Critical Thinking Excercise, Part One: Just Do It
An excellent way to exercise your critical thinking skills involves critically analyzing corporate slogans. Company slogans such as Nike’s “Just do it,” Budweiser’s “King of beer” and Fruit Loop’s “Follow your nose!” are ubiquitous in contemporary capitalistic culture. So, as you journey through your day, keep your eyes and ears open to the various business taglines that you will inevitably hear, and pick your favorite for further analysis. Continue reading »
You Know Nothing
One of my favorite things to do involves reading and listening to the opinions of others. This is great for me, because people and their opinions are everywhere. I derive pleasure from considering alternate points of view and even enjoy arguing against my own ideas. Whenever I think that I honestly know something, I try questioning it until I prove myself wrong or decide to try again later. It usually doesn’t take very long to realize that I don’t know […] Continue reading »
Hello, I Hate You.
I have been fairly nervous about starting mindfeed.org. Like you, I fear ridicule, rejection, and criticism. Although I don’t understand exactly why, I find myself differentiating between the criticism of others and the criticism of myself. Perhaps the reason involves the perceived intention of the criticism. I know that when I criticize myself, it is done with the purpose of improving or bettering some aspect of myself. However, improving myself is not the result of every personal criticism. During certain […] Continue reading »
What are the Different Layers of the Blogosphere?
By now, everyone is familiar with the whole concept of the “blogosphere.” According to common definition, the blogosphere represents the virtual realm in which all blogs exist in an interconnected community of online social networking activity. Such blogospheric activity includes writing, posting and commenting, and involves many different types of blogs and bloggers. As with the atmosphere, the blogosphere consists of several, well-defined layers. Let’s investigate this hypothetical representational phenomenon.. Continue reading »
Life, Twinkies, Zombies and Death
I have to admit, I am completely intrigued with human ideas, thought, and opinion. My favorite part of blog posts are the comments, and the best part of the newspaper is the opinion page. When talking with people, I am generally the one doing most of listening. In fact, I find that the more I listen, the more people are willing to talk. Often, they will talk with apparent and utter disregard for anything that I may have to add […] Continue reading »
Everything is Relative
People love to argue. Often, to resolve conflicting opinions, people will “agree to disagree,” saying something like, “it’s all relative.” The idea behind this common statement is that everyone believes in their own version of the truth, which may or may not happen to prove true for other people. Saying that “it’s all relative” also implies that every version of the truth is equally valid. Unfortunately, important discussions are often abandoned to the familiar tune of universal relativism. Continue reading »
Notes and Tips for Better Social Bookmarking
For those of you still hiding your bookmarks within the dark confines of your browser’s “favorites” menu, may I suggest stepping into the “here and now” with a fresh new approach: social bookmarking. Hopefully, most of my readers are already familiar with the many wonders of managing and sharing your bookmarks online, but for those who may still be questioning the whole idea, allow me to expound briefly on several of the immediate benefits: Universal access to your bookmarked sites […] Continue reading »
Five-Step Feed-Portfolio Makeover
Recently, I found myself drowning in an ocean of RSS feeds. Even after switching to Google Reader, which definitely speeds up the process of plowing through posts, I was wasting too much time consuming subscribed content. Thus, in an effort to find balance between saving time and staying current, I executed the following five-step feed portfolio makeover: Drop lame feeds. Previously, I had subscribed to a number of feeds simply because they were recommended or mentioned in an article somewhere. […] Continue reading »
Make Your First Post Suck, Everybody Else Does
Your first post is going to suck. Everyone’s first post sucks. It’s a fact of blogging. Despite your best intentions to write a stellar first post, it isn’t going to happen. Even after all the hard work setting up and configuring your blog, all the time spent obsessing over every CSS rule and semantic detail, and imagining your very best content presented at the very outset of your blog’s career — even after all of that, an award-winning first post […] Continue reading »
Repenting of My Nofollow Sins
Hello, my name is Jeff and I am nofollow addict. When I first began Perishable Press two years ago, in August of 2005, WordPress quickly became my blogging platform of choice. Everything about WordPress was great, so I had no trouble overlooking a few seemingly insignificant quirks, such as the nofollow attributes that are automatically applied to all comment links. In fact, at first, I really had no idea what they were or how they affected my site. Eventually, as […] Continue reading »
10 Firefox Extensions that I Use Every Day
In the Beginning.. Over a year ago, I posted an article recommending over fifty essential Firefox extensions. Excited to have discovered the miraculous joys of extending Firefox with such amazing functionality, I loaded my primary copy of Firefox with just about every potentially useful extension that I could find. Several weeks were spent playing with new features, customizing preferences, and configuring options to gel together in an orchestrated chorus of blissful browser harmony. After experiencing the functional firepower of my […] Continue reading »
Essential HTML Entities
Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” HTML characters. Some of these characters — such as quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes — are very common, while others — such as the copyright symbol, bullet, and arrow — happen less frequently. The vast majority of special characters, however, like the latin Ä (i.e., capital letter “A” with a diaeresis), and the mathematical symbol ⊃ (i.e., superset), rarely see the light of day on […] Continue reading »
Looking for High-Quality, Ad-Free Sites
Shouts out: First of all, to everyone who reads my content on a regular basis, thank you! Things are finally rolling along quite smoothly, and I just wanted to take a moment to let you know that I truly appreciate your kind participation with Perishable Press. Whether you’re sharing code, leaving comments, or even just reading my content, it’s all very inspiring and appreciated. We have some great things planned in the near future, and look forward to sharing them […] Continue reading »
WordPress 2.1 Blogroll Nightmare and Lessons Learned
Here at Perishable Press, we like to stay current by running the latest version of WordPress. The site launched in 2005 with WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn), eventually made the jump to version 2.0 (Duke), recently stepped up to 2.0.1 (Still Duke), and currently enjoys 2.0.5 (Ronan). Although each of these upgrades have required various file edits, plugin tweaks, and theme modifications, the process is always educational and remains an important aspect of this site. Much of our content revolves around using […] Continue reading »
Riding the Wave
Compared to some of the big players out there on the internet, we here at Perishable Press run a relatively small website. We began this project in September of 2005 with nothing but a domain name and a pocketful of inspiration. During the first several months of development, our traffic statistics looked something like: one unique visitor and 10,000 hits (i.e., nobody but us). And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, everything changed.. Continue reading »
Creative Balance
I have been drawing and sketching for over thirty years. The process of setting up for art, developing ideas, and letting the pens flow, really gets my juices flowing. Once that flow hits, and the music fades, hours disappear, manifesting imagination. This process is so familiar as to happen automatically, as a natural consequence of internal inspiration, artistic creativity, and the desire to express the subjective experience of my subconscious mind. Another important aspect of exercising a creative lifestyle involves […] Continue reading »
