The Tyranny of the 24-day Writing Streak

In WordPress, I click on the purple bell at the right corner of my home page to find the announcement:

You’re on a 24-day streak on Words Like Me!

I never intended to blog for 24 days straight. Normally, I don’t have enough ideas for 24 days in a row of content. But after the first four days of steady content, I found I didn’t want to break my writing streak, and so I kept writing. Now I’m looking at my 25th day, and I feel chained to my laptop for the next update.

I am naturally a competitive person, and the person I vie with is myself. Write a novel? (There was a time when I had never written one, and that was only 12 years ago at age 48.) Walk 60 miles in three days? (I’ve done that too, at age 40.) So that writing streak counter in WordPress makes me want to write another day.

The horrible part is that if I decide to not write one day, my streak goes down to zero. That didn’t bother me when I only wrote every other day. A 1-day writing streak broken doesn’t feel like a tragedy. A 100-day streak? Or even a 20-day streak? Much more impactful.

Oh, no! What if I run out of words?

My husband assures me I will never run out of words, as I have never managed to during long car trips. (He’s correct.) But what more do I have to say about writing?

I haven’t let you read any of my writings lately. That’s certainly one thing I could blog about. I haven’t written down a character interrogation lately, either. Or talked about any one of a dozen other things. I want to stay interesting, though, which is a pressure that almost equals the pressure to write another day. Almost.

I’ll write daily as long as I can stay interesting, and I’ll try to write about writing as much as possible, because I think it’s more interesting than hearing about my very uneventful life.

Playing with WordPress Embeds

In WordPress, in editing mode, there’s this blue plus sign in the upper left corner of the screen with a lot of options. I’ve used few options, mostly because I haven’t needed to. But am I missing something? Let me see.

I’m specifically playing with Embeds today. Embeds are a way of putting external content from social websites into your blog. Let me start with embedding one of my books via the Kindle embed:

Oh, I like that! Visual, professional, and with a link!

How about Twitter?

Tweets by lleachsteffens

Ah, my Twitter is very boring. I need to fix this.

WordPress has a generic link for sharing. I’m going to try Beacons with this:

https://beacons.ai/lleachie

Ok, not at all exciting.

How about a map?

Maryville, MO, United States

It’s an old map — the university no longer houses the Missouri Academy. And 102 BBQ? I’ve lived here for 24 years and don’t recall seeing that.

There are a few embeds I can see myself using plus many more I won’t, because I don’t have the social accounts they correspond with. The ones that work are pretty attractive, though, and I especially see myself using the Amazon Kindle one.

I think I’ll end this with the Facebook embed:

https://www.facebook.com/laurenleachsteffens/

Well, that was anticlimactic.

When WordPress is good, it is very very good, but when it’s not, it’s so-so.

When Black and White is Just Right

I can use all sorts of cool colors in this blog!

I just found out that I can change the color of headers, text, and background on this blog post. Hurray!

However, I am going to resist the temptation to do so. This blog is going to stay black and white.

Readability

The truth of the matter is that not all cool text innovations should be pursued. People’s vision is not up to all those cool colors.

Let me explain: Our eyes need contrast, lots of contrast, to see letters against backgrounds. We need those letters to have sharp edges.

Let me try something: Do you see these letters as well? No? Not enough contrast.

How about these? Better, but doesn’t your brain hurt a bit?

I could also change the background. Again, less contrast, and lots of eye pain.

The takeaway

I guess the takeaway is that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. The design palette for this blog offers me options that I don’t choose to use because they’ll mess up my message. How frustrating! I’m going to have to stick to the black and white.

Gamification

Gamifying defined

Gamification is the practice of building in rewards to activities on the computer through completion badges, notifications, and other incentives. Often used in online lessons and certifications, gamification can motivate people who need a boost to get through activities. Completion is not always its own reward, especially when the time put in seems large compared to the outcome. Gamification, even with its virtual and nonmonetary rewards, can give a sense of completion.

Gamifying WordPress

I would have skipped writing today, but I would miss getting that “You have posted for XX days in a row!” notification from WordPress. And, eventually, that “You have posted XXX posts on WordPress!” notification. I have fallen victim to the gamification of WordPress, and I’m fine with that.

Until today, I didn’t associate WordPress’ notifications as gamification, until I realized that they were driving me to blog.

Gamifying daily life

One piece of advice for goal setting is to include a reward for meeting a goal, not too expensive or fattening. There are plenty of apps on Android and iOS that motivate achievements and tasks with gamification. (To find these, search for “gamification”.) I have not tried any of these yet, but they all work under this gamification concept.

This works better with an online app rather than setting up the rewards yourself. I think the act of someone/something else giving the award makes it more satisfying psychologically.

A query for the reader

Do you reward yourself for completing disliked goals? Boring goals? Tell me about your motivation/gamification strategies in the comments.

Struggling with Technology (again?)

I used to be good at technology

I used to be good at technology. Honestly, I used to be the person who introduced new technology to my colleagues, who stared at their mouse as if it would yield answers on its own. The irony is that it would have yielded those answers if they only used it to search menus and drag objects.

It’s not my fault

I find myself worse at technology than I used to be, and I refuse to say it’s my fault, because I’ve been using the same techniques to teach myself new software. It’s not working. I have decided it’s not me, but the software available to me.

It was inevitable that the increasing complexity of programs and apps would result in some inscrutability. My first experience on a computer was a DOS machine. The entire WordPerfect program sat on a 8″ floppy disk (1.2 MB storage) and I had room to store my homeworks. Now we download megabites of code, invisible to us, and store programs on our terabyte hard drives, and our documents in the cloud.

Increasing complexity

Why has the size of programs and apps increased so greatly? Because progress demands programs be increasingly complex, doing more things, and doing them beautifully. I demand this myself; it’s always a bonus to me when I can type myself rather than using a secretary; format my own books; develop my own videos. Some of these programs are not made by big companies, as is evidenced by the Apple, Android, and Microsoft Stores.

The consequences

The consequences of increasingly useful and complex programs and apps are threefold:

Increasing margin for mistakes
Increasing difficulty in making logical and intuitive interfaces.
Information overload

I’m running into these, but usually the latter two. I do, however, occasionally run into buttons that don’t work, captions that float over other essential functions, and other errors. (WordPress, why do I have to click twice on “Select” to get into the photo archives like Pexels?)

Logical and intuitive interfaces — menus and buttons where the function pops up when you scroll over it; context-sensitive menus. Learning Photoshop has been challenging due to its many, many menus where menu options are not always intuitive. In these cases, a robust help menu helps, especially for those of us new to the program and not so new to the world. WordPress, on the other hand, has context-sensitive menus, although it took me a bit to figure out which menu to seek — is it the plus sign or the menu on the right?

The last is information overload. This is where you see so much on the screen that you can’t focus. Photoshop again is a good example of this. Numerous menus with numerous options — don’t get me wrong; I’d rather that than a plethora of programs that are less complicated.

I don’t want to throw away functionality, especially as I am a DIY person. Maybe better help and more consumer testing and some idea of the language used on Photoshop.

But I have a question for you:

Do you know any good books on Photoshop? On WordPress? Please let me know!

Word Press Tricks?

Oh I have questions …

I haven’t been on WordPress very long, and WordPress is a very, very complex site. I like to play with the bells and whistles — but I don’t know them. Maybe it’s a matter of learning HTML, but I’m too old a dog to learn that trick, unless you have a quick way of teaching me. Maybe I haven’t found the right button.

I know about the context-sensitive menu on the right, and I know about the floating menu when I type, and I know about adding blocks, but a lot of the options I have trouble understanding. Here are my questions:

~~How do I make a numerical list?~~ Never mind; I found it. And I found strikethrough too.
Can I do footnotes with numbers? Or do I have to fake it by superscripting in text and then at the end of the document in the descriptive part?
How do I get a bigger caption size so I can describe a photo?
How do I indent a block without using block quote?
How do I get a photo to left-justify with wraparound? I don’t want all my photos to right-justify?
What is the coolest or most useful “bells and whistles” you’ve found here?
Why is the inline image below not letting me wrap text around it?

It’s your turn.

Readers — if you can answer the questions above, please let me know!