National Novel Writing Month Sign Up
I just signed up for National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. In case you are not familiar with NaNoWriMo, which I will shorten to NaNo from here on out in order to save my Shift case from undo abuse, let me explain. NaNo is one month (November 2011, this year) during which writers write an entire novel in one month. More specifically, a writer commits to writing a complete 50,000 word (minimum) novel from scratch during the period that begins at midnight on November 1st and ends at midnight on November 30th. There is no prize, there is [...]
Google Author Tag Worthless?
Like many other online writers, I was intrigued by the recent buzz surrounding the implementation of an HTML tag that lets search engines, like Google, know who the author of a webpage is. The idea is that if someone is a good writer who publishes lots of useful and well written online content, then perhaps the other things that person writes should be considered in that context. When Google has information about who wrote a piece of content on the web, we may look at it as a signal to help us determine the relevance of that page to a [...]
AP Style Email Not E-Mail
The Associated Press announced that they will be updating the AP Stylebook to reflect the “evolution” of the language from e-mail to email. Most of us freelance technology writer types have long since moved on from the out-of-date e-mail, but occasionally sticklers and editors conditioned to toe the AP Style line exactly, have required the use of e-mail from time to time. The online version of the AP Stylebook has already been updated and the Spring 2011 edition of the printed AP Stylebook will include the new usage of email as well. If you are wondering, this change to the [...]
Windows Live Writer 2011 beta Blogging Software
Windows Live Writer was a surprising free utility offered by Microsoft as a way to post to multiple blogs with many of the modern conveniences of more powerful software like Microsoft Word, which the company killed off as a legitimate way to blog by having it produce garbage-filled HTML code. I still haven’t bothered to go back in and see if the new Microsoft Office 2010 editions generate better blog and web code when Microsoft Word is used to create blog posts via its “Share” function. WLW, on the other hand, created pretty decent code that was fully compatible with [...]
Freelance Writer Blog Posts
If you are going to earn money writing online, you are going to need a website. If you are going to have a website that attracts enough attention from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, and others to actually drive any traffic to your website, you are going to need a blog or other section of your small business website that gets updated on a regular basis. If you are going to have enough time to dedicate to being an entrepreneur and running your small business successfully, you will occassionally find it difficult to update your blog as often as you would [...]
Yahoo Style Guide AP Style For The Web
As we mentioned earlier, Yahoo has taken on the task of producing a “style guide” for the Internet. Those of you who are already in the professional writing business know about the different writing styles out there. There is AP Style, which is based upon a book by AP called The Associated Press Stylebook. Then there is the MLA stylebook and a couple of others as well. For those of you not in the freelance writing business, the point of all these style guides is to fill in some of the language gaps that exist between the grammar manuals, like [...]
Freelance Writing Tips and Interesting News From Elsewhere
A handful of interesting articles worked their way through my RSS Reader this morning and I thought I would share some of them here for others who might also find them interesting for their freelance writing business. This list is not an endorsement of the content that is linked, which I may or may not agree with, but rather interesting or otherwise helpful information that made me stop and take note. First up, is this post, which while I’m sure is not the official release, nor the original mention of the news, was the first one I happened to come [...]
Copyright Law Understanding Is Not Easy
Understanding copyright law is not easy. It certainly is not as easy as some people make it sound. The context, situation, and even media type all factor into how copyright applies, or does not apply.
HostGator Web Hosting Means No Auto Thumbnails for Your WordPress Blog
In my ongoing saga for finding a good, stable webhost for my websites, I have found a new snag. HostGator web hosting comes recommended highly from A TON of different WordPress bloggers as not just a great web host, but a good WordPress web host. Only, here is the thing. It is now WAY after midnight and I have just found out that the way HostGator’s servers are setup, any WordPress theme using an open source image resizing script called TimThumb will not work. HostGator apparently blocks the method TimThumb uses to display the resized images. The ONLY fix for [...]
Freelance Writing Business Site Re-Design Coming
ArcticLlama is undertaking a major redesign and content update of our freelancing business website. Follow our progress through ups and (hopefully not many) downs.
