Josh Stauffer» Uncategorized

Sinatra – Free Genesis Child Theme

Josh Stauffer — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 05:44:00 +0000

I am pleased to announce the release of Sinatra, a free Genesis child theme. This WordPress theme works on the Genesis Framework.

Empty Named Anchor Fix

Josh Stauffer — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:26:12 +0000

While developing a WordPress theme recently, I tested it in Chrome, Firefox, and IE and everything worked as expected. Recently I noticed the named anchors were not working in Chrome. I narrowed the problem down to Chrome positioning the anchors on the screen at coordinates 0,0 probably because the elements were empty. Thanks to this comment, it’s as simple as adding the CSS display: inline-block to the named anchor elements. The code was changed to and viola, the empty named anchors are fixed.

Jon Acuff: a Man of His Word

Josh Stauffer — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 02:39:30 +0000

In case you don’t know, Jon Acuff is a well-known blogger/author who is responsible for the popular blog and book, Stuff Christians Like and the book, Gazelles, Baby Steps And 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me About Debt.

Back last November he wrote a blog post, ‘Can I help you with your blog?‘, and I responded thinking it would be great if he did help but I’d understand if he didn’t. I can’t imagine the amount of email and requests Jon gets. It has to be a lot when you consider he’s reached over 2 million people with his blog and has tens of thousands of twitter followers.

Why am I writing this post? Well, I have two reasons…

To serve as a reminder for me to follow Jon’s suggestions.
To let everyone know that Jon Acuff is a man of his word and of great character.

The Evidence

Hi Jon,

I purchased your book last week and read your post today (http://stuffchristianslike.net/2010/11/can-i-help-you-with-your-blog/ ).

Hook me up.

http://www.joshstauffer.com/

Josh

Josh

Thank you so much for buying my second book! I really appreciate that. I am reviewing blogs right now and just came to yours. I love it! Here are a few thoughts I had:

I’d love to see you creating more content. Set a goal to write one post a week for 90 days. That’s 12 posts. Then write a handful of 3 posts really quickly. Write short posts. Just 200 words or so. Then, once you’re done, sit on them for a few days. Come back later when you’re not in love with them. You need to have an editor’s eye and if you try to edit the same day you write, you will miss things.

I’d like to see you do a couple of posts with lists in them. Blog readers really love to have short, easy to digest content and I personally have really seen community grow with posts that allow specific, list based things to react to. Your post about hostgator would have been a perfect post for a list.

On the community tip, the best way I grew my community on SCL was by joining other communities first. For a year before I launched my site I plugged into other blogging communities and would regularly post comments. Becoming known for generously leaving comments is a great way to encourage people to comment on your blog. (The times people commented you did an awesome job writing great responses to them.)

Think about creating more “exits and entrances” for your posts. Readers need visual entrances they can use to start reading. Sometimes it’s tempting to have long run on paragraphs, but readers sometimes feel intimidated by big “walls” of text. Try to break up some of your posts into smaller chunks and give readers the chance to “enter and exit” ideas easily.

I’d love to see you take greater “visual credit” for the Transchild theme. I think it looks great and it would be fun to have some sort of visual preview represented on your main page.

Hope that helps. Thanks for buying the book!

Jon

Make a good decision today by following @JonAcuff on Twitter and checking out his blog, JonAcuff.com. You can thank me later.

Redesign – March 2011

Josh Stauffer — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 05:25:12 +0000

A redesign for my blog was long overdue. I’ll continually be making tweaks and improvements but I am really pleased with how it came out. This design is a child theme for the Genesis Framework. I tried to add some flavor by incorporating some jQuery effects, CSS3 styles, the Google Font API, and some Genesis hooks. My favorite feature is probably the scrolling background in the header area. Take a look around and if you have any comments, please fire away.

Do more faster: Escape the “one more thing” mentality

Josh Stauffer — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:26:34 +0000

Matt Mullenweg recently posted an essay titled, 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number. If I were asked to sum the essay up in one sentence it would be, “Stop being such a perfectionist and show others what you have to offer already.” Or maybe “Break the ‘one more thing’ mentality and get the product out the door.”

Here are several things that Matt wrote that really struck a chord with me:

If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum – if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in.

You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect…But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong.

I copied and pasted these quotes here to serve as a reminder, particularly for me. For you to fully understand the context in which Matt is speaking, I encourage you to read his entire essay.

How to Export Google Reader Subscriptions

Josh Stauffer — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 02:15:22 +0000

If you find it difficult to keep up with your favorite sites then Google Reader is for you. You can read all of them in one place and Google makes it as simple as checking your email. Using Google Reader will help you stay up to date by constantly checking your favorite blogs or news sites for new content. And of course… it’s free!

The Downside

Don’t get me wrong, Google Reader is great but somehow over the past two years I’ve been using it I’ve managed to accumulate quite a subscription list. As I write this I am currently subscribed to 110 websites and have 835 unread items. Not only does this massive list make me feel overwhelmed but it has become a huge distraction.

Time For Action

Obviously I find value in the 110 websites I’ve subscribed to but enough’s enough and it’s time to declutter. I could simply just start unsubscribing from sites but I may regret that down the road. So here’s the plan… backup my subscription list and then start unsubscribing until I end up with 10 or less websites. It will be tough deciding which site stays and which goes but I just know that I will feel so much better after it’s done.

Export Your Google Reader Subscriptions

Click “Manage subscriptions”
Click “Import/Export”
Under Export your subscriptions, click “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file”
Save the XML file to your hard drive.

How to Export Google Reader Subscriptions

That’s really all there is to it. Now that my subscription list is backed up, it’s time for some serious house cleaning.