Deborah Woehr

I’ve got three weeks to go before my job ends. I’m so excited about this because I’m looking forward to a solid block of time where I can concentrate on writing. I downloaded WordPress version 1.6 Sunday night and have tinkered with it a bit. So far I like what I’m seeing. The interface is still simple, but more graphical.

Yesterday, I started thinking about how I want to design my book. If I’m not neck deep in the kids’ homework, I’ll look over my outline again and see what needs to be changed. Tonight is slated for testing.

When the power supply on my 4 year-old Mac decided to take a crap this weekend, I took advantage and wrote Chapter Nine of this novel. When I got my computer up and running again on Tuesday, I looked over what I’d written and promptly trashed it. The scene didn’t fit in with what I thought I had on the computer. But it felt so good to return to my writing again!

Prosperity is about an embattled psychic who finds herself stranded in a town full of ghosts. While you won’t find the novel written on this blog, I do provide excerpts,progress meters, and (in the future) links to other ghost-related sites/blogs.

Before I wrote one word of The Layman’s Guide to WordPress, I did my research both online and off. To date, there is no book available on the market. So I decided to write one myself when two of my readers confessed that they didn’t have a clue how to use WordPress and were intimidated by the interface. I decided right then that my book would be aimed at beginners, and that it would be a visual guide.

Once I came up with this idea, I posted my thoughts on The Writers Buzz and WBA to gain some feedback from my readers. The response was positive.

So before I moved, I wrote the outline and started my research. I continued to receive positive feedback from readers over the next several weeks. Then, yesterday morning, I found this comment waiting for me:

You probably haven’t seen it because one is being written right now by experts in WordPress?

Stay tuned.

Well . . . no. Obviously I didn’t know about this book because these experts have kept the project under wraps. The commenter sent me two emails, explaining their WP book was being written by several volunteers. She was nice enough to invite me to contribute.

I’m not sure if I’m going to accept the invitation since I’m no expert. I’ve just been blogging with WordPress for a little under a year and wanted to share my experience with other novices. And, I wanted to help promote WordPress since I enjoy this program so much. I meant absolutely no harm, yet I’ve clearly violated very serious territory.

I’ve decided to continue writing the book because it’s my own personal challenge. However, I will not publish it due to the high probability that I’ll piss off the WP community.

Kuwait is going to donate $500 million in oil products and humanitarian supplies to help Katrina survivors.

Quoted from Reuters:

Sheikh Ahmad said the gesture was a duty toward a friend by the tiny Gulf Arab state which was liberated in 1991 by a U.S.-led multinational coalition from seven months of occupation by Iraq.

This is a very good gesture, and I hope more come.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear all the liberals blaming Bush for Katrina. See Leadership is about details (or “What if Giuliani was President right now?”) for an example. Comment #8 made perfect sense. I’ll quote it for you below.

Do any of you realize how hard it is to get in or even around the disaster area? How do you get even private buses into or around an area that has no gas, no electricity, no food, no water, no police, no LAW? Having to deal with snipers that sit on top of roofs firing away at the people trying to help. All of you are watching this from TV or reading about it on the internet but you have NO real sense of what is going on there. There none of this within a few hundred miles of the disaster zone! It is a logistical nightmare!

Here’s some other things to think about. These people were given 24 hours to evacuate, which wasn’t enough time given the number of freeways and the number of cars that would use them. The majority of these people are used to hurricanes and figured that it would be better to wait things out.

As for the sluggishness of the emergency response, I agree with the commenter above about the logistics of the disaster. But from watching Fox News last night, I observed one doctor’s frustration over the lack of communication between the state and local authorities. Despite this, he was able to life flight two dozen sick babies to functioning hospitals without a single death.

Congress is being particularly slow in sending federal aid money to New Orleans and Biloxi, and I’m not sure why. It didn’t take them this long to send money to Indonesia, did it?? Why isn’t Bush rushing this through?

Better yet, why isn’t he cracking down on the oil companies who are using Katrina to excuse their price gouges? A lot of people are very disappointed in him right now, Katrina being the latest reason. But there is some good news.

I followed the link to the Blog Herald and was encouraged to see that a few out of the thousands of missing people have been found okay. I’ll be following this post to see if more turn up in the coming weeks.

Follow this link to America - You’re Not Alone. International Community Wants To Help, where you’ll find a list of countries (including Thailand) who want to help us. This is great news, but I won’t give any thanks until something actually happens.

This is may latest project, which is a visual, step-by-step guide for beginners. The goal with this book is to help users install, configure, design, and promote their blogs. The progress meter below serves as a kick in the ass for me to keep going until it’s done.

I set up a blog for this project about a week ago, but the single post I have on it is in draft form. But continue to check back, as I will be adding links and resources soon.

1,263 / 100,000 (1.0%)