Unnecessary Redundancy
One of my pet hates is redundant language; I reserve the right to “really truly” for emphasis if I want to, but all that “05-hundred AM in the morning” stuff is for cock jockeys.
Here’s a little visual celebration of redundancy in action:
I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone
Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker
Stating the Obvious by Hryck
Redundancy by mlcastle
Images via Flickr: Andrew Sardone, JulianBleecker, Hryck, mlcastle
Related resources
- Writing tips and blogging job opportunities (invisiblogger.com)
- Redundancy Explains Junk DNA, Redundancy Explains Junk DNA (sandwalk.blogspot.com)
- Tighten up your writing by removing redundant/unnecessary words (cybertext.wordpress.com)
How My Boobies Got Involved in Canadian Politics
Like I said the other day, I had this organic search traffic spike. Lots of people looking for Mike Crawley showed up, the majority of them from Google image search.
About 20 hours later, I saw the news that Mike Crawley has been named as the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada….
What this essentially means is that a whole lot of people were doing a quick spot of internet research on Mike Crawley, maybe looking for a picture of him to include with their blog post or news story, when they crashed into a couple of my photos along the way and got, um, distracted. “Important stuff, politics… oh look, boobies!” and so on.
So, if you’re here looking for Mike Crawley, Canadian politician, you just missed him.
If you want Mike Crawley AKA Photofrenetic, erotic nude and artistic nude photographer, then check out the gallery or visit his website.
That is all.
Pervs.
Related articles
- WTF Happened There? (machiavelliid.com)
- Liberals end 2012 convention with internal changes, new president, resolution … – Toronto Star (thestar.com)
WTF Happened There?
I just had one of those mad traffic spikes: not a StumbleUpon flashmob, not a run of Facebook click-throughs, but a burst of activity that comes mainly from organic search.
Look:
As it turns out, I had a lot of hits from people searching for Mike Crawley. Which isn’t surprising, because he’s an expert and because he does nudie photos.
There were a couple of hours there when it was all just busy, busy, busy – for this place, at least. I’m used to pootling along at no more than a hundred or so views a day most of the time, so this was pretty fucking unusual.
So who were those passing pervs? Will they be back? Did they find what they were looking for? What does it all mean?
The problem with “free”
For a month or 2 (OK, maybe more – my sense of time is hazy when I’ve been procrastinating hard) I’ve been the proud owner of a free .co.cc domain name and free 000webhost.com hosting. I haven’t made any good use of it, but it’s sucked up a fair amount of my time: checking to see if the registration had been activated, requesting activation, waiting, checking to see if the nameservers had been updated yet, waiting, twitching, reading the support resources, visiting the non-existent site to will it into being with my steely gaze, emailing support and waiting a week for a reply.
All I wanted it for was to poke around: instal WordPress.org, play with themes and stuff, test things I wasn’t sure about before I did them anywhere important. I didn’t see any point paying for something I was only going to use for fun and exploration. D’oh.
Top quality fun and exploration are well worth paying for. I wouldn’t say “oh, I’ll only ever use free sex toys because they’re just for fun,” or decide that my walking shoes have to be free because I’ll only use them to explore. So why was I focused on getting my test on for free?
Because the internet’s sposed to be free, yo.
No.
In the end I got pissed off and paid about £20 of our quaint English pounds to some guys online in exchange for a year’s hosting package that’s probably a lot higher-spec than I need, and includes a free .com domain name registration. I didn’t compare web hosting prices and find the best deal, I didn’t ask all my self-hosting friends for recommendations. Shit, I didn’t even tweet for help.
I just got bored bored bored of the dicking around with this free stuff and decided I was happy to pay someone who would do it a little bit faster and better; then I paid the first people I googled who looked… faster and better. And they were. I still had to live chat with a techie about getting my domain registration arranged, but that was quick and painless and live, dammit, so I wasn’t left frustrated and grouchy.
Oh, my aching internet-addicted bones.
I’m not saying all free stuff is bad; I have some excellent free or “freemium” stuff that I’m very happy with and whose support service is actually quite supportive. But I don’t want to embrace the false economy of saving money by doing everything myself, when my time is worth more than the fee for assistance.
So this morning I looked at my situation and grokked this: I could spend a few hours messing with my new setup and export-importing all my content and adding plugins and dancing with widgets. Or I could spend some cash and have my new site set up for me. I’d been intending to do it all myself, to benefit from the learning implicit in any new activity. But I realised the knowledge to be gained is largely “how to point and click”, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up whenever if I needed to. So again, I’d rather spend a little cash and save the hassle than spend the time (when I could be earning money or chilling with my family) to do it myself.
Problem solved through the application of cash. So if you have cash, great – your takeaway is to spend more of it on saving yourself for the good stuff. If you don’t have cash, that sucks and I’m on my way. Leave me a comment (or email me) about who you are and what you’re doing for money; I’ll get back to you and help if I can.
Image credit: Gisela Giardino
How to make a shitload of cash without working too hard
This is how I see myself and my business in a few years’ time. Especially the chart.
Seriously though, how are you going to get from here to there?
My plan involves working bloody hard (but,like I said,not too hard) and training the Animal to make money from blogging too. That way I can just put in a regular few hours a week working for other people, a few more working on my own side projects, and spend the rest playing ball and reading books with Mini-MI while the Animal plays househusband. In the park. With ice cream. Cos that’s how good it will be, if I get it right. Right?
Related articles
- Make Money Blogging: Where to Find Blogging Jobs
- Inspiration: “You Will Keep Getting Older, And Then You Will Die”
- Invisiblogger Jobs Board
Image credit: Snugg LePup
Taking Risks: Success is defined by the possibility of failure
This is a guest post by Caitlin Kelly of Broadside blog.
If you told me to jump out of an airplane or try rock-climbing or bungee-jumping or riding a motorbike, I’d say no thanks. I hate heights. Most physical risks leave me cold.
But when I was 25, I left behind my apartment, dog, freelance writing clients and live-in boyfriend eager to marry me – and moved alone to France for eight months for a journalism fellowship. I was desperate for a break and a change, but I knew getting on that plane would – as it did – forever change my life and how I saw myself living it.
Sure enough, I came back to Toronto, ditched the boyfriend and got the best job ever, aglow with the sort of confidence I could never have attained sitting safely at home.
During my fellowship I had taken all sorts of risks that even my mother, a woman who had traveled the world alone for years, found a little… misguided. Like getting into a truck with a French truck-driver who spoke no English and driving from the south of France to Istanbul for a story. Sleeping in the truck on a bunk about two feet away from a man 10 years my senior I had never met. For eight days.
Best trip of my life!
It cemented, early, my conviction that selective professional, intellectual, emotional, creative and athletic risk-taking is a highly under-rated activity, especially for girls and women, as so many of us, still, are programmed to play it safe: pick the right school/grad school/man/job/apartment. Strap in and hang on!
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
I think it’s the worst advice anyone can give a woman, and millions of us grow up listening to a chorus of people trying to dissuade us from trying the very things that will likely help us grow (up) a lot faster and in more interesting ways than simply taking the easier and less risky conventional path.
I grew up in a family of talented creative folk, who wrote and directed and edited films, television shows and magazines for a living. No one ever had a paycheck or a pension. It was balls-to-the-wall. So I knew early that risks bring rewards, and rejection — we had steak years and hamburger years. I learned, as I still do, to splurge on lovely and durable items (cashmere, a car) when I have the cash because next year… who knows? I learned to save money, live low and ferret out great consignment and thrift shop deals in my leaner years.
One of the tricks to risk-taking is making sure you’ve got a safety net before you leap: good health, savings in the bank, little to no debt and the consistent self-discipline to ruthlessly separate wants (flat-screen TV, new car, iPad) from needs (groceries, a safe vehicle, health insurance.)
I took another risk after I lost my fancy newspaper job, as a reporter for the New York Daily News, in 2006. I couldn’t find anything else and, desperate for steady cash to supplement my freelance income, took a retail job at a local mall for $11 an hour. This was in September 2007, long before the recession, and friends and family were puzzled by my choice.
Why would I work for so little? Retail? I was 50 at the time, more than 20 to 30 years older than almost all my co-workers.
I took the risk of trying something new, something utterly out of my comfort zone. My ego took a beating, as everyone does in retail, with snotty customers.
But that risk paid off in ways I could never have quite imagined; my second book, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” was published in April 2011, called “an excellent memoir” by Entertainment Weekly.
And my life during those two years – how weird is this? – has been optioned by CBS as a possible sitcom.
Risk is not a four-letter word.
Dull is!
*****
Caitlin Kelly is the author of Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail and Blown Away: American Women and Guns.
Caitlin blogs about women, writing and work at Broadside. She also helps other writers to excel through her expert coaching and editing services.
Call for guest bloggers
Pop quiz, hotshot. How many of the following are you?
- interesting
- creative
- funny
- excitable
- imaginative
- geeky
- sexy
- open-minded
- opinionated
- oddball
- honest
- eloquent
- obsessive
- insightful
- snarky
- freaky
- or Z, all of the above?
If you said yep to more than half of those, we want you. If you said yep to the last one, we really really want you.
I’m looking for new guest bloggers that will blow our heads off with their awesomeness. Or just spout some mad gubbins that entertains us. That’ll do.
Interested? Here’s how:
- Email mi@machiavelliid.com and tell me
- Who or what you are
- Where you blog (if you don’t blog anywhere, that’s fine)
- What you’d write about on here
- Where else we can find you (Twitter, Facebook, whatever)
- Write what you like, and people like you will read it. Send it to me or upload it to our guest blogger account as a draft.
- Don’t send us the same old stuff you’ve already had published somewhere else, please. If you want to get more exposure on a certain topic, write a new post about it.
- Include nice relevant, attributed public domain images where you can, cos everybody likes a good picture.
- Write yourself a byline/mini-bio/shamelessly self-promoting blurb that I can put at the end of your post. You’ll get a one-line intro at the start of the post as well with your name & a link to your main blog/site.
- If you want your byline to include a photo or logo, email me that too.
- Please don’t put affiliate links (like clickbank, go, affiliatewindow, etc) in your guest posts or bylines. I’ll remove them.
- If you’ve got a one-on-one deal with someone that they’re gonna give you a kickback for the customers that find them via a link in your post, that’s fine with me (and I may not even be able to tell, if they’re just using something like Google Analytics to count clicks & conversions). But if it looks like an affiliate system to me, I’ll remove the hyperlink.
- Stuff in as many non-affiliate links as you want. I’ll only remove them if they’re boring (drab p0rn, search pages, bad web services) or despicable (non-consensual p0rn, virus peddlers, predatory fearmongers).
- Be aware that I edit all posts on here, but I’ll check anything beyond spelling, punctuation & grammar changes with you first.
Still reading? Nice one. Email me now, then.
Catch me on the Front Side Bus
I’m massively happy to announce that I’m now the go-to girl for brains, robots, archaeology and freaks/feats of nature on Front Side Bus — if you haven’t checked it out yet, go there now. You’re missing all sorts of tasty science, gadget & geek news.
Here’s links to my first 2 stories for them:
Time for self-hosting? I need advice!
Today, this blog passed 10 thousand page views.
It isn’t a big number, and it’s page views (not the same thing as the number of identifiably unique visitors) but I was happy nonetheless. It’s nice to know that I’m not talking to myself anymore :)
When I started blogging all I was doing was posting spare thoughts, and photos from my modelling jobs when I worked with people nice enough to share the results with me. I had a handful of views a week. The only people I told about the blog were my friends and occasional photographers.
There was an occasional web traffic spike when something exciting happened (like my one and only burlesque performance, or our DIY home birth). Then I’d just had a baby and returned to work less than 3 months later; I rarely had the energy to write for myself when I’d spent all day writing for my living. But in the last few months, I’ve started to make time for this blog again.
The joy of blogging, to me, is that I do it because I want to, not because anyone else expects it. My recently-renewed blogging energy [or perhaps it's just the start of a manic episode] has made me think about what’s next: should I move to a self-hosted WordPress.org setup?
With WordPress.org, people who know tell me, I’ll be able to tweak anything I like and embed anything I want to. I can advertise the shiz I like, so I could earn back the hosting fees. I’ll be in control, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Here’s the problem, or the 2 problems really:
- I am not a web developer. My html is tourist-standard, I’ve never used WordPress.org before, and I know nothing about moving all this stuff over to another host. I’m scared I’m gonna screw it up.
- If I go ahead and self-host, I’ll feel obliged to try and make it earn me some money to cover the costs. Will that mean I start to see my blog as work? Will I start power tripping and checking my Klout more often than my email?
So I’m begging you, if you’ve already been there & done this, if you know what I need to know, please share it with me. I’m feeling kind of stuck and I’m not sure what I should do next. Help!
Related articles
- Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)
Am I blogging about you?
The Animal asked me the other day, “Do you write about me on there?”
He knows that I mention him sometimes. He’s taken a look at my posts before. What he meant was, am I talking *about* him? About us? About how he’s an inconsiderate dullard with the sexual prowess of a celibate rock? [I'm joking. He, like Mary Poppins, is practically perfect in every way.]
Now, he says he’s going to have to read my blog so he can see what I’m thinking about. Like he can’t just ask me.
So the other thing he’s really asking is, am I writing about things he wants to know? Is he missing out on some super “tame your girlfriend” tips by not subscribing to my RSS feed? Am I giving away secrets? [The answers BTW are sometimes; yes, if you apply inductive logic and keep a careful eye on your set-based reasoning; only the cheap ones.]
This is essentially what everyone wants to know… is there something here that they can take away with them? Am I posting stuff they can use? Am I blogging about their lifestyle, their field, their problem, their ambition?
And the answer is… I don’t know. Because I don’t know who you are. You might be a Googler of fetish models, a perplexed parent, or a Renaissance fan.
All this has made me curious: am I blogging about you? If not, who are you and how did you come to be here?
Lo.
Here, at last, is my blog. You’d think it’d be quicker to blog than to make home-printed-&-stapled fanzines like I used to in the early 1990s. It isn’t. Maybe I’ll get faster. Maybe you’ll have to read slower. Maybe we could have intermissions for cigarettes & ice cream. You’ll have to bring your own. Sorry.
Machiavelli Id
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