I'm experimenting with changing comment link text and other aspects of the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds website in hopes of making it more intuitive to navigate for people not used to blogs and encourage conversation:

• Instead of saying "Previous" for newer posts and "Next" for older posted, the links at the bottom now say "Recent Posts" and "Older Posts." I might change "Recent" to "Newer." I hope this will make more sense--I don't think most people would naturally click "next" to get to older material.


• Instead of "No Comments/x Comments," the comments link now says "Click Here to Leave a Comment." I suspect that audiences unfamiliar with blogs (most of the current membership) might not realize from "No Comments" that they can leave a comment. I haven't quite figured out how to have two links--one Click Here and one that says "x Comments," since I have a tiny bit of self-taught PHP and that's it.



• Above the comment box it now says Leave a Reply. Please feel free to ask questions or leave feedback using the comment form below. We encourage discussion of posts. Your comment will be publicly visible, but your email address is for verification purposes only and will not be shared.

  
  
  

  From past comments I wanted to make it clear that the comments will be publically visible. I've had to edit out phone numbers in the past due to commenter confusion.

I hope these changes will improve the website's functionality for its users, as well as making it more accessible to potential members. I think the website is starting to outgrow its current design (it needs a calendar plug-in, for one things), but this is a step.

Since my last entry I've written another 4 articles for Student Health 101 (the one I was being vague about was on gender neutral housing, but I haven't been able to get a final published copy yet), and some web articles for JobMonkey.com. My article about South Iceland appeared in the January/February issue of Transitions Abroad with two photographs of Vestmannaeyjar.

Transitions Abroad seems to have removed all mention of the print magazine from their website--I wonder if they're switching to web-only? I think that would be a shame, but it does seem to be the way of the future. I personally love being able to hold a physical magazine and flip through it (and I'm not a fan of "print-style" website engines). Physical magazines are also much more convenient for flights and doctors' waiting rooms.

I've also switched my portfolio website to run off WordPress for ease of updating. I'm not quite done tweaking the template, but the photos are mine and I think it looks nicer now.

I'm thinking about trying one of those photo-a-day-for-a-year exercises, but I suspect it would end up being 300 photos of my cats and 65 photos of leaves or something. This month has been bitterly cold and I've been avoiding going outside, plus I'm not into (sub)urban scenes or still lifes for the most part. It would be interesting, though. Maybe I'll start with a month and see how that goes--when the weather improves.

It's been an extremely busy summer--I've reviewed a lot of books, written a few articles, contributed to a reference book, and edited a wide variety of things (from exhibit panels to an online college curriculum) at the day job.

I'm very pleased with one of my articles in the July issue of the Colorado College Alumni Bulletin, "How the West Was Studied: State of the Rockies 2007" (not online yet). It covered the results of Colorado College's 2007 State of the Rockies project, an interdisciplinary research project conducted annually on economic and environmental issues facing the Rocky Mountain Region. The project has grown from nothing to a well-respected source of research that has been used in congressional briefings, and it was a pleasure to interview the passionate and articulate students and faculty involved.

I'm also very excited about an article I've completed for Student Health 101. I had the chance to talk to several students who were all great interviews, and it's more of a social issue piece than I usually write. I'm very pleased to see SH101 covering more topics like this (I'm being vague because the article isn't slated to run until October), and the addition of short audio clips to the interactive digital version of the magazine is a new experience for me. I'm also excited to see students discussing specific articles in the forums--I think that's great.

The Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc. website has been a major part of my writing efforts this summer, and I think it's shaping up well. I expect things to slow down there come fall.

More about this summer's work here.

It's been a while since I updated here--the conference in Grand Junction was good, and Colorado National Monument is lovely. I didn't make it to Yellowstone, but I did see Fossil Butte National Monument (a new park for me) and John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (which I hadn't been to since the new visitor center opened).

A handful of publications since then:

• Reviews for Bookslut of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella and Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Danny Danziger, two extremely different, but equally fascinating books.


• Escape the City: Nature Awaits, in Colorado Springs News & Views, a local start-up. This is a round-up of family-friendly nature and science destinations within one hour of Colorado Springs.

I also submitted a biography to Salem Press's upcoming Great Lives from History: The 20th Century, and I'll have a couple environmental pieces in this summer's Colorado College Alumni Bulletin. I have a few more assignments in the works right now.

I've also been doing regular updates to the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc. website. We're just starting to work on assembling the next newsletter.

And of course I have some scientific abstracts and presentations to prepare, as well as a satisfying but time-consuming summer job.

• Laying a Cornerstone for the Arts (page 6 of PDF) and Playing Soccer in Püke (page 12 of PDF), Colorado College Alumni Bulletin, April 2007 (PDF)
  Researching and writing "Laying a Cornerstone of the Arts," about Colorado College's new Cornerstone Arts Building (under construction) was a really enjoyable and interesting experience--I got to take a hard-hat tour of the construction site with people involved in architecture, construction, and usage planning.
  
  For "Playing Soccer in Püke" I interviewed a CC alumnus who's in the Peace Corps in Albania, where he's started a soccer team for the local children. Writing for the Bulletin always reminds me what amazing people come from my college.



• Behind the Dioramas at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Gifted Travel, April 2007
  This was a fun article to research and write. I'd been meaning to go on the dioramas tour for several months, as museum dioramas have been an interest of mine since I was a little girl sketching the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. It was fascinating to learn more about how they're created, and there were a lot of neat details I couldn't include for space reasons. The tour is different every time depending on the group, the crowds, and the tour guide.



• Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, by Arthur Allen, Bookslut, April 2007
  I can't quite say I had fun reading this book--it's a serious and often depressing or frustrating topic--but I did learn a lot.



• JobMonkey: Alaska Summer Jobs
  Researching this project really made me want to go work in Alaska for a summer!

And of course I've done a few updates to the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc. website (and have some more in the works).

Tomorrow I'm off to a conference in Grand Junction and then to Portland, OR for a few weeks (driving up through Yellowstone, which I haven't been to in years). I am going to try to work minimally during that time--take notes for potential articles, finish the assignments I'm currently working on, but not actively look for anything new until I get back. Actual vacations are important sometimes!

I'm currently interviewing people for an article. I have thus far interviewed two people, producing over 1,000 words of transcript. I have another three or so people to interview. I could probably get by with one or two, and the final article may only have three people quoted.

The interviews have to be turned into a 250-word article and an expanded 400-word web version. And they will be--I've done it before--but I still find it somewhat amusing how succinct journalism has taught me to be. My natural style when journaling or writing letters is quite long and rambly. Journalism requires me to get to the point and only the point.

Unfortunately, due to its non-profit nature, [name redacted to protect the guilty] cannot provide compensation for work that is accepted for publication.

I keep seeing things like this crop up, and I find them very disingenous. There is absolutely NO legal bar to nonprofits paying writers, just as there's no legal bar to nonprofits hiring fulltime employees. Large nonprofits do both all the time, and some of them pay quite well.

If the publication can't pay because it's a start-up, or because they didn't budget for it, fine--but they should say so upfront.

And new writers, if someone tries to tell you they "can't pay" because they're a nonprofit, be aware that there isn't a legal reason behind that. Small nonprofits sometimes can't pay because they don't have much money, and there's certainly nothing wrong with volunteering for them on occasion (I do so myself for one small nonprofit dear to my heart; I also attend their board meetings and know they really can't afford the services I provide and still fulfill their mission). But volunteer your services because the organization is upfront about its finances and you care about its goals, not because they claim "nonprofits" can't pay. And if the nonprofit is large and solvent? Don't donate your services unless you're rolling in money yourself, please.

I now have 4 articles live and 6 pending at Ezinearticles.com. That means I have to write 20 more in the next two days for the Lieurance-King New Year's Article Challenge, although I doubt they'll all go live in time to meet the deadline. But I didn't sign up for the challenge hoping to win (that chance passed weeks ago)--I just wanted to motivate myself to do some serious marketing. If I get 30 articles up, I'll consider that a reasonable sample size to determine whether this is a worthwhile marketing technique.

Back to (other) work now!

Dinosaur Comics: The only comic where a giant T. rex and a Dromiceiomimus have discussions about synecdoche.

The last several comics have been about literary techniques, a la T-Rex. I love Dinosaur Comics.

Since last fall, I've been working on a major redesign for the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds, Inc., a nonprofit Friends of the Park group supporting Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. There are a few sections I'd like to expand still, but most of the site is up..

It's been an interesting and educational experience so far. I've had to learn some new skills (and pick up a little PHP) to customize the WordPress template, and I fear site maintenance may not be as easy for the non-computer-skilled as I'd hoped. But maybe it will.

Background:

I'd been thinking about the possibility of the Friends having a blog like Virgin Islands Archaeology with the NPS and Friends, a blog for Virgin Islands National Park maintained by interns sponsored by their friends group and by park employees. Their Museum Curator, Susanna Pershern, was very helpful in answering my questions about how the blog has worked out for them.

When the Friends of the Florissant Fossil Beds website went down, I broached the possibility of a redesign. The previous webmaster had other commitments and didn't have time to update often, and I thought it would be nice to integrate a blog into the site, as an easy-to-update news page. Then I thought, well, a blog is basically a simple content management system. Why not run the whole site off WordPress (an excellent open source blogging platform), so it'll be relatively easy for people with no HTML skills to update?

What I did:

• I found a fairly basic, clean WordPress template and customized the colors and a lot of subtle aspects of the layout.


• I installed the RandomHeader plugin and selected a bunch of photos of the park from my personal collection. A different random image shows up on each page refresh or internal link click, which gives the site visual interest and variety. The old site was primarily text content, which is important, but I thought photos would help break up the text and keep the visitor's attention.


• I pulled some content off an archived version of the old site (I'm not sure what happened to the latest version) and extensively rewrote and expanded it.

What I hope to do in the future:

• I'd like to have a clean, simple print stylesheet--black text on white, no header or sidebar--so that people can print out news entries and informational pages easily. This is hypothetically not terribly hard to do with CSS, but I'm still learning PHP and how the different parts of a WordPress template fit together.


• There are some other tweaks I'd like to make to further customize the look of the layout.


• Get other people involved in the front page newsblog. I don't know how long I'll be able to maintain it myself, especially since I probably won't live in Colorado forever. I'd like it to be a combination of event announcement forum and something like the Virgin Islands National Park blog, which has nicely photographed little featurettes about research and special events at the park.

I'm very excited about this project, both because I've learned a lot of useful skills from it and because the Friends are a nonprofit group very dear to my heart. The website has been down for over half a year now for various reasons, so it's a relief to have it back up. I am glad to have had so many chances to help them out this past year.

A spelling demonology.

As always, witty and insightful. I particularly like

(Being able to tell whether an indicated word is spelled correctly is the normal sort of spelling ability. Being unable to ignore the existence of a typo that’s within your field of vision, even if you aren’t consciously reading the text in which it occurs, is the kind of spelling ability copyeditors and proofreaders tend to have.)

And her wicked oral spelling test for proofreaders:

Bazaar, bizarre, accede, precede, desiccated, supersede, accessory, necessary, accommodate, harass, artillery, battalion, guerrilla, iridescent, miscellaneous, millennium, vermilion, parallelism, commitment, committed, committee, counselor, calendar, stratagem, sorcerer, restaurateur, prophesy, pharaoh, eulogy, feud, fluorescent, suede, pseudopod, fuchsia, jodhpurs, frieze, receive, sacrilegious, seize, siege, weird.

One of my regrets about childhood is that I was never able to participate in a spelling bee (do schools even have those now, since the invention of spell-check?).

My first software review has just been published over at Notes in the Margin, an online publication for writers. Scrivener is a really interesting word processor/outlining and storyboarding program for Mac OS X, aimed primarily at novelists. I am in love with this program, even though I'm not a novelist! It's great for keeping research notes organized, and for rearranging chunks of text (something I do a lot, since I rarely write beginning to end on longer pieces).

You can read my entire review at Notes in the Margin: Scrivener 1.0 (Mac OS X)

Although I've had a couple potential projects fall through this month, work looks to be picking up again. I should take advantage of my remaining slow time to update my website and write some more short articles for the Lieurance-King New Year's Article Challenge. One of the four I wrote before I got distracted by other things has been picked up for a writing newsletter already, which is nice.