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What Jane Has Been Up To: 2012
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2011 Blog: January through March, April through August, September through December
2010 Blog: January through March, April through Sept., Sept. through December
February 1, 2012
Ideas taking shape
I’m heading home from two big events: My first presentation in Utah and a business meeting in San Marcos (CA) with the people involved with Energize Students, the sponsors of my podcasts and the host for some additional content I will be offering through their site.
The Utah gig was with an incredible group of about 250 Montessori teachers, always a real shot-in-the-arm for me. It was also the first time I did a presentation in Utah, the significance of which figures only in my attempt to claim that I’ve worked in all 50 states. With this event, Idaho is the only remaining place on the list.
The California meeting cemented a commitment to collaborate to bring my work to parents and teachers in various forms through another channel (their Web site) and to promote their site to my contacts (and site visitors). We’re also talking about them sponsoring my newsletter— another possibility for a joint venture.
The feedback they’ve gotten from the students who responded to a contest they recently ran will focus the priorities for upcoming podcasts. I’ll be contacting friends and colleagues with expertise related to bullying and issues related to the culture of the school as well as those who can address issues relating to college (and job) preparation and applications. And we’re looking at producing two podcasts a month, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
“Too much stuff”
This “work” includes a reorganization of the information on this site. My marketing person feels like there’s just too much stuff on this site and it’s hard to find things. Hmm...
My intention has always been to have a TON of information and materials available on this site but I need for the “stuff” to be easy to find.
I mentioned that I’m working with a Web designer and although I’m hoping to keep certain “branding” pieces (my logo, the colors, and many of the graphics I’m currently using), I called her because I wanted to lay out these pages a little differently and add a few new features, including searchability.
Now, talking to Lynne (marketing person), I’m also thinking about the overall architecture of the site. For one thing, I’m going to get rid of the “Free Stuff” button. For one thing, nearly everything on the site is free and this section has become a little much to navigate.
So what if the site were organized by topic? Looking over the articles, excerpts, handouts, books, podcasts, links, and presentations, everything seems to split into one of the following five areas: adult behaviors (which will be listed either as teaching or parenting depending on which button you click), learning, culture and community, behavior, and inspiration and self-care.
I’m still not sure exactly how this will play out, but my first thought is that each topic will include links to everything on the site related to that topic, including articles, books, podcasts, etc. It will still end up being a lot to plow through, and I don’t want to spend weeks just re-creating a different mess, so I’m real open to suggestions.
Meanwhile, it’s now early morning, Feb. 2, and good to be home for the next few weeks. Much on my plate for today, so I’m gonna start my day.
January 15, 2012
The first podcast pages have launched!
I spent this weekend uploading five of the podcasts I’ve done to this site and creating Spectrum Podcast pages that visitors can go to to hear the audio and download the accompanying support material, at the very least, a PDF handout with tips, notes, show highlights, and a bunch of resources related to the topic. (Click here for the home page for multimedia presentations, including the Spectrum Podcast series.)
So far, the pages for two of the shows are done, including my very first program where I chat with Dr. Lulu Lopez about increasing parent involvement in schools, and the following show with Don and Gracie Tillman talking about technology and special needs.
These shows are also available on iTunes where you can not only download the audio for these programs, but can also subscribe so you can be notified as new shows are published— all completely FREE. How cool is that?
Three of the other shows are also through production and have been uploaded. I will create pages for them in the next few days as I get the handout PDFs finalized. (This is the most time-consuming part of the entire process for me, but I’m done with one, almost done with another, and will have the third one by the end of the week.)
It may be a few days or more before these shows post on iTunes but I can still get the audio and handouts up for my site visitors. (That bit of magic is being done by my sponsors at Energize Students.
The wheels are grinding and I’m finally seeing progress in this area. I have a recording time set for the next session and one other show already recorded but not produced yet. So keep checking my multimedia page for a lot of new content in the next few weeks.
Web site changes
I’ve been thinking about a few new features I’ve been wanting to add to my site. I know I’ve made a lot of changes (and major improvements) over the years, but I still don’t have this site where I want it to be.
For starters, I’m not crazy about the bar with my contact info at the top of each page, and I realize that if I change to a horizontal navigation bar, I can increase the amount of “real estate” for sharing content on each page.
My wish list also includes drop-down menus, search capabilities, links to post each page on Twitter or “Like” it on Twitter, and a sign-up sheet for my newsletter. (More about that below!) The only problem is that I don’t know how to code these features. I did learn them all a few years back when I was too tied up with travel and book deadlines to apply what I’d learned.
If I want to make these changes happen and move forward with a more up-to-date site, I either have to re-learn everything or I have to hire some help. A friend recommended a local contact and I made a call.
Many of these changes are things I’ve wanted on my site for years but just couldn’t manage time-wise. At this point, I don’t mind doing the grunt-work myself, but the design features I want— and the code I need to make them happen— are beyond my capabilities. Plus, I need to spend my time doing other stuff right now and just think it’s a good business decision to seek guidance, another brain (or at least set of eyes), and talents I don’t have to move this along.
I’ve asked my new person for a one-page template I can use throughout the site. (I may end up with a couple templates for different sections of the site but this one to get started.) Either way, it means that once we agree to a design, I will still end up with the bulk of the work because frankly, I can’t even imagine what it would cost to have someone else re-create all 800+ pages of this site. But this kind of work is mostly mechanical, saving the template as the existing page and pasting content in where it belongs. Tedious, but doable.
I’m hoping to maintain the overall feel of the current site in the re-design. From a branding point of view, I really don’t want to overhaul things like my logo, and I’m still really liking these colors, but I’m also pretty open to what she has to say. We’ll talk later this week to see what she’s come up with and will proceed from there, so stay tuned.
And in my spare time... a newsletter!
Years ago, I started collecting email addresses to use in a data base for a newsletter I wanted to send out to let people know when I released a new book or made changes or additions to my site, for example. I took a few classes that might have helped had I not once again been side-tracked with other projects or gone too much to make any headway.
I mentioned in an earlier blog post about having a little more time on my hands right now, and I think that this signals a chance to move forward on this project as well. As is often the case, this vacuum seems to have attracted a couple of “right people” to help make things happen. One is the person who will very possibly turn out to be my new Web design helper. The other is a friend from my book group whose background is marketing and who is well versed in setting up Constant Contact accounts— something that did not exist when I was learning things like CocoaMySQL.
We first talked about this a year ago but I couldn’t get past the first step: exporting the names from my Address Book into an Excel spreadsheet. It took about two days to go through my 3500+ names and delete listings like airlines and hotels, as well as friends and relatives who probably wouldn’t be interested, but once that “group” was established, I had to figure out how to get them to this contact person in a form she could use.
I spent several hours on the phone with Apple and with my ISP trying to come at this from a few different angles. I even tried setting up an Entourage Mail account but getting the addresses in there proved to be a similar impossibility.
Then the lightbulb went off and after a little online research, I found a $3.99 app designed just for the purpose of exporting data from Apple’s Address book. Click on a couple buttons and voila! Mailing list exported! It took maybe 10 seconds to show up in an Excel file that my Constant Contact person could use to set up my account. Yay!
We still have a great deal of work ahead, though I’ve asked her to hold off until I see where this Web redesign is heading (so I can match the appearance of the newsletter) and also take a look at some samples to see how I want to set this up, what I want to include, and how I want to answer a few of the questions she asked that I would never have otherwise considered.
Heeding the message
There’s this joke about a man sitting on his roof, praying to God to save him from the flood waters threatening his town. A truck driver stops to give him a lift but the man says, “No thanks! God will save me.” As the water starts to rise around his house, a boat comes by to rescue him. Once again, the man says, “No thanks! God will save me.” Soon afterwards, a helicopter offers him a lifeline, yet the man declines, assuring the pilot that God will save him.
The helicopter flies off just as the water sweeps the man away, drowning him in the flood. When he gets to Heaven, he confronts God, asking why he didn’t save him. God says, “Look. I sent a truck. I sent a boat. I even sent a helicopter. It didn’t look much like you wanted my help after all.”
I’ve thought of this story many times over the years, most recently in light of a brief news story I heard about one of the main reasons women don’t reach their highest potential being the tendency to do everything themselves. I think I mentioned this in a blog post a few weeks ago. It made a very strong impression on me.
When I think of slowing down— and turning 60 last April had a good bit to do with that— I was thinking that meant working less. At the same time, I was coming up with all these ideas and seeing all these opportunities to develop them. But whether they involved the audio podcasts, evolution of my Web site, marketing ideas, ePublishing, or, say, video projects (which I haven’t even mentioned yet), I knew that I was out of my depth in knowledge, skills, and talent.
So OK, I’ve never shied away from learning new things, but the more I started learning about all of the above, the more fragmented I was starting to feel. For the past few months I’ve been feeling tired and unfocused. I know I’ve used the term “spinning my wheels” and “overwhelmed” at least once or twice in the past few months’ worth of posts. I want to move forward and either don’t know where to start, or don’t like what I’m turning out.
Although finances are still an issue (my cash flow hasn’t been this tight in well over a decade), what I keep hearing over and over again (in my gut, in my head) is to just shut up and listen to people who are smarter than I am. Absorb advice, ideas, other perspectives, and other people’s experiences.
I don’t think I’ve consciously resisted asking for help. I just wonder if it ever occurred to me to ask. Another old joke about not being able to appreciate the sweater I just knitted because I didn’t spin the yarn, and when I learned to spin, because I hadn’t raised the sheep. Yikes!
This idea that I had to do it all myself has been a fairly consistent theme in my life. Sure there were people who had their own agendas, who had very different ideas from what I was looking for, or who made a lot of promises and didn’t deliver. But maybe, just maybe, I’m ready to surrender here, make whatever shift I need to make at this stage of my life, opening to possibilities, and rethink my role in all this.
The invitation is hereby posted.
I am ready to receive.
Jan. 21 update: Just saw this posted on Facebook: “I like the quote from the 60th hexagram of the I Ching: Acceptance of Limitation is the beginning of Transcendence. I have experienced this to be true.” Thanks, Susannah.
January 3, 2012
Circling in the New Year
Starting the year off on the road. No complaints. It feels like ages since I’ve done a presentation and I’m ready to be back with a group of teachers tomorrow.
I’m also very glad to have the work that I do right now. Every few years, I seem to go into a holding pattern with my work. The last time this happened to a significant degree was in 1999. (Interesting that I find no reference to this period in my ’99 blog, which had no entries for that year after the beginning of July. I certainly journaled a great deal back then but my blogging days were just starting out and I suppose I wasn’t really oriented to writing here yet.)
At that time, I was working on Creating Emotionally Safe Schools and up to my ears in research, trying to spin a coherent thread from mountains of articles, books, and about 1500 large-sized index cards. I had some work in Australia and on the way, went on a short retreat in New Zealand. (I had a presentation scheduled for Tauhara Centre, but otherwise spent the rest of the week touring and reflecting on my life.)
I remember having this sense that my career had totally stalled out. Of course, the book gave me a sense of purpose and direction but it felt as though nothing was moving forward. I couldn’t see beyond where I was at the moment and had no idea if the work I was doing on the book even had a point.
In retrospect, that sounds absurd, but it speaks to a lack of perspective, something that often happens when I’ve been granted the time and grace to actually focus on a project. Not unlike where I’m at right now.
Things are slow. I have absolutely nothing (no speaking engagements, that is) on the books after the end of March aside from our next geek cruise and vacation in April, and although work on the podcasts is going well and I have a ton of ePub projects on deck, I can’t help feeling like I’m just spinning my wheels. That old feeling of “what’s the point” starts creeping in, dragging with it a very old and nasty habit of worrying about finances and future.
So OK. 2012 comes in with a whine. Lovely.
I certainly have had a great deal of evidence that the Universe supports me (and the work I do), and yet here I am, starting a new year off wondering if maybe the Universe forgot I exist. I also know that the remedy for this nonsense is to roll up my sleeves and do whatever the hell is in front of me, whether I trust or not.
So I booked a 5-star hotel (base for the MacMania group I’m with) for our 4 days in Amsterdam and yes, it cost a fortune, but so did all the other hotels in that area. And I prepaid a non-refundable, non-changeable fortune at that. How’s that for trust? Sheesh.
Getting ready to land soon. I’ve got one more flight, from Atlanta to Little Rock (which I swear we flew over a little while ago), and then a 45-minute drive to the hotel. I’ve got my presentation ready for tomorrow with back-up plans if I have extra time. I brought my knitting and plan to kick back at the hotel tonight and tomorrow.
Happy New Year and yeah, welcome back!
2011 Blog: January through March
2010 Blog: January through March, April through Sept., Sept. through December
2009 Blog: January through April, May through Dec
Other “Highlights” pages: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. For an index to all blogs, photos, and other personal information, click here.
Jane’s current Blog.
About Jane home page (bio, intro, other professional information).
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