Wayfarer Wings~I believe everyone can fly.~

Welcome to Wayfarer Wings! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The newest changes in Entrecard have really done a lot to help bolster site development around the Sygnus network. This was part of the reason for the big Wayrift makeover that’s been in progress over the past weekend.

I’ve been working on moving Wayrift back to a Wordpress layout — something I’ve been going back and forth on for a while. There are a lot of positive reasons to make the switch:

• Updates are easier
• RSS feed is automatic (I’ve been hand coding the RSS feed and often forget to update it due to this!)
• Site layout, while a little more limited, is cleaner (IMHO)
• It opens up the ability to track visitors, install stats and all the nice features that Wordpress offers… which a regular HTML site lacks
• Makes it easier to get the content out there to Google and other media sources

Just a slew of reasons… things I’ve learned are perks to using a Wordpress layout for any site. I’ve made the switch for Darkstar… and I’m working on making the switch with the revision of Dreigiau as well. I’m hoping most of my site will eventually go the way of PHP and Wordpress by the end of this year.

Now… the great changes that Entrecard brought. First, they added a Web Comic section! This was something that totally thrilled me — rather than having my comic tucked away in the Graphic Arts area, where it technically didn’t quite fit, Entrecard has actually gone as far as aknowledge the Web Comic niche. I haven’t used Entrecard as much as I should have for Wayrift since I discovered this. But I will be working on my drops soon. Shimmer has been a part of Entrecard for a while… but I’ve decided that right now, I really would like to focus on moving things forward for Wayrift in particular.

Secondly… Entrecard now allows the merging of multiple accounts! This has been a majorly big help for me as I’ve owned 3 different accounts on Entrecard and it’s been quite frustrating to maintain them all. I do approve of the manor that they’ve approached this as I know that due to the structure of accounts, this wasn’t an easy task to undertake. I’m especially glad that they allowed us to link accounts that already existed as that means we could keep our credits, comments and everything else in tact.

I look forward to working on moving things along for the revised Wayrift Wordpress site. I have a lot of comments to restore and a few tweaks to make… but once that’s done, hopefully the site will be whole and in a format I won’t need to change again for a long time.

The Path of Self-Discovery is Rarely One Without Speedbumps

One thing about blogging I have discovered is that you learn a lot about yourself and other people when you dare to take that step out into the blogosphere. I’ve met a lot of great folks over the past five months. I’ve experimented with blog platforms, niches, layouts and directions… finding one after another that certain things did and did not work from an artist and writer’s perspective.

One thing I know for sure now is that one blog is all that I can keep updated at this point in my life. Sometimes it’s hard enough to just do that one. While starting a second venture always sounds exciting and rousing at the beginning, it’s not long before you have two mouths to feed instead of one. So I must admit, the idea I had for starting Figpress was a good one, but lack of time has made it impossible to sustain as a regularly updated blog on its own. So late last night, I finally made the choice to consolidate my two blogs yet again. All the posts that were part of Figpress have now been integrated into this blog… and any more fantasy writing topics will be explored here in the future.

I learned a lot from the short time I was working on Figpress. Namely… the difference in motivations between that blog and this. I began this blog with the goal of getting some experience in web writing and to have a few pieces to show in hopes of landing some freelance work somewhere down the line. Then I shifted ideas after becoming a part of Entrecard and other blogging groups, hoping to appeal to other bloggers as readers. And then I remembered that I wanted to be a freelancer, so I shifted back to a more formal concept. So… WW has gone through a lot of styles and plans… but none of them have fit the feeling that I really want for my blog.

I was discussing things with Rach today and one of the major things on my mind is that this blog stands too far outside of all of my projects at Sygnus.org. This, to me, feels wrong… because my projects there have been my major net identity since long before blogging even existed. So my goals are to find a way to do the following:

• Integrate styles and content from Figpress
• Find ways for my Sygnus projects to support this blog and vice versa
• Discover the real direction, attitude, voice and feel that I want for this blog.

Basically… I need to do some soul searching… figure out where I stand and where I want to be. Especially where it comes to finding ways to make all my projects mesh together with this blog.

Now that you’ve heard my rambling… as you can see, I’ve started by giving this blog a new look. The truth is, though I stared WW to find a pathway into freelancing, I was able to hook all of my freelancing work WITHOUT the support of this blog at all. So, once more, I’ve decided to go for something more artsy and less formal in my theme.

Question!

So… what sort of discoveries have you made as a blogger? Are there projects you’ve started only to work yourself into a dead end? Do you end up learning more from “failed” attempts than from “successes”?

I’d love to hear about it!

photo credit: Daquella manera

Happy RSS Awareness Day!

Those of you who already use RSS and know how handy it can really be to send and receive updates through RSS — good for you! But the truth is, only a small number of people use RSS across the internet. Be it because they have not heard of it or simply don’t understand the benefits or how to use it — numbers of RSS subscribers are low and only slowly growing.

I was one of those who did not use RSS until late last year. I just didn’t know how to use it or how handy it could be once you got everything set up in a proper RSS viewer. Now I can’t live without it. I keep track of all of my favorite webcomics and blogs through my Google Reader account. There are probably a lot of other feed readers around, but I seriously LOVE the Google Reader. It’s become the one localized RSS feeder website that I check a number of times everyday.

It’s like getting the scoop on all of your favorite websites as they update real time! How can you beat that!?

What is RSS?

Rssday.org defines RSS as the following:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.

For more information on how it works, including a great video, visit the website at http://rssday.org/.

What is on RSS?

Most major sites update via RSS now days. In fact, whenever I find a new webcomic or blog that I know I want to keep track of, the first place I click is my Google Reader Subscribe. Other applications, such as Feedburner make it quick and easy to make this happen.

Most of my own websites have RSS Feeds through Feedburner including:

Wayrift
Shimmer
Wayfarer Wings

I’m hoping to one day update all of my projects via a reader in the future.

So what are you waiting for? Find an easier way to keep up with all your favorite websites today! Just look for the little feed button!

I just wanted to announce that my very first ever guest post was published on the blog Fighting With Writing yesterday. I can’t thank Tam enough for the opportunity to spout out my thoughts and ramblings about developing as a writer and the things I’ve learned along the way. I’m really stoked and I hope that this will be the first of many posts I can write for other bloggers.

I also want to thank Tam for posting a kind review on one of my Figpress articles for the Saturday Sink!

If you’re a writer and you haven’t already checked out Fighting With Writing I highly reccomend giving this fun blog a read!

This blog has been suffering from technical difficulties of the unknown with kind over the past few days. My EntreCard widget had vanished for users browsing in Firefox. I’ve gotten reports that say IE users see it fine, however.

What puzzled me is that I didn’t change a thing about widgets or coding prior to the disappearance. I did go back in after receiving messages from other ECers that let me know there was a problem, and I put a fresh copy of the code on the widget. I thought that would fix it, but it didn’t.

If I refreshed my site in Firefox, the widget did appear… odd?

Well, I did some more tweaking and found that if I put my EC widget all the way in the first sidebar to the left, it loaded fine. But if I left it where it originally was, all the way to the right, it wouldn’t load at all.

I think this may have to do with some compatibility issue between EC’s widget code and some other coding on my blog, perhaps. Because when you set it up to load first thing on the page, it works fine.

Anyhow… I think I’ve found my solution, but I wanted to drop a post about it in case someone else runs up against this. Here’s something to try! It’s really odd because, as I said, I didn’t change my widgets or anything… it just stopped working one day.

As you probably have heard from somewhere around the net, Wordpress 2.5 has been released. I was somewhat hesitant to install it across my numerous blogs, however, for fear of what may or may not work (especially template-wise). So I went ahead and chose to install it WW just to test it.

So far, I have to say that the dashboard layout is different, but in a good way. It has a softer, pleasing color scheme. Things are condensed and moved around… but once I found where things shifted off to, I agreed with most of the changes (though it annoys me that Categories are so far down the page from the Post now, but I can live with that).

The one big improvement that I think I’m going to really love (and I’m going to test it out here!) is the addition of the Add Media buttons that allow for uploading of pictures, videos and audio media. Maybe it was part of some plug-in I didn’t have before, or I completely missed it (don’t laugh if that’s the case). But this option would have made my blogging a lot easier if I had something like this before!

Not only does it allow you to upload an image straight from your hard drive into a gallery on your WP server, but it allows you to choose things such as alignment, making the picture a click-able thumbnail, giving it alt tags and so much more! Very cool!

Another nice feature I played with was the Toggle Full Screen option. For people easily distracted (like me) or people who just can’t stand typing in that tiny WP box (like me), this will be a nice feature. It allows you to expand your post box to fit the entire screen while you type. Of course, you can toggle this back and forth to your liking. For me, this helps me focus on my blog screen, as I might a word processor. My only beef with Full Screen (and it’s small) is that the neat Add Media buttons vanish. So that means I have to wait until the end to stick my pictures in. Which isn’t a big deal. But something to consider next edit around.

I haven’t gotten the automatic plug-in upgrader to work yet either. But so far, only the Gregarious plug-in didn’t reactivate with the new version.

The addition of the Permalink editing feature is also a nifty thing. It’ll be easier for folks who didn’t know what the Slug box of the old WP version meant.

So far, I haven’t had any problem with my template or layout transferring over. Again, that’s only been for one blog. So I’m crossing my fingers that things will work as well for my other blogs.

Many thanks to Designer’s Depot for nominating Wayfarer Wings for the blog Excellent Award! I believe that part of the rules to this blog is to nominate ten other blogs for it as well. But it’s almost midnight, so I may have to hold off until tomorrow. Hope you don’t mind.

Thanks again! ^_^