Ravi’s Rants

I recently asked a very close non-blogger, never-blogged-before friend to start his own blog on my new multi-blog site, YehHaiIndia.com (driven by WordPress Mu - very cool software).

His immediate response was:

The problem with blogging is you need ideas and thoughts you want to write.

And you are assuming I have thoughts that are worth writing about….

The biggest problem with publishing a blog, is not that you may not have enough or something worthy to say.

The biggest problem is actually “fear”.

“I can’t believe he wrote something that stupid!”
“What the heck was she thinking when she wrote that?”
“He has no idea what he is talking about!”

Fear of criticism. Fear of being judged.

We don’t want to put our thoughts and opinions “out there” for everyone to judge; and for some to call us “a moron”, “clueless”, “totally wrong”.

Whereas blogging is like thumbing your nose at this fear.

You put yourself out there in every post. Every thought and comment and opinion in your blog is yours - and yours alone. You are setting yourself up for criticism and judgment and name-calling. And you want people to read your posts, criticize you, judge you, interact with your blog and give you feedback.

As long as we fear this feedback, we simply cannot do remarkable things.

No, it doesn’t mean you ignore common sense and do something stupid (like putting crazy photos of you on your blog while somehow involving your employer).

It means that if your post makes sense, and all you fear is being judged by your colleagues, friends or family - and fear about what others might say, then I say, just get over it, thumb your nose at your fear, and get ‘er done.

“Bacn” - pronounced as “Bacon” - is spam (kind of), but not really the lewd, disgusting, “killing my inbox” type.

From Jargon Watch at Wired.com:

It’s not really spam. You want to read it (and probably would), you just don’t have the time. Thanks to the folks at PodCamp Pittsburgh, there’s a new web-term you can now use specifically for these types of e-mail notifications. Things like bill-payment receipts, Twitter requests, newsletters, project notifications—all are bacn.

Here’s more if you want more.

Camtasia is giving away a slightly older version of their famous screen-capture software, Snag-it, that lets you go beyond the “Prnt Scrn” button.

Here’s where you can download it.

A Print-Screen Tip
If you press the “Alt” + “Prt Scrn” buttons together, you will capture only the front-most (active) window - which means you no longer have to capture your entire screen along with pieces of your desktop and other windows open, just to get a screenshot of your browser window.

Also, it helps to reduce the size of the browser (or whatever window you’re trying to get a screen-shot of) first, and re-size it to a much smaller size before hitting “Alt” + “Prnt Scrn”. That way you won’t get a gigantic image when you’re just trying to capture just a small portion of the window.