The Fearless Blogger

A journalist that wore two hats

In her blog Save the Media , Gina Chen shares  10 ‘Journalism rules’ you can break on your blog.

As an intro to these rules, Gina writes:

there’s a part of me that loves blogging because you’re allowed to break the journalism rules. In fact, I’d argue the best bloggers break them regularly because blogging isn’t a news story; it shouldn’t read like one; it shouldn’t look like one.

At a high level, Gina encourages taking advantage of the dynamic, interactive and community qualities of the web when writing for a blog. I encourage you to view the post to read the list in full – below is a summary of her 10 rules:

1. Use partial or fake names
2. Tell part of the story
3. Insert opinion
4. Link to a report or news release rather than rewrite it
5. Link to background rather than repeat it
6. Link to the enemy
7. Use second person; heck, use first person
8. Get personal
9. Answer your critics or supporters
10. Fix your mistakes rather than just publish a correction

As newspapers are shutting their doors and mainstream media is hopping onto the social media bandwagon, this will become an increasing relevant issue in the near future. It seems natural that a new set of rules begin to emerge. read more

bbPress is forum software created by Automatic, the same folks who brought us WordPress. Until recently, it’s development had been relatively slow.

Seems like things are starting to move forward, based on an announcement made in the bbPress.org forum today:

Hi everyone, bbPress 1.0 is moving beyond Alpha stage and skipping Beta to go straight into a series of Release Candidates towards a final 1.0 release. The first RC is now available for download.

We’ve made this decision to push towards 1.0 final as the scope of what was going to be included in 1.0 has been whittled back and we have had some serious real world trials through TalkPress.

I’ve been playing with bbPress for the still-in-progress URLuscious.com, so plan to try out the new upgrade in the next few days and will keep you posted when I have a live version available for folks to check out.

For more on bbPress, visit the site at bbPress.org.  Justin Tadlock has also recently posted the first in his series of bbPress-related tutorials on his site.

To Randy -- I don't believe in the no-win scenario -- My best, Bill Shatner

I haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet – but hope to remedy that soon!

When I do, I’ll be keeping my eyes open looking for one face in particular.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor best know for delivering the poignant “Last Lecture“, was a huge Star Trek fan. On his 12/01/2007 blog post, Randy wrote:

This is, by far, the coolest thing (okay, #2 behind the palliative chemo working). JJ Abrams (Hollywood producer/director who did the TV series “Lost,” the movie “Mission Impossible III” and a bunch of other stuff) emailed me, out of the blue:

JJ Abrams wrote:

Dear Randy –

Hi there — I’m JJ Abrams, director of the new Star Trek movie.

I read about you and your condition, and ALSO your affinity for things Trek. read more

I didn't get further than this - hopefully you'll have better luck!

Update:  I did finally get further than the intro page and have already received coupons for the two weeks I’ve remembered to submit my request for!  I’ve since added a reminder to my calendar – can never have enough reminders when it comes to free chocolate!!

Not just freebies – CHOCOLATE freebies!

Mars has implemented the Chocolate Relief Act – just head over to realchocolate.com to grab yourself a coupon for free sweets of some sort. (I seem to have bad coupon Karma, I didn’t have any better luck with these coupons than I did  with KFC!)

Here’s to a sweet start to the weekend!

I found a handy (and free) little utility via TUAW (that’s “The Unofficial Apple Weblog” for those who may not be familiar) today that I thought was worth sharing with you guys.

My Quandary
I wanted to print out the free meal coupons KFC offered through Oprah’s website.  Unfortunately, my printer is out of ink and coupons.com does not support Mac’s built in “save as PDF” option to save and email the coupon to my sweetie to print for me (instead it opens and prints straight to your default printer).

The Solution
I figured there had to be a way to set up a virtual printer that would output to a PDF file and a quick Google search pointed me to the TUAW post about CUPS-PDF by codepoetry.

The Skinny
As described by codepoetry:

CUPS-PDF is a backend module for CUPS (Mac OS X’s printing system) by Volker C. Behr that, rather than printing to a device, prints straight to PDF files.

Why use this rather than a simple “Save as PDF” in the print dialog?

- Pressing return is faster.
- Batch-print through the writer to convert documents to PDF. read more