Have you ever wanted to write a novel, maybe a short story, non-fiction, poetry, or just create your own blog. Well, March is the month to do it. COSunflower and I have both committed to start our writing projects in March and we sure would love to have more people join us. The idea is just to get started and have fun with it. What if you don’t have a clue how to get started?
Please Join Us
What Is “Fun 30 Day Projects”?
This web site is not about projects you HAVE to do. It is about FUN Projects you would LIKE to do if you just had the time - activities that create a richer and more fulfilling life and bring out the KID in you.
Can’t find the time for your hobbies? Maybe you want to learn something new. Have you ever thought about writing a novel? Or maybe you used to be a singer. Well why not write and record a song? Or maybe learn how to play the guitar.
The idea is to give yourself 30 days to do something just for the pure FUN of it. Read more »
A Novel Idea
OK, its March 1. Time for our 30 day Write Something projects. I had planned on trying to write a novel, but I really need to write a tutorial. So I thought, could I write the tutorial as a novel? I have a lot of teaching experience so I know how students act, the kinds of questions they ask, the frustrations they experience, and most importantly, the strange curve balls life throws at them in the middle of a class.
What do you think? Can this work? Any suggestions? Read more »
Summary of “How to Write a Damn Good Novel”
How to Write a Damn Good Novel is a quick read and an excellent guide to writing a novel. Nine chapters walk you through the key elements of novel writing.
- Creating characters
- Conflict - how do characters handle conflict
- The Premise – “It is the reason you are writing what you are writing”
- Story Telling – “Narrative of consequential events involving worthy characters who change as result of events”
- The Climax – “Climate is target, story is flight of the arrow”
- Viewpoint – What is viewpoint of person telling the story?
- Great Dialogue – Rising conflict
He makes it sound simple. All I have to do is write a few hundred thousand words a day and I’m there.
Watch and Read: Learning Summaries
I know Kathy Sierra from her old blog, Creating Passionate Users, which is my “Go To” source for information on learning, marketing, motivation, and creating happy users. Kathy received threats from some imbeciles on the web, and stopped posting on her site. However, she did leave the site up and it is still one of the best resources on the web. Kathy is a former game developer, java programmer, instructor, web community developer, and now does consulting and writes books. She uses the term users to identify someone that uses a product or service. Read more »
Watch & Read
February – I am starting a pure pleasure project. The mind, technology, healing, learning, etc – a smorgasbord of exciting topics.
First, I will start with TED videos. I plan on watching at least 30 videos this month and writing a short blurb about each.
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize. Read more »
Making Wine!
Just started 5 gallons of Pinot Noir. I buy my kits from William’s Brewing in California. I have always received good service from them and they have always been able to answer any questions I have had. One kit contains enough grape juice concentrate, yeast, and granulated oak for about 5 gallons of wine.
HuckleberryFriend Wine
Create a WordPress Theme Part 6: CSS Class, ID and Pseudo-Classes
CSS offers 2 methods for assigning a name to an element: class and id.
Class - CSS allows one or more elements to be assigned to a class. Why? So that a css rule can be assigned to it. Earlier, I mentioned that rules are assigned to elements, so a rule can be applied to <p> (for example). But what if all the <p>’s except for 3 should have the same rule and the other 3 need a different rule. Just assign the 1st rule to <p> and then override for the 3 exceptions by assigning the 2nd rule to all the <p>’s with a class of “whatever you name the class”. Read more »
Create a WordPress Theme Part 5: CSS Box Model
Imagine a box around every single element in your xhtml document. That’s exactly the way that CSS sees elements, as if they are each in a box. Every p, every h1, every blockquote, every list, and every other element has a box around it. Why should I care? Because CSS allows me to change the padding, the border, and the margins of each box. Read more »
Create a WordPress Theme Part 4 – Intro to Style Sheets
Style sheets can get pretty complicated, so I am going to break this up into several posts. In this post, I will create a few CSS rules and show how to implement a style sheet.
A style sheet is made up of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) rules. A rule allows you to assign one or more property values to an element. Here’s an example: Read more »
Create a WordPress Theme Part 3 – Standards and xhtml
This is the html document with the doctype and <meta> lines added. If you like, you can run it through http://validator.w3.org and make sure there are no errors. Read more »
Create a WordPress Theme Part 2 – html
I going to take some simple text and convert it to html to demonstrate the structure of a simple html page. Read more »