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WordPress Power Blogging Tips – October 29th at the Portland WordPress Meetup

October 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

WordPress logoIf you’ve ever been interested in blogging better, or just listening to me perform an organized(ish) brain dump of a lot of WordPress power user blogging tips and tricks, you’ll want to be at the Portland WordPress meetup on October 29th. Daniel invited me to come and share some things with the group.

Topics to be covered include (but are not limited to):

  • idea management / article creation and workflow
  • writing in various places both within and outside of the WordPress interface
  • media tips
  • a few useful plugins
  • my newsletters and how they relate to my blogs
  • social, search, and incoming link strategery
  • things I schedule and automate vs. things I choose to do manually

What else is on your mind? If there’s something else related to content creation, publishing, or sharing that you’d like to hear about, leave a comment and I’ll see if I can help.

Filed Under: Articles, Blogging & WordPress, Events, Portland/Vancouver Tagged With: , , ,
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Bag ‘er & Tag ‘er

April 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Found while wandering northwest Portland on the Google+ photowalk

Found while wandering northwest Portland on the Google+ photowalk yesterday afternoon.

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Coppertones

April 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Metal on the support of a bus shelter in downtown Portland

Metal on the support of a bus shelter in downtown Portland

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Support Local Charities with a Click to Bojack’s Blog

December 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It’s buck-a-hit day over at Portland blogger Jack Bogdanski’s website; for each visitor to the site today he’ll be donating a dollar to charity. Please click over to his website and while you’re there, considering offering a few dollars of your own as a donation to his group of charities.

Jack offers up interesting commentary all year at no charge; once a year he asks readers to join him in donating to a worthy cause. Please consider helping.

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Join me for a ZooLights Photowalk: Tuesday December 13th

December 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Steam at the StationEach year, the Oregon Zoo is decorated with millions of lights forming a variety of shapes, structures, and creatures in a wide assortment of colors.

Photographing ZooLights is all sorts of fun, especially when one experiments with long shutter times and camera movement. Let’s have an informal photowalk. If you’re interested in joining me, here are the details:

  • When/Where: Tuesday, December 13th at the Oregon Zoo. We’ll meet inside the main zoo gates in front of the mountain goat exhibit at 5:30pm.
  • Who: any photographer – all skill levels and varieties of gear are welcome.
  • Cost: Adult ZooLights admission is $9. See the zoo’s website for more details.

We’ll be strolling throughout the zoo’s public areas and photographing the various scenes. Read more about ZooLights on the Oregon Zoo’s website. This is an informal photo gathering and is not affiliated with any organization or company.

If you’re attending, it would be swell if you would RSVP on Plancast.

North(west)ern Lights ZooLights: Crocodile
Filed Under: Articles, Events, Photography, Portland/Vancouver
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The Story of #pdxtst

November 17, 2011 by 7 Comments

As we approach another winter in the usually-mild Pacific Northwest, it’s time to explain #pdxtst.

#pdxtst is a Twitter hashtag that stands for the Portland Twitter! Storm! Team!

Those exclamation points are important, because we’re actually making fun of the overreactions by local mainstream news media. I explain it further in this video recorded in early 2009:

I don’t recall if it was myself or Kelly Guimont (@verso) who first used the hashtag. The part that I love is that now all of the mainstream media folks now use the hashtag for local weather coverage. New media is fun!

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Occupy Portland Non-Eviction

November 13, 2011 by 1 Comment

Portland Mayor Sam Adams set a deadline of 12:01am this morning for the Occupy Portland folks to clear out of the two city parks that had been the location for the encampment. With a potential standoff with the Portland Police looming, a few thousand people came downtown and marched in support of the occupiers. I was there from around 11pm until 3:30am, the crowd was mostly peaceful and I believe only one arrest was made during that time. Here are a few of my favorite images; you can view my entire set of photos as well.

In the early morning hours of 11/13/2011, thousands gathered at the site of Occupy Portland's encampment to rally and protest the group's eviction from city parks. The scene was mostly calm despite a strong police presence and a few outliers who seemed to want violence.
Amongst the piles of Occupy garbage was this doll.

In the early morning hours of 11/13/2011, thousands gathered at the site of Occupy Portland's encampment to rally and protest the group's eviction from city parks. The scene was mostly calm despite a strong police presence and a few outliers who seemed to want violence.
Huge crowd at Third and Main.

In the early morning hours of 11/13/2011, thousands gathered at the site of Occupy Portland's encampment to rally and protest the group's eviction from city parks. The scene was mostly calm despite a strong police presence and a few outliers who seemed to want violence.
Portland Police wearing helmets and standing in close formation as they attempt to prevent the crowd from shutting down Third Avenue.

View Entire Photo Gallery

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Occupy Portland in Jamison Square

October 29, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Earlier today, the Occupy Portland movement decided to hold a rally and occupy Jamison Square, a city park in Portland’s Pearl District. I swung by and created some photographs.

Click on the image (or this link) to view the full gallery.

Occupy Portland rallies in Jamison Square on 10/29/2011
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Oregon Cultural Trust Updates Contest Terms to More Favorable Language

October 10, 2011 by 2 Comments

Last week I pointed out the carelessness of the Oregon Cultural Trust holding a photography contest including terms that asserted a perpetual worldwide license to any work submitted. After a bit of publicity surrounding the terms of service, I’m pleased to report that the Oregon Cultural Trust has updated the verbiage of the contest terms and the licensing requirements are no longer as onerous.

The relevant portion of the terms now reads:

Winning entrants agree that their work may be exhibited or shown during events sponsored by the Oregon Cultural Trust and its contest sponsors, on the websites of those organizations and in their promotional materials, allowing for the photographer to retain complete control over the licensing and sale of their work. All entrants grant the Oregon Cultural Trust and its sponsors the non-exclusive, royalty-free right to post entries in promotional messaging associated with the contest on websites and other digital properties during the length of the contest and for up to 6 months following the 2011 Competition winner’s announcement.

This seems a lot more reasonable to me; the winners (who receive compensation in the form of prizes) allow for the work to be used for promotional purposes and all entrants grant a license for use in the contest materials (which makes sense and is required for the contest’s website and other publicity to display any of the work).

In an ideal world the terms would’ve been photographer-friendly from the beginning, but I must applaud the Oregon Cultural Trust for responding to concerns and implementing reasonable licensing terms.

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Shouldn’t the Oregon Cultural Trust Stop Asking Artists to Work for Free?

October 6, 2011 by 5 Comments

Update 10/10/2011: the contest terms in question have been updated.

Just over a year ago, I called out the Oregon Arts Commission / Oregon Cultural Trust for asking photographers to work for free. In that case, they were asking for photos for PR use in exchange for website credit (which, as all working artists know, is worth next to nothing in the real world).

Today, I caught wind on Twitter of a new photography contest from the Oregon Cultural Trust. Given last year’s situation, I headed over to the contest rules for their current promotion to see what might lurk within the legalese. I was disappointed (but not surprised) to see the following rights grab:

7. Release: By entering the contest, entrant grants the Cultural Trust and its sponsors the non-exclusive, royalty-free, and irrevocable right to use, reproduce, copy, publish, display, distribute, perform, translate, adapt, modify, and otherwise incorporate the photo in other works in any and all markets and media now or hereafter known worldwide in perpetuity.

There you go. Photographers can hand over a do-anything-they-ever-want license to photographs simply by entering the contest.

Shouldn’t part of promoting Oregon’s art culture be that artists are compensated for their work? I’ll be sitting this one out, again, and I’ll be actively encouraging other artists who feel their work isn’t worthless to do the same.

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