Investigations of a Dog

I’ve just successfully upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1. You won’t notice much difference at the front end, but the admin area is much nicer than the 2.2 version I was using before. The best thing is that the editor doesn’t screw up HTML code any more which makes it easier to embed YouTube videos and Google Maps.

As part of the spring cleaning I installed a couple of new plugins. Maintenance Mode shuts down the front-end of the blog for everyone except admins and lets people know that maintenance is going on. This is a much better solution than password protecting the blog’s directory, which is what I used to do during upgrades.

TD Word Count is a cool plugin which counts all the words in your posts and generates a report in the admin area. According to this report I’d published 174,471 words before writing this present post. That’s quite a lot isn’t it? Even if you deduct the 7,000 word seminar paper which I posted in its entirety, and all the routine carnival posts and brief links to other blogs/sites, the substantial original content that I’ve posted here in the last year and a half still probably adds up to more than the average monograph. Of course if you just put all my posts together and printed them it wouldn’t make a very coherent or well-written book. But I’m increasingly getting used to the idea that writing little and often is the way to get things done.

The conference paper that I’m currently drafting has come together in short bursts of activity - maybe only a couple of paragraphs at a time - but that soon adds up. Partly it’s been easy because it’s quite an exciting piece to write, it’s intended to be very short, and it doesn’t need lots of detailed evidence, but I think making myself write for a short period (maybe only an hour or even half an hour) first thing in the morning then stopping as soon as I’ve made my target means less time staring at the screen thinking “there’s sooo much to write, I don’t know where to start, it’s too difficult”.