There aren’t too many times anymore where I start reading a blog post or webpage about writing or writers and find myself reading something completely new and different.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that I know everything there is to know about writing, or that there is nothing that anyone else can teach me about writing that I don’t already know. It’s just that most of the time, whatever it is that I do learn is related or directly expounding upon something that I already knew about, even if I didn’t actually know the details.

So, today, when I finally got around to reading the Firefox tab that I opened a few days ago entitled, "The 5 Best Copywriting Books: An Unconventional Guide," I expected to see a couple of familiar books and maybe a couple of books that were new, or a book or two about copywriting that I had never come across before. Although, typically, in the latter case, I often am familiar with the author.

Ironically, I don’t really bother with books on writing anymore. The fact of the matter is that most of them are woefully out of date, and even the ones that have been updated usually only pay lip service to the fast changing pace of the writing world. These days, things move pretty fast, and if you are stuck in a query, wait for response, query another editor, wait for response, type of mode, you aren’t going to keep up.

However, there is always plenty of good wisdom about the actual craft of writing that can, and should, be learned from books, both modern and "classic."

What intrigued me about this particular post was its promise of an "unconventional guide." I was not disappointed.

The writer of the article has the view that the only way to really learn copywriting is to jump in with both feet and do copywriting. He has a point. Copywriting is a strange beast, in no small part due to the fact that it morphs from person to person and from company to company depending upon needs and requirements. While the basic tenants are constant, the specifics that make up reality very widely.

Check out the list of best copywriting books which, incidentally, are unconventional because not one of them is actually a book about copywriting.

(I don’t feel like deep linking this post or trying to work any of my "automatic" links into the text, so instead, please use the menus to click around and have fun. I’ll worry about the moronic indexing spiders on another day.)

Finding useful webhosting information is next to impossible. Most of the big, brand-name webhost companies out there offer very sizable pay to affiliates who refer people to their service. That means that almost every single comment on the entire Internet about which web hosting services are good and which web hosts are bad is tainted by a giant conflict of interest.

I’ll try and spare you the details of how I know this, or why my freelance writing business and I are innocent (but, really I am.)

If you happen to see any webhosting advertisements while you are reading this article, please note that those are Google AdSense ads and that:

• a) I have no control over which ads do or do not show up, so I neither endorse, recommend, nor condemn whoever’s advertisements are showing up there
• b) while I do get paid by Google if someone clicks on one of those ads, I do not get any sort of affiliate marketing pay from the webhost ads
• c) if someone does click, may payout for that action from Google will only be a dollar or two, furthermore, that pay rate would be the same regardless of who or what is clicked, so there is no reason for me to choose one over another
• d) there are no affiliate links to webhosts of any kind on this page (or on this whole site as far as memory serves)

Hopefully, this fully demonstrates my impartiality in this manner at this time :)

Google Uses Speed For Search Rankings

Google recently announced that it is now using the speed with which a website loads as part of the algorithm that ranks websites in their search engine results pages (aka SERPs). It won’t be long before Google has to go back on this, just like they did with how they said they would handle no-follow links, because the truth is that the junkiest, slimiest, most prolific spammers, tricksters, and charlatans on the Internet use blazing fast web servers in order to scam the most people possible in a given amount of time.

In other words, using speed as a ranking factor benefits those that should not get high Google rankings the most. Whether Google announces this rollback or not remains to be seen, but I would count it as unlikely.

However, the good news is that in order to allow webmasters, content publishers, and writers making money online with websites to see how their website’s speed is affecting their rankings, Google has included a new tool in the Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools.

The value of this new utility is not in improving your PageRank or anything of the sort, but rather in seeing how an impartial, third-party, and a very important one at that, thinks your website is doing in terms of speed.

More to the point, this tool allows you to see how good your webhosting plan is.

If you have more than one website, or if you have two webhosts, you can run the Google search engine Site Performance tool on both of your websites and compare how fast they load. Obviously, the more similar the websites are, the more valid the comparison. However, two WordPress blogs with approximately the same number of plug-ins running on similar themes should be close enough for a broad comparison.

Making judgments based upon a half-second or other tiny difference probably isn’t wise, but if one webhost company is giving you sub-one-second times on the Google Site Performance Graph while another hosting company is giving you over three-second load times (or worse) on a similarly sized site, you have your answer about which webhost plans are good WordPress webhosts and which ones are crappy WordPress hosting companies.

I got asked an interesting question. After answering the common "What do you do," question by saying that I’m a freelance writer, I got an unusual follow up question. "So, is that like a regular writer, writer, or is that like a technical writer."

There are two unusual bits to that question. The first is that this person has drawn a distinction between what they perceive as more traditional writers, those who write books, for example, and those who are technical writers. Secondly, if one were to accept such a distinction between "normal" writers and technical writers, where in that paradigm would a freelance writer fit?

What Does a Freelance Writer Write?

The thought turned around in my head for awhile, and I came to the conclusion that that person most know or have known someone who was a technical writer. In hearing about what a technical writer does, a judgment was made that doing that kind of writing wasn’t really the same as being a regular writer. Depending upon the type of technical writing being done, and depending upon how that job is structured in a particular company, I can see the point. One technical writing project I worked on involved taking the notes from the software engineers and pulling them all together into the product documentation. I never even saw the software. There was writing involved, but the real job was actually more like editing.

On the other hand, there are plenty of technical writers who produce copy that rivals that of the most "creative" types of writing.

There is, of course, the stereotype that most people who are not connected somehow to the professional writing world that there are only two kinds of writers, those who write books (fiction or non-fiction) and those who write for newspapers and magazines.

Which brings me back to where this all started. Is a freelance writer like a traditional writer or more like a technical writer?

The answer is yes.

I have long maintained that what separates a true professional freelance writer from others is that the professional freelancer can write anything based upon the client’s needs. So, yes. I am a writer, writer if that is what the client needs. And, yes, I am a technical writer, if that is what my clients need.

And, yes, if anyone is wondering, I also write books when I can find the time.

Happy Writing.

Somewhere along the line I started reading the website Coding Horror, which is kind of ironic considering that I am a basic level programmer at best.

Sure, I understand the structure of a For-Next Loop and I can work through an If-Then-Else statement, but I’m typically much better at sorting through someone else’s code than I am at writing my own programs. It is sort of the programming equivalent of being able to read a foreign language, but not speak it.

Recently, Coding Horror weighed in on the subject of what value netbooks have. Netbooks, in case you aren’t much of a techie, are small, lightweight laptops that are typically both low-end power and low-end pricing. In other words, you end up with a very portable computer that is not designed for power computing tasks, all for a very low price.

For example, I got my Acer Netbook for just over $200 including shipping and tax. It weighs close to 2 lbs and can fit inside of my 6 inch x 9 inch notebook that I use. (It’s a little thick though.) The trade-off is that it uses a slower than the typical desktop Intel processor called Atom, and it only has 1 GB of RAM. Incidentally, these lower level limits are the result of Microsoft’s tight fisted control of the Windows XP license that can actually run on a netbook versus the recently demised bloatware known as Windows Vista.

Why Netbooks Suck For Techie Blogger Types

The author of Coding Horror is a regular reader of another blog called Global Nerdy, where a recent article suggested that Netbooks occupy the arena between Smartphones and Laptops. While Coding Horror comes to the defense of netbooks, their reasons are different from my reasons.

The original article author apparently looked around at his needs and found no need for a netbook. His contention is that Netbooks are too big to fit into your pocket and thus inferior to Smartphones as a portable device, and less powerful than laptops, and thus inferior to laptops as a computing device. This is not untrue.

The mind boggling part of the recent backlash against netbooks is that the, overwhelmingly techie, authors of these articles assume that people purchasing a netbook are actually trying to replace either a Smartphone or a Laptop at all. If that were the case, then these writers would have a point. However, that is almost always NOT the case, and the myopic vision of those who are power computing users, are just missing the point.

Netbooks are NOT a replacement for laptops or smartphones. Indeed, they are something else entirely. I cannot speak for why other people purchase a Netbook, but one need look no further than the freelance writer to understand how great a Netbook can be for the right user.

Why SmartPhones and Laptops Suck

As a professional freelance writer, I have many needs. This is not unlike most other professions. A carpenter needs a hammer, or a nail gun. I do not. But, I don’t go around saying that nail guns are worthless and that no one ever would need anything other than a hammer.

For a freelance writing business, there is no tool more necessary than a Netbook. In fact, for most of my particular uses, it is the SmartPhones and Laptops that suck, not the netbook.

The best iPhone or top of the line Android SmartPhone, and every other phone out there from Blackberry, to Palm to Windows Mobile all suffer from one fatal flaw; they cannot be touch-typed on. I write 500 words in my sleep. I often write 2500 words, 5000 words, or even complete 300 page books or manuals. Not being able to touchtype is like cutting my salary by 75%. For typing on the go, a Smartphone is worthless, no matter what kind of keyboard it has.

Which brings us to laptops. While certain techie types might consider carrying around a five or six pound laptop with a 17″ widescreen to be perfectly acceptable, there are, I would wager, quite a few more of us who find the idea of carting around a laptop and accompanying laptop bag less than appealing.

Sure, if I’m headed to the local Starbucks for a little java and writing, then I wouldn’t mind at all. On the other hand, if I’m headed out to meet up with friends, or to drop my daughter off at dance class and I just need to have something along with me so I can use some of my down time to write, I really don’t want to be lugging around a big old laptop computer and then wondering when I’m done if it is O.K. to leave it in the trunk of my car. (Is it too cold? Too hot? Will it get stolen?)

A netbook on the other hand serves this function beautifully. It is small and very portable. Instead of being the dad with the huge shoulder bag, I’m the dad with a small backpack or even just a portfolio case. I can whip out the netbook virtually anywhere and write an article, jot out some notes, or do a little research on the Internet when I find a Wi-Fi hotspot. When I’m done, it really isn’t all that big, so I can pretty much take it with me anywhere. If not, it fits in the glove box, under the seat, in a locker. Heck, it even fits in a friend’s purse!

In the end, people who bag on netbooks are completely missing the point. Netbooks are not for replacing phones or for replacing laptops. Netbooks are made to replace and improve upon that centuries old tool, the notebook; not the computer kind, the paper kind. A netbook eliminates carrying around paper and pen along with a file folder with all of your reading or research printed off. Use a netbook for what it is made fore, and you will find that netbooks are not worthless, they are priceless.

Having trouble posting pictures to your WordPress blog from Windows Live Writer?

If you are getting an error in Windows Live Writer when trying to publish a post with pictures that says something like "The following pictures cannot be published because the blog does not support picture publishing." you aren’t alone.

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a long time now to help publish posts to many of my own blogs and to the blogs of my freelance writing clients.  Until very recently, I never had any trouble publishing graphics by using Windows Live Writer.  But, all of the sudden, it says it can’t publish my pictures and that I should configure an FTP account for picture publishing.  What the –?

I’m not 100% sure what happened, but the issue raised its head shortly after WordPress upgraded to version 2.8.  Ever since then, I have had strange issues here and there with my WordPress blogs.  All of these issues relate to WordPress path errors that are set for everything from plug-ins to backup your WordPress database, to anything else that requires a path, including – you guessed it, uploading pictures.

On your WordPress blog’s control panel, under Settings is the menu item, Miscellaneous.  Click on it and you will see that there is a field there that defines the path that pictures are uploaded to for your blog.  If you are hosted on certain types of UNIX servers, like those on Dreamhost, that path may include a directory name that starts with a period. That is the problem

I don’t know whether the WordPress code has been changed such that it can no longer recognize directories that have a period at the beginning of their name, or if the code was changed so that it got more details regarding the paths so that now it sees the .whatever directories where it didn’t before.  All I know, is that I have run a dozen or more blogs the same way for over a year without ever running into this issue, and now, I’m troubleshooting all kinds of little problems that all come down to having that directory with the dot in front as part of the path somewhere.

To fix the problem with Windows Live Writer uploading pictures to your WordPress blog, delete the directory with the period, or just use a relative path instead.  In other words, if the path listed is /server/.weasels/home/blog/wp-content/uploads/ then change it to just /wp-content/uploads/

With the offending dot-whatever named directory gone, Windows Live Writer should start working like its old self again, and you won’t have to configure an FTP account for picture publishing.

Every once and a while I run across a website that I end up opening link after link in new tabs only to find myself with some ridiculous number of open tabs and Firefox warning me that opening more will make my browser slow.

Then, I open Chrome and open more.

The point is, that I end up finding good value in these sites. Since it is so hard to distinguish the good websites from the garbage websites, I figure that people coming here might be interested in seeing if there is some value in those sites for them as well.  I’ll be implementing the time honored blogging tradition of link love, or link list posts to display those sites that I find useful.

Keep in mind that this is not an endorsement, nor a commentary on their accuracy or long-term value.  Rather, these are the sites that caught my fancy long enough to warrant a bookmark and a first read through.  Make your own value judgments when you get there.  Also, there is no ranking involved here, just a list, so number 5 is just as good as number 1.

Good WordPress Sites

1. Nathan Rice
2. wpazo
3. Pro Blog Design

These are all WordPress related because that was what I was working on today, but don’t worry, I’ll have all kinds of useful links for writers on future editions.

Thanks to SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) and Google’s reliance on certain methods of ranking webpages there is often limited value to actually being clever on the Internet, at least in so far as your website design is concerned. 

Clever multimedia, particularly lowest common denominator oriented videos, of course, is actually valuable thanks to “becoming viral,” or more specifically thanks to people who email, tweet, update status, or otherwise link to funny things.  Of course, what is funny to one person is dumb or lame to another person, so it’s really sort of a random thing about what does and doesn’t work.

All of that aside, I came across a website today billed on another site as the “all signal no noise” resource for everything WordPress.  I haven’t read enough of it yet to know whether or not that is true, but either way, I did get a good chuckle out of it.

Seems that the owner of wpazo knows his way around a dictionary entry and decided to explain what his website was all about thusly.

Always nice to get a laugh from the world of words that us writers are immersed in.

Lately, I can’t help but notice the sudden proliferation of WordPress themes for writers.

Want to know what to look for in WordPress Themes for Writers?

I first came across “The Erudite.”  It claims to be a free theme for writers (their emphasis) which is funny on at least one level since there is no such thing as The Erudite.  I can only assume that this is an attempt to create a noun out of an adjective.  That’s fine if you are writing song lyrics, but you might be missing the point if you are pitching writers who, theoretically, have a solid command of grammar and vocabulary.

Erudite means scholarly or educated. Writers can be those things, and they can also be uneducated lunkheads. Being a writer does not make one erudite and being erudite does not make one a writer.  As far as I know, nothing makes one part of the erudite.  If you are going to aim a project at us, do it correctly.

Today I came across Dispatch which is some sort of child-theme / add-on for Mimbo Pro which is the version of a magazine-type theme that you pay for.  It is a theme for “writers and journalists.”

The common element of both themes is that they are sparse, non-graphic intensive, themes that make maximum use of white space, whatever the heck that means.  The unspoken commonality is that these are themes for those people who care too much about their content to actually want any fancy-pants bells and whistles on their themes.

Normally, I’d just shrug and move on, but I’ve been around WordPress just long enough to remember when the so-called magazine themes first started coming out.  If you are wondering, no they don’t look like magazines at all.  They sort of look like a very specific subset of trade magazines that deliberately attempt a newspaper look on the front of their magazine in an attempt to seem more journalistic and authoritative and less like a free publication that shows up every week if you claim even a tangential connection to the industry being covered.

Despite the inaccuracy of the term “magazine theme” it has stuck and it has basically become a de facto standard in WordPress.

In an attempt to head the so-called writer theme off at the pass, as a professional writer, I’m going to disavow these themes as having anything to do with writers.

Next, I’ll point out for the edification of all, that the people who actually care about white space and readability as it pertains to the overall layout and ability to intuitively read and follow text are typographers, not writers.  Call these typographer themes, not writer themes. (You better get the fonts right if you do though.)

If WordPress developers want to create a theme for writers, I’m all in favor of that.  However, I would ask that such a theme really be of benefit to writers, and by writers I do not mean some imaginary writers who are lower level website owners that don’t want graphics or SEO or whatever because we are either too attached to our words or too stupid to understand the value of those things.

As writers, we care very much about how our work looks and is presented, and as PROFESSIONAL writers, we care very much about how our writing can and does make money.  If anyone is looking for an ad-friendly, SEO optimized theme, it is writers.

We are the ones who are sick and tired of junk content, poorly-written-article filled, websites ranking ahead of us in Google.  Of course, they generate higher advertising revenues because the techies at Google think more like other techies who mass produce thinly developed websites using all the right HTML tags and Dreamweaver CS-PriceGouge-4.$$$ plug-ins to make the computerized robots that crawl the Internet happy.  Who cares if the information they provide is useless to most who visit. (That is, after all, the goal.  If you help with a user’s needs, you diminish their incentive to click on an ad for a product or service that they could buy that might help instead.)

Meanwhile, those of us who write useful, well-developed, fully-researched, content that people would actually want and need to read get ranked 43 because we dare to write something over 800 words.  We might also use a catchy title that people would find interesting instead of one with the right keywords in the right order, which we would only know about after paying some other techie at shell-out-your-cash.com to get access to the data and research that shows what these magic keywords are.

In other words, if you can build tricks and bells and whistles into your WordPress theme for writers that would let us write while the PHP takes care of all that Google-required crap, we would really appreciate it.

In the meantime, stop assuming that writers spend their time wishing the Internet was just black text on white backgrounds with plenty of “whitespace”.

You can read about my rant at the Windows Live blog when a developer said that search engines are designed to look where writers put important words.  (Like in the HTML title tag?  Yeah, us writers do that by instinct.)

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Do you ever wonder about the people who are new to your blog?

I can’t help but wonder what it is like to come to Arctic Llama for the first time and read some of the articles. If readers arrive via search engine, then chances are they start by reading a specific post, one that does or does not provide what they need depending upon how will their search results matched what they were looking for. 

If readers arrive via a link, either one of mine, or someone else’s, then maybe the first thing they see is the landing page.  Do they like the way the most recent articles are laid out end to end all the way to the end of the page?

It’s set up that way, because that is how I like to determine if a new site I encounter is one that I will come back to.  Generally, I arrive for the first time via search engine and if I like what I find in terms of information, style, and content focus, then I’ll click the Home link or graphic and start reading down the list of posts.  If I end up clicking “Older Posts” or whatever is at the bottom, then I’ve likely found a new friend.  If I remember to move the laundry to the dryer after the second article, then we’ve probably seen each other for the last time.

Regardless of how they arrive, I have no intention of deliberately causing people to stay.  That is for other efforts where the relationship is business and about money.  Here, it’s about fun and helping others enjoy the benefits of quality writing whether as writers or purchasers of writing.  So, I don’t study my Google Analytics or even ponder my rankings in search engines for various queries (though from time to time I find amusement at some of the things I accidentally end up ranking highly for).

Still, I can help but wonder what makes someone click on another link to read more of Arctic Llama?  What makes them leave?  What makes them subscribe to the RSS Feed or make a comment?  Did they find what they were looking for?  Were they entertained, or enlightened?

In the end when you do something for the joy and not for the money, you hope that what you do is worthwhile and well received.  If it is not, then you can take solace in the fact that it was both for yourself.

I hate Makeuseof.com.  I mean really, really, hate it.

In an online world where 99% of websites that catalog and review online services are nothing more than thinly veneered shells that simply repost the manufacturer’s description with a two sentence praise or pan (usually praise), Makeuseof is one of those websites that actually takes the time to use and then describe all manner of web-based resources, both good and bad.

…most websites simply repost the manufacturer’s description…

If you are looking for a free online service or utility that you know exists, that you hope exists, or that you aren’t sure exists, but man would it be great if it did, makeuseof.com is where to go to both find it, and then find out if it is going to do what you need it to do.

If there is more than one offering, chances are they break down your options either via a single comparison piece, or just by having articles available on all the options that you can peruse to create your own comparison.

Too Much of a Good Thing

So, why do I hate them?

There is nothing that shoots my time management to heck more than finding something interesting.  For me, nothing is quite as interesting as the allure of a new tool that I can use, and makeuseof is full of them.  So, while its great that Makeuseof led me to HTTrack as a way to download an entire website for offline browsing in a Wi-Fi-less area, it isn’t so great that by the time I found, downloaded, and installed that utility I had opened 8 new tabs.  Sugarsync vs. Dropbox?  Oh, yeah, I had Dropbox once, or was is box.net? And, it’s recent; yes!  4 Free Tools for Fool-Proof WordPress Backup? I was meaning to find something like that!

Nothing is quite as interesting as a new tool I can use…

If that weren’t enough, every time I go to the site I think that maybe one or two of my sites would benefit from looking more like the Makeuseof.com layout, even though it probably isn’t appropriate for the content I have.  (Most of my stuff doesn’t lend itself to being excerpted.)

Great; now it’s 8:30 AM.

Curse you Makeuseof!  Curse you and your infinite collection of distractions!

Ooooh…online versions of Risk!  I didn’t know that there were any.  I wonder which one is the best — (Psst. Don’t look now, but here comes 9:00 AM!)