Blog Lafayette

A story in today’s Journal and Courier, Purdue study puts livestock farms under examination, about a nationwide study led by Purdue University researcher, Al Heber, is a real stinker. Literally. OK, so the story itself isn’t smelly, but the animals in the Emissions Study are. If any of you are from a rural community that specializes in livestock farming as well as agriculture, you will understand immediately what I am saying. Large facility hog, cattle and dairy farms put off a lot of odor. With the recent advent of Climate research and the effects of human activities on the climate of the Earth, subjects like animal emissions are becoming important areas of research.

What is the possible impact of this research? Increased government regulation and increased costs for our farmers and livestock producers.

Why are they conducting these types of studies? Because of the “ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, three sizes of particulate matter and volatile organic compounds — all which are federally regulated” that the animals emit. Quote is from the Journal and Courier article. These are substances that are reputed to contribute to a decrease in air quality and possibly leading to Global Warming.

In case you have been in a cave for the last 20 years, there has been a movement of opinion in recent years that says that our Earth will warm to the point that our climate will be changed drastically and all life as we know it will be effected. Some of the more extreme proponents of this theory even go so far as to say that we are killing the Earth and all life on it and we need to take drastic measures to stop the course we are on. Who know? I would be happier if the data that these people are using was above reproach and if they were truly objective. But they aren’t. Objectivity is hard to come by.

Where do I stand? It is easy to see that I am not a member of the “mankind is murdering the Earth” crowd. I fall more into the category of “lets all work together to find a solution that makes the farmer AND the Earth happy”. I grew up in a rural community. Farming is a way of life. Most, and I mean that literally, farmers cannot afford to buy the very expensive machinery to make sure their animals are emissions free. The money involved to do that would put most of them out of business and drive up the costs of the food you and I eat to a level we have not seen in the United States. But by the same token, I do not want to see us hurt our environment or make our air quality worse either. What is the middle ground? I don’t know.

I suspect that there are solutions that would lower emissions without breaking the bank for the farmers, if only calm and sensible heads prevail. I hope that the knee jerk reaction by any non-farmers who really don’t understand the costs involved or the really low profit margin that the farmers realize will not be the course of action taken. As always, the middle course between the extremes is probably the best way to go. And as a side benefit? We might not have to smell quite the level of odor when living down wind from the local hog producer. That would be a good thing. Right?

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on my wife’s blog, trying to give it more functionality and ability to present more in the sidebars and such. It has been a learning process. In an earlier post I said that I would be bringing out the details of some of the knowledge I gained in this process. Here is a little bit of that knowledge.

One of the problems I was trying to solve was how to make different widgets and content show up on different pages. I didn’t want a cookie cutter approach where all my sidebar content looked exactly the same on every page. My solution? Two very useful WordPress plugins. They were “Custom Post Widget” and “Widget Logic”.

The “Custom Post Widget” is a great tool that allows the webmaster or author to create individually saved bits of content that can each be moved over to the sidebar area in admin as needed. The best part about the widget is that it allows the content to be authored using the Visual editor in WordPress. This allows formatting of the fonts, uploading images and everything else you can do with the visual editor. This is a much better solution than using the standard “Text” widget which does not allow easy formatting of the content.

That is great, but what about the ability to make these content blocks appear on different pages and posts and in different locations on those pages and posts? This is where “Widget Logic” comes in. “Widget Logic” puts an extra field in the bottom of each widget that you put in the sidebar area of your blog that allows you to tell the widget with a little piece of code which pages it can show up on. The bits of code are called, “Conditional Tags”. Conditional tags allow me to point the widget to only the pages or posts that meet the conditions of the tag. For instance, say I want a block of text to only show up on my Home page and my About Me page but nowhere else. I would drag the content block over to the sidebar area in my admin that contains that text content. I would enter the code, is_home() in the widget logic field in the bottom of that widget, and then click save. I would add another content block with the same text to the sidebar, and enter the code, is_page('about-me'), where “about-me” is the title slug for my About Me page, and click save.

Viola! I’m done. Took me about 30 seconds, and the text in that widget is only showing up on my Home page and my About Me page.

For further information about Conditional Tags go to the link, http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags. To get the two plugins mentioned, just go to your plugins page, go to “Add New”, type in the names of the plugins into the search field, and install each when it comes up.

Hope this was a help. Happy blogging Lafayette and all!

So far in this ongoing series of blogging tips, I have looked mainly at the mechanical side of blogs. The platform setup and so forth. But frankly, that stuff is the easy part. The hard part? Writing your blog.

Did I say hard part? Yes, I guess I did, but that really that shouldn’t be the case. It all depends on what you are blogging about. If you have a blog dedicated to “How to clean your carpet”. You may run into a problem finding content. You can only write so many blog articles about how to clean your carpet because there are only so many ways to do it. But, if you have a blog about life in general, you have a much larger subject area to write about! Sometimes people have a hard time coming up with a subject to write about because they are not looking at all of the sources of writing ideas that exist in their day to day life and in the world around them. What did you do today? How did you feel about your day?

I am a member of Virtual Online Learning, a group dedicated to teaching how to do many assorted Internet related things. Among those topics is blogging. In a recent Go To Meeting session, Danna Crawford, the founder of the group gave a great presentation on all of the different sources of content we have available as bloggers. Following is a shortened list of the areas she spoke about.

• Childhood
• Teen Years
• School
• Family
• Towns/City
• Vacations
• Concerts
• Deaths
• Births
• Neighbors
• Events
• Celebrations
• Parties
• Styles
• Weddings
• Divorce
• World and Local News
• Politics
• TV
• Magazines
• Headlines

She also spoke about using a strategy where you finish a statement such as:

• I read …
• I did not agree with …
• I completely agreed with …
• Did you hear about …
• On this date in …

Make these into Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions. We each have the answers to these questions wrapped up in our own lives. When you look at writing a blog from this perspective then you can find much more to say than you may have first imagined. Try one or more of these ideas today. And don’t worry about writing to match James Paterson or some other author that you know of. The goal is to write. The craft of writing well comes with time. Or at least I hope it does. That is what I am counting on for my own writing. How well I write ten years from now will be entirely different than the quality of my writing today.

Have fun blogging and have a great Lafayette Week!

I have had a very enjoyable day of blogging. If I could blog for a living and do nothing else, I would be content. I simply love the act of writing.

Today, I have been involved in a blogging challenge with a group I belong to called Virtual Online Learning. We were tasked with writing five blog posts, and if we were feeling really industrious, a sixth, bonus, post. This is my bonus post. That is not what I mean in the title of this post though. When I say “the bonus of Virtual Online Learning” what I am really talking about is the great set of new friends that I see emerging from my involvement with the Virtual Online Learning group. The real bonus is the fact that there are people scattered all over this world that I have the opportunity to communicate with and to become friends with through this medium of the Internet.

Another bonus that I am getting today is the great set of blog posts that I have been reading as a result of all of the other people involved in today’s challenge. There is some really good information in some of these posts. I am reminded once again that there are articulate and talented people all over. I am gratified that I get the chance to know some of them and that I get to learn from some of them. This blog post is my “Thank You” to all who have taken the time to do this challenge today. I look forward to reading your blogs on an ongoing basis.