Discovery & Trapfinding – The Expendable Peons Technique

For anyone who checked in earlier, hopefully it will strike you that I started putting a little time into pulling this site together (still don’t have much of a clue what’s gonna drive my content flow, but I have Field-of-Dreams faith). If you were holding a stopwatch and really know me, you might feel like not enough has happened yet. I can explain. I lost about an hour of my time trudging through the chasm between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Possibly, I was a little too eager, dove slightly too headlong. But I felt like I was getting a good grasp on codexes and all the ways they would help me spice up this site. I just couldn’t figure out for the life of me where to upload the first php file I downloaded. When I finally found this page, I felt stupid but also liberated.

I started looking at the free themes available to the .com crowd. My wife and I talked through them. I loved one magazine-style, 3-column layout for it’s classic elegance. I gave up on it because I didn’t like how little blog text it featured (only the three most recent entries), and I couldn’t see where it could fit all the peripheral info I wanted to include (look right). I passed on a few others that looked great but were missing a search bar, or had their blogroll in the wrong place before settling on a template that was a bit boring but laid out how I wanted it. Only after I settled was I prompted to manage my widgets…a set of customizable tools that let me rearrange the peripherals how I wanted them. I felt stupid, and newly burdened. Time to find a theme I actually wanted to look at.

Look around. That’s the one I picked. Started working through all the widgets available. Finally decided to hope on the del.icio.us train. Signed up for an account, quickly imported my Chrome bookmarks, and was immediately overwhelmed by how unwieldy the list of links seemed compared to my browser bookmarks, a comfortably familiar (if idiosyncratic) group I had raised from infancy. So I turned to the Chrome extensions community for help. Plowed through a pile of add-ons that didn’t seem to work for me. It took a little too much time for me to realize that none of the more functional ones seemed to work with my Yahoo-linked delicious account, and then a little bit more while I looked for a way to shed the Yahoo yoke. No go. So I want be implementing delicious in my home browsing yet, but I do have it set up and I’ll be looking for ways to integrate into my online life. The first step, of course, setting up the delicious widget on here and seeing if that’s a feature I want to include.

Anyway…my time is cheap now. Especially this late at night. So I can afford to march it blindly into situations like those and not really worry about it. Looking forward to the day when my time is a highly coveted resource.

Linking my social media #1

-Using this advice to make my twitter feed a job-search asset.
-Finally enabling twitter on my phone.
-Added wordpress link to twitter profile.
-Updated twitter bio as job pitch.
-Drumming up LinkedIn connections on twitter.
-Creating more self-promotional twitter background here and here. Still in progress.