I just made my first loan through Kiva and it felt so good I wanted to share. If you haven’t heard of this group, check it out immediately. Kiva is a person-to-person micro-lending website, that enables you to loan money directly to entrepreneurs around the globe who might not be able to get a loan any other way. 

As someone who has felt the insane pull of those (scam?) late-night “sponsor a child in Africa” ads, I can highly recommend Kiva as a alternate, less scammy way to really help, and really know who you’re helping.

My dad and mom recently uploaded a bunch of pics which I’m re-uploading here, in the hopes that this will help save them for all time. Also I wanted to label them while I still had the brainpower to remember who everyone was.

Only a post will tell!

Will the plugin function?! Apparently yes it will! Now you who follow me at twitter.com/mcginnisgirl will be notified whenever I post new content here on the blog. Yay!

Just for the readers of this blog!  Find me at twitter.com/mcginnisgirl.

Apologies to everyone who’s already bothered to follow my other Twitter account, twitter.com/mcgirl2008, which has turned out to be a very Wordpress / coding / geek-focused. I swear this one will deal with the writing, what I think of the view outside my window and other such fascinating topics.

See you in the twitterverse.

Okay granted I’ve only just installed this bad boy, so issues may crop up, but as of right now Adminimize is my fave Wordpress plugin - at least, when it comes to user administration.

If you’ve ever wanted to simplify the Wordpress admin interface by user role, without having to install Role Manager or any additional plugins, this is it, baby.

In a single easy-to-understand admin panel you have options to hide or show menu items, hide or show elements on the “edit post” page, hide or show the admin footer. You can hide the screen options dropdown or show it.  You can hide the dashboard or show it - and if you choose to hide it, you can redirect users to any other admin page instead. You can hide the ‘admin color scheme’ on the Profile page. And much more!

Combined with the fantastic Fluency2 admin theme with its delish keyboard shortcuts and on-hover menu popouts, and the Remove Update Reminder plugin that hides the “update Wordpress!” message from everybody but the admin, Adminimize makes managing Wordpress as a CMS truly easy.

Now to find a plugin that allows me to brand the login panel and admin section without hacking Fluency2!

Yes, I still dislike its very clugey admin interface, but after reading a ton of web hosting reviews from other sites, I must admit it’s probably one of the better hosting options out there, especially if you’re hosting a number of sites on a variety of platforms and want to tweak the feature set to death. 

I’ll also concede that while 1and1’s admin interface is faster and easier to navigate, and their FTP is fast, they aren’t the most kind and gentle of customer support companies. This does’t matter much to me as I haven’t needed to use customer support hardly at all with 1and1. (And I’m betting a lot of GoDaddy’s support calls amount to “where can I find x y or z on your friggin’ confusing site?”) But it’s a factor.

Just to cover my bases, I’ll also say - I’d love to go with a smaller, more personal hosting company. I was with one once and it was a fantastic experience - until it was bought out by a bigger fish. And then that bigger fish was bought out by an even bigger fish. *Shudder*. So now I stick with the sharks. They may not be friendly, but they’re damned consistent.

I know I’m supposed to be thinking about writing right now, but I had to take just a moment and say:

GoDaddy is a pain. 

I would say that more vehemently, but as a professional web designer/developer I am often at the mercy of decisions made long before I came into the picture, and I don’t want to make my own life hell by ranting and raving against something I can do nothing about.

I will say, however: if you have not yet decided on a hosting provider, decide AGAINST GoDaddy. Their many-headed hydra of a web site is confusing for novice and pro alike. Their FTP is slooooow. They seem to go out of their way to make things more complicated than they need to be, frustrating efforts to quickly get in and get out and do what you need to do. And their dirt-cheap pricing is a farce, because once they’ve lured you in they force you to buy “additional” services that most other hosting providers give you for free.

Looking for an alternative? Try 1and1.com. In the many years I’ve been using their hosting and domain-registration services I’ve never experienced 1/18th of the frustration that an hour on GoDaddy produces. 

Thanks for listening.

After a long and lovely year of concentrating on writing, I’m back to balancing writing with my other love, the world of the web. 

I’ve launched a new business, Friendly Web Consulting, and have been busily designing and building sites. So far it’s fantastic. I had forgotten just how much I enjoy the process of designing a site from the ground up — understanding a client’s needs, brainstorming about how to best reach their audience, sketching out a design and seeing it through first Photoshop and then Wordpress theme development.  I’ve become a bit obsessed with the need to learn all the latest Photoshop tricks and download all the coolest new Wordpress plugins. 

Which is not to say I’ve totally forgotten about writing. I haven’t, but I’m focusing my time there differently. Rather than exclusively writing-to-be-published, I’m writing to learn my craft and I’m attempting to let the road to publication weave it’s own way through the woods.

Up until a few weeks ago, my “backup” process was pretty sad. Occasionally, I’d remember to boot up my external hard drive and I’d drag-and-drop some files over. More often, I’d e-mail important files to my Gmail account.

E-mailing files to Gmail also enabled me to move between my desktop computer with its big screen, and my laptop computer with its lovely portability. Unfortunately, I never got good about remembering I’d e-mailed myself files, so more often than not I found myself confused as to which version of my WIP was actually newer.

I tried copying files before I worked on them and renaming the new one with today’s date. That solved some of the issues, but I ended up with multiple copies of a file clogging up my hard drive and email.

But Dropbox has fixed all that. No more remembering to do anything. No more wondering if I’m working on the latest version. No more having to make backup copies before editing a file, in case I mess something up.

Dropbox looks like a folder in My Documents. Whatever I keep in that folder is automatically backed up to a secure remote server, anytime I connect to the internet. And Dropbox keeps a revision history for every file, so my previous edits are always saved. I don’t have to remember to do anything - I just keep my WIP in a subfolder underneath My Dropbox, and that’s it!

If you’re interested and want to know more, here’s the official Dropbox tour, and here are the FAQs. When you’re ready to sign up, get Dropbox here.