{"id":3775,"date":"2012-07-29T11:21:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-29T16:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/?p=3775"},"modified":"2012-07-29T11:51:40","modified_gmt":"2012-07-29T16:51:40","slug":"wordpress-for-geniuses-in-other-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2012\/07\/wordpress-for-geniuses-in-other-fields\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress for Geniuses (in other fields)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Write what you know. What a load of rubbish. “Write what you don’t know” (Ken Kesey wrote<\/a> that), that’s more like it, if you want to be good at it.<\/p>\n

\"WordCamp<\/a>But when you teach, you do teach what you know. That’s the way it seemed when we were children.<\/p>\n

Once one has spent years, days and ticking seconds in classrooms and lecture halls and auditoriums, not to mention tense dining tables and rowdy restaurant booths, it’s obvious even very good teachers teach what they know so far.<\/p>\n

When you consider lecturers (and preachers and pundits), you see living wizards of Oz<\/a>, at various points of expertise.<\/p>\n

My moments at a blackboard, whiteboard or screen — or just a stand with my notes on it — prove that at best, I also teach what I know so far, and sometimes folks learn.<\/p>\n

At 9:15 Saturday morning,\u00a0 July 28, 2012, I will teach “Quick & Easy WordPress.com,” on the WordPress 101 Track at the 3rd annual WordCamp-Fayetteville<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: The class has been presented, with people saying nice things about it. Lots of details, including Keynote\/PowerPoint presentations, are at my WordCamp 101 page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

My presentation is described<\/a> as:<\/p>\n

The beginnings of a do-it-yourself, no-domain, free website. Templates, posts vs pages, and how to have a static home page, with the dynamic blog in a sidebar or not at all.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The proposal the organizers accepted reads:<\/p>\n

The session will cover the basics of using WordPress to create — for free — both blogs and conventional websites for personal and business projects. WordPress.com will be the basis of demonstrations to create a site then create individual pages and posts. WordPress.org details will be integrated into the presentation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What do I “know so far”?<\/p>\n

I am a WordPress enthusiast — paraphrasing my proposal — who’s found code projects as addictive as writing ones, just prefer the latter. I am Director of Online Media for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists,<\/a> run on the WordPress.org platform. I run the Ozark Poets & Writers Collective<\/a>‘s site via WordPress.com I’ve worked on a few other sites. My Brick<\/strong><\/a> has resided at benpollock.com’s Mirthology: A Loose Leaflet<\/span><\/a> since 2003; WordPress, of course.<\/p>\n

The title I gave is “WordPress for Geniuses (in other fields).” Sure, it is a play on the Blankety-blank for Dummies<\/em> series of books, but the point is people in other endeavors can create and maintain blogs — yet more than that, have a sophisticated website under your name or title of your enterprise. You can do fine ones at essentially no cost and with no more knowledge than sending email.<\/p>\n

That actually is the starting point of WordPress, to let the programming and design specialists work their hearts outs for people like us to just click some buttons and bring our projects to life.<\/p>\n

Check out what’s being offered at WordCamp Fayetteville 2012<\/a>. It’s affordable. And all the cool kids will be there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Write what you know. What a load of rubbish. “Write what you don’t know” (Ken Kesey wrote that), that’s more like it, if you want to be good at it. But when you teach, you do teach what you know. That’s the way it seemed when we were children. Once one has spent years, days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-coarsely"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":30,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/12\/education-tests-everyone\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":0},"title":"Education tests everyone","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"December 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock . \"We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us,\" says Walt Kelly's Pogo. (Not Gene Kelly, who never danced punk's pogo.) That classic Cold War punch line's almost an affirmation for those of us who consider ourselves enlightened Americans. But as such, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "American Culture"","block_context":{"text":"American Culture","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/american-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":107,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/10\/havent-they-been-through-enough\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":1},"title":"Haven’t they been through enough?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 2, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Monday, Oct. 2, 2005: Refugee, evacuee, ban, persecute. Who could object -- well, I couldn't -- when Oprah Winfrey in the second week after Hurricane Katrina pronounced from New Orleans that people who made it through the devastation \"survivors\"? It's uplifting, optimistic, triumphant and, well,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":352,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/09\/tom-sawyers-child-labor\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":2},"title":"Tom Sawyer’s Child Labor","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"September 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"A brief in today's paper arouses interest for those procrastinators among us just getting around to Spring Cleaning. Northwest Arkansas Sustainability Center\u2019s 'Pack It In, Pack It Out' activity day for children will begin at 9 a.m. Saturday at Fayetteville's Wilson Park. Participants will be organized into groups and have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":98,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/11\/food-shelter-and-story\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":3},"title":"Food, shelter and story?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"November 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 24, 2005. Old School by Tobias Wolff provoked this riff. (I checked out the audio book from the library perhaps a year ago and returned it after hearing only most of the first disc, going by that's when its familiarity ended. Having\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Course of Words"","block_context":{"text":"The Course of Words","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/course-of-words\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":239,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/10\/promenade-lemonade-cynical-pinnacle\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":4},"title":"Promenade Lemonade: Cynical Pinnacle?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 6, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"PROM-E-NADE -- The Pinnacle Hills Promenade Shopping Center opened Wednesday. Wanting to see the center, not the artifice of ribbon-cutting, and crowds that won't be that big until the day after Thanksgiving, I'm here for an hour Thursday afternoon. Background here and here. Forget this joint on bustling weekends, too.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3506,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2012\/02\/my-friend-jeff-zaslow\/","url_meta":{"origin":3775,"position":5},"title":"My Friend Jeff Zaslow","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"February 11, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"When you're middle-aged, what the hell is a friend, anyway? Some of my favorite people I see for one long weekend every year, a conference. In between there will be a handful of emails and, these days, rather more frequently, single-sentence repartee on Facebook. I often have met their spouses,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Columnist Jeff Zaslow (right) and professor Randy Pausch","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/randy-and-jeff1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3775"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3775\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}