friends stopping by each day. I earned my MA in English from California State University, Fullerton in 1998 where I majored in English. My emphasis was made specifically for future college teachers: “Language, Writing, and Rhetoric.”

I met my wife Sarah when I moved to the High Desert of California in 2002.  Since then we have commenced raising a family with three kids and we became homeowners in 2008.  Much of my past writing has included family stories and they are always giving me new material.

With blogging, or “speed publishing,” what I write is often gone forever after a few hours. That’s why I try to make it relevant and not too long. I think I’ve been successful at that and made it a habit for a while now.  In addition to publishing on my three blogs, I write articles across the web. Here’s a link to an archived list that’s always growing.

My Publishings

There are also a few interviews of me out there on the internet. Thank you again to the blogs who host them.:

Interviews:
Do You Diggit
FuelMyBlog
The Man Page
This Eclectic Life

By the way, here are the other two blogs I publish:

Damien at the Speed of Life

Dynamite Lesson Plan

And last but not least my BlogCritics published works can be found here.

blogcritics.org/writer/damien_riley

Thanks for visiting,
Damien

* To contact me, use the contact form below or if forms aren’t your thing email me at: rileycentral at yahoo dot com

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