How to Be Rude on the Subway

In the beautiful city of New York there are regularly millions of people trying to get from one place to another — the most affordable of which has to be the New York subway system. If all the people who rode the subway system would abide by even half of the rules that are announced over the loudspeaker, everything would run a lot more smoothly. Since, for some reason, people don’t want to follow the rules, allow me to introduce some more rules — rules of how to be rude while riding on the subway.

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Twenty Ten Rotating Image Header Tutorial for WordPress.com

UPDATE:  December 9, 2010
This morning, we removed the rotating headers from all 13 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network because calling all those remote images was significantly adding a lot of page load time for our articles.  We’ve gone back to using a single header image for each blog hosted here on WordPress.com, and we hope you’ll notice, and appreciate, the speed gains.  This tutorial is still valid as of this writing, so if you’re still interested in remotely serving called image headers for your blog, the information here should still be valid.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
After reading a keen blog post from Automattic’s Nick Momrik — concerning new default image headers for the WordPress.com Twenty Ten theme — I decided to see if I could get my Cutline Rotating Image Header Tutorial working with the new, default, Twenty Ten theme we are currently using for the Boles Blogs Network here on WordPress.com.

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The In Situ Strings Stretch Technique and How to NOT Stretch Your Guitar Strings

As a burgeoning — bludgeoning? — Bending Blues Guitarist, I am shocked, SHOCKED!, by the bad advice and the rotten technique I witness on the internets, and on YouTube, demonstrating the wrong way to properly stretch a new set of guitar strings.

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Quantifying the Freshly Pressed Effect on WordPress.com and How to Get Featured

Yesterday, at 10:00am Eastern my article — American Folklore and The Blues Black Cat Bone — was featured on WordPress.com’s Freshly Pressed.  It was a great and grand honor to be selected and here’s my reward letter from the Freshly Pressed editrix:

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How to Make a Paper Indian

It is always a fascination learning what materials artists use for creating their inspiration.  Allen and Patty Eckman live in South Dakota and since 1987, they have been making life-sized paper sculptures of Native American Indians.  This artistry has, so far, netted them a cool $5 million USD.

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The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com

UPDATED:  December 9, 2010
After six months of usage, I cancelled our yearly paid TypeKit account this morning and removed all the fonts from all 13 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network.  I did this for two reasons.  The first is because there is a niggly font rendering problem for iOS 4.2 devices like iPhone and iPad with some fonts that requires you to change how you publish a headline or your name, and you need to add Custom CSS to try to make the workaround work.  I have no interest in sleuthing font solutions across 13 blogs for a service we pay to use.  TypeKit should not have offered inferior font sets to customers that causes this sort of hassle.  The second reason for TypeKit removal is that some of the font sets we were using were adding 100kb to over 225kb to page load times.  That’s just too much cruft to load for too little aesthetic gain, and adding that to the iOS font problems we’ve been haggling over the last couple of days placed the final straw on our back that irretrievably broke our interest in supporting TypeKit on our blogs network.

UPDATED:  July 4, 2010
I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn’t simple or intuitive and since there really isn’t any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You start by going to Typekit.com and signing up for an account.  This afternoon, I purchased the Portfolio option for $50.00USD a year because I have 14 blogs in need of fonting.  If you have one blog, you should be able to get away using the free Trial plan — but you will have to wear a Typekit badge.  You do not have to purchase the CSS upgrade on WordPress.com to get Typekit to work on your blog.

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How to Die in Peace

Do you plan to die in peace — or do you just plan to die as death finds you?

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