Healthy discontent. . .

. . .is the prelude to progress. *

Last week–was it only last week?–I posted about some of the organizational tools I have used to try to keep up with my Hydra-Headed To Do list. At that point, I suggested somebody remind me to talk about the progress bars I used recently with a group of friends. Well, y’all fell down on the job, and nobody reminded me, but I’m going to talk about them anyway! So there.

You know what I mean when I say, “progress bar,” don’t you?

Every time you load some software, you see one. If you’ve ever participated in a school fundraising drive, you’ve seen one. (That thermometer that rises as the money rolls in? That’s what I mean.)

Back in November, for about 3 months, I made the most incredible progress on a variety of fronts because of some progress bars.

I had a few tasks that could be quantified–like editing a certain number of pages, writing a couple of chapters of my upcoming book, accomplishing 12 tasks of tax preparation. Things like that.

I found some nifty HTML code that allowed me to create a progress bar, and then I noodled with it and changed the colors and added glittering animated gifs when the bar reached 100%.

They looked something like this, with a countdown timer to display how much time before the end of the month, and some progress bars to show how close I was getting to meeting the goals. (Please note: Any resemblance to any actual goals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

This is not a perfect implementation of this idea. For one thing, I have to manually calculate the percentage of progress as I go along and edit the page. But as a beginning pass at it, it was a whiz-bang!

Why was it a whiz-bang?

Because it was incredibly effective!

Stuff like editing, which I hate? I sailed through it. I’d do a couple of pages, and instead of quitting, I’d think, If I do a few more, I get to move the bar along a little more! And I’d keep going!

At one point, I had ten or fifteen progress bars going, and I was just watching those colors move farther and farther right and those glittery butterflies flutter. It was a game. Much more fun than checking things off or crossing them out.

If you’d like to add a similar progress bar to your own website, you can find a code generator here. If you prefer a vertical, fundraising thermometer-type thing, this might be a good jumping off point.

If you’re technically-challenged, there are always paper and stickers and crayons. The point is. . .a visual representation of your progress, interactive in some way, even if it’s just gold stars, can make a huge difference!

* Mahatma Gandhi

DIY publishing

Step Two

Yesterday, I was talking about using Calibre to convert documents into the appropriate formats (ePub, Mobi, etc.) for eReaders. The conversion process was easy to figure out and is astonishingly simple. The only drawback is that there are some formatting glitches that occur.

Occasionally, you lose your paragraphs. They get merged together or broken into two ‘graphs at odd places. All those nifty Microsoft Word features like “smart quotes” and em dashes don’t translate well. (You can turn that stuff off in Word, but if you forgot to do it before you converted in Calibre, you’ll have a mess.) In addition, images don’t always end up where you intended.

There is, almost certainly, software you can buy that will allow you to edit an ePub or a Mobi file. There may even be some freeware that will let you do it. Tuesday’s Tip, however, is my discovery over the weekend that an ePub file is really just a bunch of HTML files and associated style sheets and image files all zipped up together into one file with the ePub extension.

If you have any kind of zip software and some knowledge of HTML, you can easily fix any problems with your ePub file. (Note: I said “easily,” not “quickly.” It can take some time.)

The first thing to do is convert the document using Calibre. Then, locate the resulting ePub file on your hard drive. At this point, I recommend storing a copy of that file in some other location until you’ve finished tinkering. It’s always good to be able to go back to where you started if/when you get hopelessly stuck.

Once you’ve made the backup copy–(Seriously. I mean it. You can never have too many backups.)–right-click on it and open it with your zip software (WinZip, 7Zip, jZip, IZArc–whatever your chosen utility is).

You should see a list of files–several of which have the extension .html. These are now editable in any text editor. (I think I mentioned, previously, that I like Notepad++.)

Make your changes (this is where you need that working knowledge of HTML) and check them by viewing each file in your browser.

When you are finished tinkering, select all the files (make sure you get all of them — the html files, the image files, the css files, the opf files and anything else that you unzipped from the ePub file) and use your zip software to re-create the archive.

Rename the new archive to the original name including the ePub extension.

You should now be able to view it on Calibre’s eBook viewer or on your ePub-compatible eReader.

If you’re trying to edit a MOBI file, it seems the simplest thing to do is convert it to ePub, edit, and then convert it back.

Now, one caveat to all of this is I haven’t yet figured out how DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected files work. I’m talking here about unprotected files. If you’re looking for info on DRM, you’ll either have to Google for yourself or wait until I’ve climbed that bit of the learning curve.

That’s me!

Branding, Intellectual Property and Google Alerts

This Tuesday’s Tip is about Google Alerts. Get one, use it, pay attention to it.

What is a Google Alert?

It’s a way to let Google do some of the work of keeping you updated and informed.

You can set up a query for anything, and Google will email you a summary of links of instances where your search terms appear on the web. On an ongoing basis.

Say you are fascinated by–I don’t know–koala bears. You can set up a Google Alert for the term “koala bear” and get a daily, weekly, or real-time email of websites where that term appears. You can choose to be informed about every website or only news stories, blog mentions, videos, or books. You can choose to let Google determine the best matches and email you only those, or you can opt for all results.

As an artist, this can work for you in three ways.

The first, perhaps, is obvious. Research!

Writing about koala bears? Let Google do some of the grunt work, and have new info delivered to your inbox daily. Of course, you will still need the library and reference books, but a Google Alert can save you time by letting you know there’s a new book being published next week. You can be the first to request it on Inter-Library Loan. It’s like your own personal research assistant for content.

It can help with market research also. If you’re trying to put together a book proposal for a non-fiction work–the definitive treatise on koala bears–you’re going to need to include research on the competition. How many books about koala bears are there anyway? Maybe you should write about apple cider instead.

The second reason has to do with branding. Whether you are doing business under a company name or your own, it’s probably a good idea to know how else that name is being used. In my case, it turns out there are quite a few other Elaine Smiths out there. (I’d have bet on the Smiths, but the Elaines were more surprising. I don’t meet too many Elaines–Seinfeld and The Graduate notwithstanding.)

Quite a few of the links in the Google Alert I have on my name are one-offs.

Obituaries head that list, of course. Surprisingly, they are often encouraging. In fact, I hope I do as well as the Elaine Robb Smith who passed away in 2009 and was described thusly: “”Even into her 90s, Elaine Smith could do a smooth time step, tapping her way down the hall of her adult-care facility using her walker.”

There are, however, a small circle of us who make recurring web appearances. There is the Elaine Smith who is a member of the Scottish Parliament. There is the Elaine Smith who designs outdoor pillows. There is the Elaine Smith, who, sadly, recently also passed away, who founded Therapy Dogs International. There is Elaine Smith, House Member of the Idaho State Legislature.

I don’t know if I have anything in common with these ladies other than our name, but it’s kind of fun to see them surface time after time in news stories and to follow their careers at this anonymous distance. (I did once write to Representative Smith of Idaho, because she was courageously standing up for women’s rights, and I thought I would just say thanks.) Fortunately, they all seem to be eminently respectable, hard-working, contributing members of society. I’m not sure what I would have done if a porn queen popped up. Fortunately, I’ve never had to decide–but it would have been a branding issue, for sure.

Almost certainly, these women know nothing about me (unless they have their own Google Alerts), but most days, I see them mentioned in my inbox.

And that brings me to the third, and possibly most important, reason to have a Google Alert on your name.

The concept of intellectual property is going through massive mutations in the hearts and minds of internet users. The laws, however, remain the same. You write it, you own it. It should not be copied, distributed, posted, etc. without your permission. No independent artist, however, can safeguard their work completely. We don’t have the time or the resources. But a Google Alert can help.

Cautionary tale:

I said earlier that I see the other Elaine Smiths appearing in my inbox with fair regularity. Usually, when I get my daily Google Alert, I scan it, checking them off in my mind.

There’s the pillow lady. There’s the dog lady. There’s the member of Scottish Parliament.

I check it out, check them off, and move on with my day. One day, however, a couple of years ago, I got my Alert email, and the internal dialogue went like this:

There’s the pillow lady. There’s the dog lady. There’s the member of Scottish Parliament. Huh. That sounds like my play. That is my play! That’s me!

A small theatre was advertising a reading of my play.

Now, I had submitted the play to them. They, however, had never approached me for my permission to do a public reading or even informed me it was happening. In the theatre world, this is a BIG no-no.

I would never have known without the Google Alert.

I give the theatre the benefit of the doubt. It may have been something that slipped through the cracks. Possibly, several people each thought somebody else had been in touch with me. I got in touch with them, and they were apologetic. They offered to cancel the reading. Since there are not usually any really good reasons not to have a reading, however, I told them they could proceed. No real harm done, except that I might have been able to be there if I’d known about it.

On the other hand, it could have been a production, and that would have been a big problem.

So, set up a Google Alert on your name and on your titles. Pay attention to it. Make sure that when your own work pops up in the middle of the snippets about therapy dogs and pillows and the Scottish Parliament that there’s a chance you’ll know it.

Weeding sorties

The value of incremental progress

I am not a champion gardener. If you’ve been following this blog, this will not come as a big shock to you.

And I believe I mentioned before how I live in a sub-tropical climate. Plant life has a tendency toward the over-exuberant. Unless it’s dropping dead from heat stroke or complications due to my lack of green-thumbness. Mostly, however, it is over-exuberant. There’s a vine thing, for example. . .well, let’s just say, it won’t surprise me if it creeps in the window and strangles me in my sleep one night.

Anyhow, it must follow as the night the day *(I knew I could get Shakespeare in here somewhere!), that Weeding 101 would become a required course.

The problem is it is also extremely hot down here. Extremely hot. Hotter than hell, eggs frying on the sidewalk, where’s a cooling shelter hot.

I am a person who likes to finish what she starts. Preferably within minutes.

Back when I was doing a lot more programming than I do now, working on large and complex projects with shifting requirements and ‘scope creep’ of epic proportions, I was most often hired by Tony Coretto, the CEO of PNT Marketing Services, Inc. Tony is a most excellent boss. In the midst of chaos and looming deadlines, he would talk with unfailing optimism about “incremental progress.”

I’m sorry to say that I never totally appreciated the value of that way of looking at things until it came to weeding the flower beds in a hot, humid July in Florida. It is not possible–unless you have greater masochistic tendencies than I do–to eliminate all weeds in one marathon session. A person can, however, make incremental progress.

Going out before the sun is high enough to beat down on the flower bed, you can work for a half hour or so in the shade. Taking out the weed whacker in the late evening, around 7, there might be a breeze coming off the water.

It will never all be done at once in one shining example of impeccable landscaping. The campaign is not one of shock and awe. It’s guerilla warfare with intermittent weeding sorties.

Incremental progress.

And you know what?

It turns out that’s the only way to finish any piece of writing. A little at a time.

So this Tuesday’s Tip is to make a sortie. Set a timer and write for five minutes. Ten minutes. One minute. Any increment at all leads to incremental progress.

* Hamlet, Act I, sc.3

Tooting your own horn

You don’t need money to toot your own horn. You just need a horn.
—from a Citibank ad, of all things

A playwright is always his or her own first producer.

That’s an inconvenient truth.

It also applies to almost any kind of artist.

I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you this, but the chances of somebody knocking on your door to offer you a recording contract when they hear you singing in the shower are slim.

Your private journal, however steeped in literary eloquence, isn’t going to bring you a publisher if no one ever sees it.

You’ve got to get over all that early training about only speaking when you’re spoken to and acting like a lady and being modest and so forth.

Put your stuff out there.

Marketing is key. And it’s not just for Fortune 500 companies any longer.

These days, we all have access to a relatively inexpensive marketing tool that levels the playing field. It is easy–and important–to have your own website.

A lot of web hosts provide powerful tools to get you up and running quickly. In order to put your own stamp on your design, however, I highly recommend that you achieve a basic understanding of HTML (main markup language for web pages). Even if you use any or all of the various WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors that allow for drag-and-drop design and which have come a long way since the early days, understanding the underlying codes is invaluable when there’s a problem.

Being able to edit the HTML can save you hours of confusion and frustration.

And this Tuesday’s Tip is a pointer to a great online tutorial, W3Schools, and a reminder about a nifty little program that makes editing that code much easier: Notepad++.

W3Schools is a terrific reference to all the major web design languages. It has great interactive online tutorials and lots of examples for beginners and a searchable reference for more knowledgeable users. I use it all the time.

And once W3Schools has helped me figure out what the code should look like on my webpage, I go to Notepad++ to help me implement the solution.

It’s possible to edit HTML in the regular old Notepad that comes with Windows. Notepad++, however–free to download and use–provides a number of additional features that will make you wonder how you ever survived without them.

It lets you edit multiple documents in the same window. Great for cutting and pasting useful bits of code from one page to another.
It allows color coding of syntax. Comments in one color, keywords in another, etc. So much easier to read the code that way.
It allows collapsing and expanding of sections of code. Just make the whole table disappear (in the code), while you work on the rest of the page, for example.
It allows search and replace across multiple documents. If you change the directory structure of your website, you can globally replace all references to any particular path.

There are other features I haven’t yet explored, but those alone have saved me hours of time.

We’d all like to spend all our time on creative endeavors. But if we want those endeavors noticed, we might have to toot our own horns.

Treasure Hunt

The holy grail of disk space

Way back when I bought this PC–which has provided remarkably trusty service over the years–it seemed like it had unlimited disk space. 140 Gb. How could anyone possibly use all that?

One lives and learns.

Programs get bigger. I want more of them. There is music to store. There are graphics and videos to edit. There is data to crunch. And there is odd and esoteric research to hang onto because, who knows, I may write a book or a play about that someday.

And the next thing I know, my PC has only about 5 Gb left and has slowed down to something that would insult the speed of a baby if you called it a crawl.

I do have external drives, but there is a lot of data I like to keep on the local drive. That’s the one Carbonite backs up under their basic plan, and while I love Carbonite, I am not quite ready to increase my backup budget just yet.

I am also not quite ready to install a new larger hard drive. We won’t discuss whether this is out of the same frugal–i.e., penny-pinching–impulse or out of long and dismal experience of what happens when you start taking your computer apart . (I will say that it will be a lot easier to get to it the way my office is set up in my new house than it was in the past–when there was a lot of crawling involved–and, once, a hacksaw–but that is definitely another story!)

So, I have reached a point where I have to evaluate what’s on this drive and make some decisions. Some files can be moved to an external drive, of course. Some files can be archived.

And, let’s face it, there are probably a lot of files that can simply be deleted.

To keep or not to keep.
That is the question

And that brings me to a couple of nifty little programs.

(Before I tell you about them, let me give you one other very important Tuesday Tech Tip. Don’t just take my word for it. Read other reviews before you use anything recommended to you in a blog. ALWAYS have a current back-up before you start deleting files. Use common sense. Proceed at your own risk. Remember–your results may vary. I’m telling you what I’ve done. I’m not guaranteeing it will work for you.)

About a week ago, I got a lot of disk space back using Easy Duplicate File Finder. It’s a free program for both PC and Mac users that will compare files in selected directories and provide a list of those it has identified as duplicates. You can view them, move them, rename them or delete them.

Almost 10 Gb had been swallowed up by dupes.

Today, however, another 5 Gb has disappeared. More drastic action is needed.

So, I just found: Directory List & Print. It’s freeware–although there is a paid version that has a few more features–and it’s really simple. It does exactly what the name suggests. What I like about it, is that unlike Windows Search, I can easily copy the directory listing to Excel or Word for storing, sorting, editing, printing –and, unlike redirecting the output of a DOS dir command to a file, I can choose which pieces of information to include in my list.

I can then go prospecting for disk space.

It should be easy to find the major candidates for deletion: the temp files and backup files that are outdated. I’ll be able to scan the list for other possibilities as well as use it for the plodding, methodical check-list-y approach I just know is coming.

Amazingly, I’ve already gotten rid of over 8,000 files one program has generated in unsubmitted crash reports. That’s half a gig recovered! (That may not sound like much, but I’m pretty sure this is going to be a tedious process of knocking off little minnows of files nibbling away at my disk space and not identifying any Great Blue Whales swallowing Jonah-sized sectors on the hard drive.)

Those crash reports were just sitting out there taking up space for no reason. I’m not sure I’d have noticed them if I hadn’t run this program and generated this list.

Every time I do something like this, I swear I’m going to be more diligent and disciplined with data storage as I go along. This is what is known as a pipe dream. Not having access to a personality transplant, I’m glad I’ve found these two programs.

I’ll let you know how the Great Disk Space Recovery Project is getting along.

Everything is a learning experience…

Tuesday’s Travel Tips

I thought I was late with today’s post, but it turns out it’s only Monday as I’m writing this. Not Tuesday, as I thought. (Although it is Tuesday as you are reading it. Or possibly Wednesday. [Still having trouble with that email feed being a day late. Going to fix it soon, though. I hope.])

Chalk my confusion up to an entire Sunday spent zig-zagging up and down the east coast, trying to get back from Maine, eight solid hours of which were spent just sitting in airports.

(So the first of this Tuesday’s tips is “Don’t do that.”)

And then there was a tropical storm and a late night drive home through a deluge.

I slept in this morning.

Then I had to/wanted to email everybody involved in the Northern Writes New Works Festival to thank them for all their hard work and talent and for including me and my play.

But now I am able to turn my attention to other things, and–aha!–I remember I have a blog post to do!

It seems like the best thing I can do is tell you a little bit about what I learned on my recent travels.

The Kia Soul is not a bad little car! And that weird lime green means you won’t lose it in a parking lot. (If you can find one in Maine.) Thanks, Avis!
It’s kind of a good idea to bring an empty plastic water bottle to the airport. It weighs nothing, you have no problem with security, because it’s empty–and then you can fill it with water at a water fountain inside. You stay hydrated without spending a fortune on airport beverages.
Speaking of airport food. . .if you happen to be at Reagan International and decide to buy a burger at Five Guys, be aware that a burger to them is actually two burgers on one bun. If you want a normal burger, you have to order a Little Hamburger. (Maybe it’s like that at all Five Guys. I don’t know. I don’t eat there much, but I ended up with more than I wanted to eat this time.)
My best travel accessory is my jacket with all the pockets! So easy to slip the mp3 player in one, the Kindle in another, the ID in a third and so on. Plus, it keeps you warm. (See tip # 5.) I may even bring my fishing vest next time, although that wouldn’t help with the warmth issue.
The row immediately behind the emergency exit row is kind of cold. There’s a little gap and a big draft around that exit panel, and it’s freezing at 30,000 feet.
Row 4 on the US Airways shuttle from DC to La Guardia has extra leg room–but you’ve got to stow all your carry-on stuff (including your laptop) in the overhead bin for take-off and landing.
Hoot Suiteis great for keeping you connected to social media when you can’t find a free WiFi connection for your laptop. It works well even on a tiny Blackberry!and, the most important travel tip of all…
Try to hang on to your sense of humor.

Anybody else got any good travel tips? Comments welcome!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants