Silence the voice of your inner blogging critic

On especially bad days this is what the voice in my head says: [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/9856414″ params=”show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=ff7700″ width=”100%” height=”81″ ] But...

Blogging hubris

Yesterday I made the mistake of bragging about how well I’ve been doing with my daily blogging practice. And tonight I thought I’d knock off a quick blog post that would keep me in my groove. Instead I found myself learning the ins and outs of last.fm,...

“Since I started blogging…”

I overhear more and more conversations about how people cope with their lives online. We talk about our day-to-day strategies for coping with e-mail overload. We gossip about our friends’ Facebook profiles and worry about whether we should be joining the latest...

Talking about grown-up love online

One of the great miracles of my life is the affection between our two kids. As an only child myself, I always feared the prospective challenge of playing referee among multiple offspring. From what I could see of multi-child families, parenting siblings looked not...

Social media is the jar my brain sits in

Brain-in-a-jar images of the future are usually presented as dystopian. But for many years, I found the brain-in-a-jar lifestyle nothing short of enviable: what could be better than eternal life, or even just regular old life, than dispensing with the annoyances of...

5 ways to get authentically naked

What’s the line between authenticity and over-disclosure? This post offers 5 ways you can keep track of the boundary between sharing and over-sharing.

How to use Thesis to customize your teasers by page and category

I use the Thesis theme for my WordPress blog. Thesis is much beloved in the WordPress community because it allows a high degree of customization using its two pages of configuration menus, so even if you know nothing about PHP or CSS you can do a lot to customize your...

Choosing a widget control plugin for WordPress

For the past few months I have used the Widget Context plugin on my WordPress blog in order to control where widgets show up on my site. Everything you see in the two right-hand columns of my site is widget-based, as are the 3 columns that display teasers for featured...