Website hackers are really something I don’t want to have to deal with.  Does anyone have any recomendations for a WordPress Security plugin?  I’m waiting to get on the beta tester group for Maximum Security, but I don’t really want to wait very long for a solution?

Stick’ll let everyone know when the WGOM is safe again at twitter.com/WGOM.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I love baseball.  I love the actual event, the strategies, the players, most of the fans, fantasy baseball ¹ and of course most of all the Minnesota Twins.  If It were possible and I was able, I would watch every single baseball game of the season.  I’m confident that it would be the best summer/year ever.  Throughout the history of mankind I don’t think anyone could come up with a better way to spend a year.  In short, I guess I’m a pretty big baseball fan.

[By the way, spring training starts next week.  Twins pitchers and catchers report on Sunday!]

Back to the subject of this post.  One of my favorite tools for researching baseball statistics is StatCorner.com.  This site created by Matthew Carruth and Graham MacAree focuses on advanced statistics to measure a player’s quality.  I’m not going to go into the specifics of the statistics; they are more reliable than the traditional ² statistics, and you can read more about them here.

I spend a lot of time on StatCorner and I have found it to be very user friendly.  But yesterday I discovered that StatCorner offers a Firefox search plug-in!  Now I can search for player stats right from my Firefox browser!  You can install the plug-in from this page.  Here is what the search box looks like:

And here is the whole page:

If you love baseball and need the ability to quickly find player statistics, I highly recommend that you start using StatCorner’s Firefox plug-in.  It is simply awesome.  I didn’t think I could be any more addicted to StatCorner’s website, but this plug-in has proved that point of view wrong.

The video reminds me of a Queen song . . . if Queen sang comedic songs about calling shotgun that is.  I think its a funny video.  The end threw me for a loop until I heard the last line.  It all came together.  The world made sense again.  Here is the video:

React! How bad do you want shotgun? Anybody have special shotgun rules? Right-nut, anyone?

For some reason, I’ve recently been asked to read and comment on a number of friends’ work.  Personal statements, blog posts, magazine articles, and a couple of other minor writings have been handed to me to look over within the last month.  And you know what, I enjoyed every minute of reading and commenting.  It was fun, challenging, and actually helped my own writing process.

Frankly, most of the items I was supposed to comment on were already near published form, but I think having someone else look over your work is a good thing to do.  Irrespective of how far along in the process you are, it allows you to bounce ideas off of other people.  It also gives you a chance to reflect on how other people react to what you have written.  Finally, it gives you the break necessary to distance yourself from publication, which in turn allows you the time necessary to rethink and rework your words.  It is very easy to quickly click publish; but, your work benefits from allowing your thoughts to ripen.

Editing other people’s work also has several benefits for those doing the editing:

1. It allows you to reflect on how other people view your “finished” products;
2. It emphasizes the importance of self-regulating your writing when no one is available to read your work;
3. It gives you practice rewriting and reworking sentences, which is something most people do not do to their own work; and finally,
4. It is favor you provide to a friend which strengthens your relationship with the other person.

Who knows, maybe in the near future you’ll need someone to look over your work.  Line up some favors now, while you have time.

One final note: You don’t have to wait for someone to ask you for help.  If you know someone is working hard writing something, offer to read it.  People might not know that you are willing to help, so let them know you are ready and willing.

Besides, editing and commenting on other people’s work should be an early-adopter habit: You get an early preview of what is coming up the pipeline and what is in the works.  There’s nothing more exciting than reading about the next big thing that has yet to happen.

Luckily, late Monday night, Chris Welle, whom I follow on Twitter, brought my attention to the Forum’s brand spanking new website: www.inforum.com.  Lets take a quick look to compare the sites.

First the old site:

And now the new site:

It is somewhat difficult to see the differences in the screen grabs above, but the new site has a number of improvements:

1. A new wider format.  The old site was very narrow with the sidebars talking up about 65% of the screen.  The new site gives the actual news stories much more real estate than the previous site;
2. Revamped RSS feeds which offer greater choice in the type of stories syndicated along with fewer of the annoying ads that the old feed had;
3. A better story tagging feature which will help ad targeting among other things;
4. Better navigation and search features;
5. Finally, the new appearance of the site should not be overlooked.  I simply think the new format and templates of inform.com are a vast improvement over the old site.

It is great to see more local paper’s update their look to conform to modern web standards, and I think Inforum.com certainly went about the change the right way.  I am excited be a regular visitor of the new and improved site.

Are there more examples of smaller media/communications companies [Forum Communications isn't small, but the area/region it serves doesn't qualify as a top market] improving their content online, or are most smaller news outlets in need of face lifts?

Today I’m going to think out loud a bit about blogging.  Andy Drish has a very good post about blogging over at his site called, “Change Your Life – Start a Blog.”  Blogging has had a profound effect on many people’s lives, and certainly has changed mine.  Andy’s post basically chronicles how he came into blogging and his early struggles with the medium:

I was clueless. So Mike [Note: a fellow blogger - ed.] started teaching me the basics… And I hated it. For two reasons: 1) I had nothing to write about. 2) I sucked at writing . . . Being a bad writer with nothing to write about isn’t the best foundation to start a blog.

Id.  Luckily, most people who stick with blogging eventually learn to create posts built upon what other people have written, but with their own analysis.  Nevertheless, I think most people go through phases where they don’t know what to write, or question whether people want to read what they’ve written.

It is unquestioned that writing a meaningful post is most difficult when your first begin, but I also think this is an ongoing struggle for authors.  [Based on my last week of posts, I do not mean to say that my posts are meaningful for other people, but rather that they are mostly my own work.]  I’m not sure what the trick is to winning this struggle.  I could be to find a muse of some sort to get you started [read: North Dakota this last week] or it could also be a community you have become involved and invested in [for me this includes primarily the WGOM Community and fellow bloggers I know on a personal level such as Andy or J.M. Verville].

Of course Andy quickly started writing about things he is very passionate [and very good at cultivating]:

But I quickly realized that blogging isn’t just about writing. It’s about ideas. And conversation. And relationships. But mostly… blogging is about people.

Id.  Andy is clearly right.  I think blogging is largely about finding your particular niche and exploring it while building personal relationships.  Originally when I started blogging [at a prior domain which has long since lapsed] I had one goal: to get practice writing.

Over the years, I do think I’ve had plenty of practice, but that practice was not the great intellectual pursuit I was searching for.  More and more the writing that I do has become secondary to my participation in online communities.  Writing in a vacuum is not much fun.  Conversing with people about what you each have written is much more rewarding.  It took me a long time to learn this lesson, and Andy is right: blogging is more about the people than the actual writing.

So take Andy’s advice: Start a blog, change your life, and think about the world in a new and exciting way.  But make sure that you are particupating and building relationships along the way.

[You can start your blog for free at WordPress.com]

On the Reader team, we know that the old adage “change is good” isn’t always true. Sometimes, change is just change. In this case, we hope that these decisions both improve your Reader experience today, and pave the way for additional improvements down the line. So…what’s changing, you ask?

See Official Google Reader Blog: Square is the new round.  The visual changes took me a few minutes to get used to, but nothing is really all that different from the prior version.

But that’s not to say nothing has changed.  Google Reader was always fast, but right after the updated Reader loaded I noticed a substantial difference it takes to load.  I never had a problem with the time Reader took to load, but I’m always in favor of enhanced performance.

So basically Reader got  a face lift, and it now much faster.  Good job Google.