MarkWhittaker.com

I love using WordPress for my blogs. For the most part, it’s really simple to set up and use, and with the amazing number of plug-ins, you can run a website with almost no programming knowledge.

I’ve had my self-hosted blog for about six years, and it’s been a good experience, although my blog posting has been erratic. I’ve learned enough programming to be dangerous and enough to be frustrated when I can’t figure out what’s wrong. The frustration level surged a couple of weeks ago when a friend (thanks @reedsirinek) told me he couldn’t leave a comment on a recent post.

After hitting the comment submit button, the site returned a page-not-found 404 error. OK, I looked through my WordPress comments settings and didn’t find anything obviously out of place. Next step: put Google to work. Google steered me to a variety of posts in the WordPress.org support forum. Some posts described similar problems, although they pre-dated the current version of WordPress by a year or two.

No help on WordPress support forum

The advice was old, but I tried some of the recommended steps — jiggling permalink and discussion settings and even themes — all to no avail. I even took a look at my .htaccess file to look for glitches. I resolved the 404 error problem, but the commenting function was still broken. After submitting a comment, the site simply returned to the original blog post with no comment added.

I let the problem percolate for a week or so, and finally hunkered down to look into it this weekend. I did a few more Google searches, and even posted my own question about it on the WordPress forum. After a day, I got no response. (That’s not a criticism. Volunteers run that support forum, and they do a great job. I was impatient.)

Finally, the solution came not from looking at code, but by noticing something on a blog site I read occasionally. That blog uses Disqus, a nifty commenting platform that has more features than I’ll ever use. What, I wondered, if there’s a WordPress plug-in for Disqus and I can bypass the built-in WordPress comment functions?

Sure enough, I found the Disqus plug-in, and after a couple of minutes had signed up for a Disqus account. It worked! At least for a moment. The comments showed up, and there was no 404 error. After a couple of test posts, however, I realized the comment counter wasn’t working. A quick jump back to Google uncovered an easy solution — clicking a radio button in the plug-in admin — and I was off to the comment races.

I tested a variety of themes, and the Disqus set-up worked with most — but not all. I’m planning to experiment with some new themes over the next few weeks, so I’ll need to be mindful of how comments are affected.

Lessons? Obviously, there’s more than one way to solve a perplexing problem. It would be cleaner to figure out where the original error is, but I’m satisfied with the creative work-around. Lesson 2: Test my site more often to make sure things are working as they should, at least until I’m getting a steady flow of comments!

I’ve been stewing for a while about Seth Godin’s notion (assertion?) that “We Are All Weird.” That’s the title of his most recent book, which describes the demise of “mass,” as in mass marketing, mass education and opiate of the masses.

The 97-page book’s theme hits home because the failure of “mass” is a root cause for the crumbling newspaper industry, in which I worked for 30 years. Godin’s explanation for the growth and acceptance of weirdness rings true, but there are one or two sour notes in there, at least for me. The problem? I’m NOT weird, at least not weird enough. Indeed, reading Godin’s book makes me wish I was weirder.

For reasons too various to explain in this article, the society of “mass” inspired by the industrial revolution worked just fine for me. I was successful in public school largely because I followed the rules, studied and the learned the material presented to me and was good at taking tests. That success prepared me for college, where I was a little less “successful” in terms of grades, but very successful in terms of preparing for a career in journalism. I spent most of my time at the Temple News, even serving as editor one semester.

I grew up in suburbia, landed a job before my college graduation day, worked my way up the newspaper ladder, got married, had a couple of kids, changed newspapers a few times, became a manager — all of it a pretty “normal” life progression. In fact, I was proud of the “normalcy” of it all, even though a part of me hated being normal. Normal means average, and who wants to be average?

A variety of life events have punctured the fiction of my “normalcy.” And it’s safe to say that my career in the newspaper industry, which ended with a layoff three years ago despite my shift to the online side of the business, has given me a front-row seat to watch the collapse of mass. Never — at least since the invention of the printing press — has the saw “You can’t be all things to all people” been more true.

Godin’s book makes me uncomfortable because even though I can accept the 21st century fallacy of “normal,” I have yet to embrace my “weird.” Of course, it’s not that I need to find something weird about myself. It’s that I need to uncover and celebrate the things that make me unique — the things that separate me from “mass” and “normal.” We all have those weird parts — whether it’s a love for baseball or the Beatles or collecting shot glasses from vacation destinations.

Somehow, I know that my life’s work remains in media/marketing/communications. I just haven’t brushed the dust off enough weirdness to know exactly how I can make my best contribution to those in my life and in my world.

Disclosure: The link to Seth’s book is an afflilate link.

The Tampa Tribune laid off 165 employees a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was just another straw on the back of the buckling camel that is the newspaper industry, but it vexed me more than many similar announcements over the last four years.

I have two friends among those who received pink slips. I’ve had other former colleagues forced from the newspaper biz, but I think these lay-offs touched me deeper because I was with both at the beginnings of their journalism careers. They were part of an amazing team of people that worked at the North Hills News Record, a suburban Pittsburgh paper that no longer exists, during the 1990s.

Thanks to a 1992 strike that shut both of Pittsburgh’s metro dailies and the resulting effort by owner Gannett Inc. to turn the News Record into a major suburban daily, the News Record newsroom was a hotbed of talent. Much as it did with USA Today, Gannett pulled in some of its brightest editors and up-and-coming journalists and sprinkled in a few outsiders such as myself.

Joseph Brown was a young photographer at the News Record. If it wasn’t his first job in journalism, is was one of his first. He’s a Florida native and a graduate of Florida A&M. The News Record job might have been his first venture to the North. The gray skies of Pittsburgh must have seemed daunting, but he brought with him a love a golf, and western Pennsylvania is home to lots of good courses.

He had a great photographer’s eye, but he was raw. I remember that he was always willing to listen to advice, and our chief photographer worked closely with him. When he left the News Record, he returned to Florida and took with him his future bride, Elizabeth Lee, who was a young reporter at the NHNR. They have four beautiful children, and for now, Joseph has no job.

Courtney Cairns Pastor is the other News Record alum who lost her job with the Tampa Trib. She came to the News Record as a Penn State journalism graduate. She was (and still is) talented and eager to learn everything she could about writing. She covered a lot of meetings, and I’m pretty sure I edited a lot of her early stories. Courtney also found her mate — sports writer Frank Pastor — at the News Record.

I wish I could remember a good anecdote or two about Joseph and Courtney, but none come to mind. They were fun to work with and helped us put out an award-winning newspaper. Away from work, Joseph made a 3-wood for me when I was just learning to play golf.

Both now have experience with Web. Joseph was the Live Desk coordinator and multimedia editor for the Tampa Tribune, and Courtney was the family and “mommy” blogger for the paper and became adept at using social media to grow her audience.

I haven’t been in close touch with Joseph, Liz, Courtney and Frank over the years. We’re Facebook friends, and the Browns have been kind enough to exchange Christmas cards with me over the years. Somehow, I feel worse about Joseph and Courtney losing their jobs than I did when, after 30 years working for newspapers, I was laid off in December 2008.

I wish I could have done more to “save” the newspaper industry, not for me, but for people like Joseph and Courtney. I worked on the online side of the business for eight years, and depending on your perspective, might be among those to blame for the changes that have eaten away at newspaper profits. On the other hand, I saw the changes coming, but never could figure out how to take advantage of them or convince my bosses to invest more to prepare for the interactive future. Of course, I’m not the only one who hasn’t been able to figure it out.

Both Joseph and Courtney know I’ll do anything I can to help them (I’m pretty handy at setting up WordPress blogs, for example), but I don’t have jobs to offer. For now, I hope that during their time at the News Record and with me, they learned some skill or lesson that helps them persevere this current setback and move to something better.