May 28, 2010 | blog, happiness
I’m so tickled with myself after getting something done yesterday that I can’t help but post about it. I finally was able to split out my Happiness series of posts from the main blog feed, populating them on their own page here on the blog.
Longtime readers will remember I started posting almost-daily on things that occurred to me at the time. Mostly these were a sentence or two on something that made my day, or made me smile, or something along those lines. I’ve not done many this year (or late last year) because of workload and such. I also started refraining from posting these nuggets because I didn’t want to dilute the message I am trying to share on the blog.
So moving these posts to their own page was what I wanted to do. What really made this possible, since I’m not a PHP/WordPress coding guru, was using the Headway Theme. This great skinnable theme framework let me slice and dice the post feed in multiple ways. One of them being I can exclude a category from the main feed, and put it on another page. I know, I know, there’s many ways to do this, but this was within my reach and more importantly… it worked! Thanks to the folks over at Headway Themes and their support staff for helping answer a couple of questions. Now I can publish those Happiness posts right to the main blog feed and not worry if their going to the right place.
Awesome.
Photo credit: h.koppdelaney’s
Oct 1, 2008 | blog, happiness
About a year and a half ago, I started experimenting with the Aside feature of WordPress, and thought it was neat. While I didn’t like the way they lacked titles, I did like how they were supposed to be concise and to the point.
What came out of it for me was a growing series of posts entitled "Happiness". These posts started as Asides, mainly from a point in my consulting career where I was a little disillusioned as to the amount of success I was having at the time. Which is to say: "not much".
I started using these posts as inspiration, to point out to myself what made me happy at that moment in time. In the beginning, I truly just picked the first happy thought that passed through my mind and posted it.
Since then, I’ve done much the same thing, though from time to time, I do struggle with a "good one". I don’t like to repeat myself, though I know I do. Also, I’ve tried to be inspirational to others when the muse strikes. I succeed in that maybe 20% of the time I think. My real inspiration to continue these posts is that they continually reward me, and that’s all it needs to do at any rate.
So I hope this helps answer questions as to why I post "Happiness".
Oh, and you can get the "Happiness" RSS Feed here!
Photo credit: Amy Gwen
Jun 4, 2008 | blog
Wow, what a wild ride the last few months have been. I’ve been planning to refine the direction of my blog and revamp the appearance for some time and it’s finally completed!
Well, it’s almost completed – I’ve got a replacement for the About page almost ready to publish, and I’ve got one last page that I’ll add a little later. Seems I just can’t get it to come out quite right in the past week while working on other things – so I’ll get to that real soon.
Direction
The great part is that I’m refining my direction. Since I’ve come out of corporate, with a strong background in information technology, I’m going to focus on helping those organizations with social media. I’ve changed the description of the blog to "social web & the enterprise". I believe that to better describe the direction that I’m going.
Friends
First, I really respect a number of bloggers for their work & influence on me. So, instead of the old blogroll, or a list of links, I created a new Friends page. This page is people I have come to know, respect, learn from, work with, and I wanted to do more than just link to them. You’ll find a description of each blog and a thumbnail of their landing page.
Resume
Also page that can now be found in the top navigation area is the Resume page. I’ve had a variant of this Social Media Resume up for about 9 months, but never advertised it on the blog. I’ve revamped a number of pieces of the page as it used to be a completely custom HTML page forced into a WordPress theme template. Now it fully fits the theme, with a special resume.php template that allows different sidebars and such. Much better. I’ve pulled the video that I had on it, but will replace it with another one to fit the direction of the blog shortly.
Advertisement
You’ll also notice that all advertising save two things have been removed from the blog. While I make enough to pay for hosting, I believe that the ads detracted from what I’m here to accomplish, so they’re gone. The two items I mentioned that remain are badges for Personal Branding Magazine, and for Avatar Consultants. Their of personal interest to me, I’m involved in writing for one, and the other is my consulting firm.
Nowhere But Up
So if the picture in this post didn’t give a hint, my motto as I revise my direction and enter a new phase, is that there is nowhere to go but up. Join me as we bring the benefits of the social web to organizations of all sizes. Come along and help individuals realize the power and strength of their brand. Let’s make each day the best it can be!
I want to give a special thank you to Mykl Roventine for patience, ideas, and a great design – I wouldn’t have gotten this completed without his work. Thank you.
Got feedback? I bet! Don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in a comment below.
Photo credit: Leo Reynolds
Jun 3, 2008 | blog
Just want to share a bit of news. I’m in the process of updating the theme & design of the ol’ blog tonight, so if you see anything odd, broken, or inoperable it’s probably being worked on. A teaser thumbnail of it running on the development system is included just for fun. 
However, if you want to let me know of specific things that aren’t working and such, please feel free to do so. You can ping me on Twitter (I’m @rickmahn) or via email (rick {at} rickmahn.com).
This is pretty exciting for me as I’ve been planning on a new design for several months. I’m very glad to have had Mykl Roventine heading up the redesign based on a free theme called WP Premium. The look & feel is clean and simple and suits me quite well. A big thank-you to Mykl for the great work.
That’s it for now, I’ve got a couple of things to finish up before flipping the switch so I’m off to get those done! Talk soon folks!
Rick
Mar 1, 2008 | blog
Hi all!
Just a quick post to mention the updated “post footer” changes that I came up with. Since adding a few additional services here on my blog, I’ve disliked how messy and unorganized the bottom of each post had become. So today, I set out to tidy it up a bit and make it a bit more pleasant to look at.
I’ve simply defined a specific section for the “footer” of each post that draws a border, added light background shading, consistent font size, and a simple table to hold the “ShareThis” feature on the right-side of the column. I think it helps define the end of one post and lets the header text of the next post stand out a bit better. Previously it seemed like it rambled from header, to post content, to some tagging, to sharing options, to related posts, and finally to the post meta data at the end.
The base theme is Misty Look by Sadish Bala, currently in version 3.5 supporting WordPress 2.3.x. I’ve made several customizations over the past year and have found the code fairly easy to modify if you’ve got a reasonable understanding of HTML and PHP. Let me know if you have a question on what I’ve done, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.
I hope you agree that this makes each post a bit more readable, and isolates the post meta data that can be skipped if you want. If you don’t agree… well I sure would like to hear your opinions! My goal is to have things readable, fairly organized, and hopefully, easy to read for you when you come to visit. Just leave a comment if you have an idea or feedback – I’d love to hear your thoughts!
