Pariah Burke Consulting & Training with Creative & Publishing Workflow Expert Pariah S. Burke | Informing & Empowering Creative Professionals™

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 19 June 2009 through 24 June 2009:

• 7 Perfect WordPress Portfolio Themes — If you don’t have a port­fo­lio site yet or are look­ing to cre­ate an easy to update, fast load­ing and slick look­ing port­fo­lio than you should be using WordPress. Traditionally WordPress is a blog­ging con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, but recently it has been used to be the back end for many cool types of sites such as port­fo­lio sites for pho­tog­ra­phers and designers.
• Learning To Say “No” Nicely — How to Keep From Burning Bridges — Saying “no” could eas­ily upset them, and it’s very pos­si­ble that they might even get mad at you. For all you know, they might write you off as a free­lancer — never to call on you for work again.
• 10 Biggest Mistakes People Make on Twitter — Twitter is a great tool, not only for mak­ing con­nec­tions with a large amount of peo­ple, but it is also a great tool to pro­mote your­self, build your brand and help oth­ers while you’re at it. However, some peo­ple get it all wrong. I’ve done a few items on this list too, and have worked to change it and hope by the end of this arti­cle, you’ve picked up a cou­ple tips on how to bet­ter your twit­ter expe­ri­ence as well.
• The 10 biggest mis­takes peo­ple make on StumbleUpon — Stumble Upon is a great place to find and pro­mote awe­some con­tent. Not only is the use of stum­ble upon very easy with their tool bar, the com­mu­nity is great (for the most part). There are some mis­takes peo­ple are mak­ing on a daily basis though that could dras­ti­cally effect the way they’re per­ceived and the effec­tive­ness of any mar­ket­ing efforts they’re mak­ing. Below are ten of the biggest mis­takes I’ve seen peo­ple make on stum­ble upon.
• Ludicrous! #WordPress Forces Images 10px Wider! — I noticed this prob­lem in one of my own designs. If I set the post width (class=“entry”) to be 600px wide, and uploaded and inserted through WordPress 2.7 and up an image that was 600px wide, WordPress wrote this directly into the cap­tion div: “style=‘width: 610px’” . Thus my 600px col­umn was being forced to 610px wide, over­reach­ing it’s bounds, and forc­ing a float drop of the sidebar.

  Fortunately I found the solu­tion in the linked WordPress Forum post–use the CSS solu­tion at the bot­tom of the dis­cus­sion, not the core file hack mid-way through.

• The Bits and Pieces X: Training in Practice — Good read for any­one involved in in-house proj mgmt and train­ing — There are many ways to train peo­ple to use com­pli­cated new soft­ware. You could sit down with each new user indi­vid­u­ally and show them what to do. Because you have 300 peo­ple on staff full-time to do that. The train­ing might be a live demo of some of the processes, or one of those movies. It could be a series of online mod­ules that take the user through var­i­ous steps of var­i­ous work­flows. There might be a quiz at the end. Everybody likes quizzes.

  We chose a vari­ety of train­ing approaches. This is a nice way of say­ing we didn’t really have a coor­di­nated train­ing approach. Our train­ing started out with the best of inten­tions, of course. Unfortunately, our sys­tem was pressed into ser­vice before it was really fin­ished, so the train­ing pro­gram was REALLY not really finished.

• Enterprise 2.0: Confronting Social Media’s Dirty Little Secret [Yet Another Columnist Talking a Lot w/o Saying Anything] —
• 43 Must Read PHP Articles and Resources — Whether it be a new tip to bet­ter organ­ise your code or a way to speed up your scripts, this list hopes to be essen­tial read­ing for both the PHP new­bie and the the expe­ri­enced developer.
• Think con­tent is king? Sang Kim from Ripple6 says Audience is King — I spent an hour with Sang Kim, CEO of Ripple6 (who spon­sored our Inbound Marketing Summit events). It was time well spent, as Sang hails from the good old days
• How to Explain Your Production Process to Clients #Design #Freelance #Freelancing — Being able to define your pro­duc­tion process comes in handy when you’re deal­ing with an impor­tant group of peo­ple. They’re the peo­ple who have the audac­ity to ask such ques­tions as, “What am I pay­ing you for?”

  Giving your clients a good answer will go a long way toward boost­ing their hap­pi­ness with your work. It also will work won­ders for your hap­pi­ness as a freelancer.

  So, how do you fig­ure out what your pro­duc­tion process is?

• Faces in the Sand Sand Sculptures — Check out this art­ful crop of sand-crafted expres­sions come to life