Nathan Hale's Calendar

If you're not reading Nathan Hale's blog you should be. He's a wonderful artist and all around creative guy. His posts aren't long and they usually involve a picture he's drawn.

He's also been known to publish whole stories on his blog. Lately, he hasn't done that as much because he's just so busy putting out books.

I'd like to have that problem.

Earlier this week, he shared his calendar. He uses it to track his work. It's simple, useful, and really cool to look at. Here's a quick explanation.

A line coming in from the bottom of a day means he started drawing a page. A line going out the top of a day, means he finished the page. Seriously, look at all those lines. For more details, you need to read and comment on his post.

Not only is it easy to see the work he got done, this feels like a sup'd up version of the Don't Break the Chain method. I love it.

In fact, I've been trying to think how I could adapt it for writing. I was thinking about tracking scenes.

I define a scene as a series of chronological events that happen in one location. This is how I write my stories--scene by scene. I don't put them together into chapters until later in the editing process.

So scenes might work. Of course, they vary in length quite a bit, some of my scenes are just 500 words while others are 5000 words. Still, I don't think that matters. What matters is moving the story forward, not how many words are in the story.

I'm also considering making writing and editing scenes look different somehow. I don't want to complicate things, so I was thinking about writing a "D" or "E" when a line comes in the bottom. In the end, it also doesn't matter if I'm writing or editing as long as the book is progressing, so I'm not sure if I'll need to do this.

The goal is to have a cool visual representation of my progress. Cool enough that the pattern I'm creating will provide motivation to continue the pattern.

So, I'm looking for other people's ideas. What do you think would make for a good calendar tracking system? Also, don't forget to check out Nathan's blog.

* Nathan's calendar image posted with permission.

How to Add a Facebook Like Button to a Webpage

It's not Tuesday, but this will be a technical post. A few people have asked me about adding Facebook Like buttons to web pages.

Step 1) Facebook and Twitter and Bears, Oh my!

There are so many social networks these days, which ones do you choose?

We've got the big guys: Facebook and Twitter, but what about LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, and StumbleUpon?

Not to mention a metric slew of sites that aren't as popular, or aren't as social, but still have fans who might want to share your stuff: Blogger, Digg, Buffer, Bitly, WordPress, Posterous, Orkut (are they still around?), MySpace (are they still around?),  FriendFeed, Evernote, and dozens more.

*The metric slew is a unit of measure for those who want to sound precise but who really have no clue how much they are talking about.

I'm recommending you go out to AddThis and grab their code. AddThis is used by some big sites. They are simple to use and have a lot of ways to tinker with their stuff if you're the tinkering type.

When you download their code, they'll ask you to create an account. It's not required, so if you want to try them out first, that's fine. Just dismiss the sign-up window.

Here's three examples of their stuff. (The following examples are setup for web pages, so they don't work as effectively on my blog, sorry. I'll do another post specific to blogs in the future.)

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Note: AddThis isn't paying me anything to promote them. For some reason, companies don't want to give me money to promote them. *sigh*

Step 2) Huh?

Have you ever gone to like a webpage and Facebook decides it wants to use the "Email Me" picture of a giant @ sign instead of the site logo, or the description that comes up is the "About the Author" text instead of the first paragraph of the page? Frustrating, isn't it.

You solve these issues for your site using Open Graph tags. These are meta tags you include at the top of your html page that help Facebook and other sites figure out what's most important.

Now, open up your page to edit it and include the following meta tags at the top in the <head></head> section:

  <head>
    ...
    <meta property="og:title" content="***PAGE TITLE HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:type" content="***CONTENT HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:url" content="***URL HERE***"/>
    <meta property="og:image" content="***IMAGE HERE***"/>
    ...
  </head>

These tags tell Facebook what title, url and image to use when someone likes your page. The og:type is also interesting, there are a lot of options including "article", "author" (when you're bragging about yourself), "book" (when you're promoting your book), "cause" (when you're spreading the word for your favorite charity), "activity" (when you're announcing your book release party), and quite a few more.

And that's all you have to do. Go ahead and try it out and let me know how it works for you.

Wrap Up

Now you can help Facebook and other sites know how to share your web pages.

In my next blog post, I will show you what you need to do if your page has many different things you want to like. For example, if you have a bunch of different images or videos or quotes and you want people to like each one separately.

Until then, let me know if these steps were helpful for you in the comments below.

* Ah, the open road. There's more to this picture taken by Takver and posted on  Flickr. Especially check out Takver's  holiday set and protest pictures.

Putting Boxes Around Text (Technical Tuesday)

Let's go outside the box . . . and inside the box. In fact, let's talk about the box itself. I've had a few people ask me how I put boxes around text.

Like this.

It's not hard to do, and I've made a tool for you to quickly create your own.

Note: This tool may not show up in a news reader. You'll need to visit the blog.



There are some basic instructions included with the tool. If you need more details, I've got your back. Read on.

Box Content

You can type as much text as you want into the box.

You can also put HTML in there. This means that you can have images, buttons, multiple paragraphs, whatever.

Widths

There are three widths you can control with this tool.

• Border Width: The thickness of the line.
• Inside Padding: The space between the line and the text inside.
• Outside Margin: The space between the line and everything outside.

Here's a quick graphic that may make more sense, or you can just play around with the settings. As you change them the Preview will be updated.

Colors

All that's left is choosing some colors.

Get the Code

Now that your box looks just right, switch to the "Get the Code" tab. There you can copy the code and paste it into the HTML view of your blog post. You can also use this code on your website.

Happy Boxing.

* Origami is one of my wow-I-wish-I-could-do-that-but-not-enough-to-actually-practice skills. So when I see things like this decorative box, I'm in awe. And Dominic Alves did a great job photographing it. You can find it and others on Flickr.

Editing Speed Bump

Please help. I need some suggestions to solve a problem.

I'm editing a big project right now, and editing always goes slower than drafting. One reason it takes so much time is because it's harder to mull over.

You see, when I write I picture the scenes in my head during the day, so by the time I actually sit down and start typing I have a strong framework to build on.

Not so when I'm editing. I don't have a typographic memory (that's like a photographic memory except with words), so it's hard to do much away from my computer.

Here's my wish: I want to find a way to take my draft with me during the day and make notes.

I loaded my draft on my phone as an eBook. That worked great except I couldn't take notes. I've tried several Android eReader applications and none of them allow notes. *sigh*

There's the low-tech solution: I could print out my scene. The downside is that I don't ever have paper with me anymore, and rarely a pen or pencil. I suppose I could buy a binder, but I'm not terribly excited about that.

Here I am, stuck trying to find a solution to a problem of my own making. Isn't that the way life is?

Since I have a blog, I thought I'd foist my problem on you ask your advice. What suggestions do you have? What have you done to overcome this problem? Even a little commiseration would be appreciated.

Thanks.

*Speed Bump picture by veggiefrog can be found on Flickr.