It’s done. Finally.
Three weeks after making the move from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress, The Writings Of Dennis Earl is finally looking the way it should: like a professional website. It wasn’t easy. Numerous pieces had spacing issues which were an absolute bugger to correct. As I was trying to remove needless gaps between the paragraphs, the size and style of the font would change unexpectedly. It would either shrink, expand and/or darken in tone. Sometimes, small or large chunks of the text would simply disappear. On other occasions, certain paragraphs would be mysteriously repeated or relocated somewhere else on the page. As a newbie to WordPress blogging, it was very easy to get infuriated over the slightest frustration. I felt very depressed at the start.
But thankfully, the more time I spent figuring things out, the easier it became to focus on cleaning up and I began to feel a lot better. You have to understand that WordPress is more advanced that Windows Live. For one thing, you’re dealing with codes which tell the computer how your words are supposed to look once they’re published on the site. You see, when you want to work on a piece, there are two tabs to choose from: Visual and HTML. Right now, I’m typing on what’s called The Visual Editor. It’s pretty much the same as Windows Live only the window you type in is much smaller. (You can adjust the size but I haven’t tried to figure that out yet.) When you click HTML, you’ll see everything you’ve typed plus a whole bunch of other words bracketed with the greater than and lesser than signs. These are essentially commands that let the computer know when to bold something or underline it, when to make a page return or show what website you’re embedding in a certain word or phrase in the text.
A lot of the difficulty I had came from pieces that were originally written and saved in Microsoft Word then copied and pasted into the old Windows Live site. I learned the hard way that Word is not exactly WordPress-friendly. Once I figured out what to do, it was simply a matter of going into HTML, finding those pesky codes and deleting them, sometimes more than once. Perserverance, patience and constant previewing ultimately got the job done. I highly recommend that you make changes in HTML, not the Visual Editor, and that you preview your work before you publish. It is so much easier and I wish I knew that from the start.
While there are still some pieces that have an extra page return here and there, practically everything else is perfectly spaced out. I can always go back and cut out more page return codes if the mood strikes me, but I’m pretty happy with the way this website looks now, minor flaws notwithstanding. I have to learn that perfection is an impossibility.
This would be a good time to explain the new category policy. Back on Windows Live, you were restricted to using one category per piece. And you had a limit on the number of new categories you could create. I remember being really disappointed about that because I had a whole bunch of category ideas that I couldn’t use.
Thankfully, WordPress is a completely different story. You can add as many new categories as you want, whenever you want. As a result, those old ideas have been revived and successfully implemented into the new site. Since I’ve written quite a few pieces about The Beatles, U2, Seinfeld and The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, each of them has their own categories now. I could’ve done the same for Howard Stern and Iggy Pop, but for now, I’ve decided against that. (I’ve done enough cleaning up for now.) All of the old categories from Windows Live have safely made the transition to WordPress and I will continue to use them when appropriate. The complete list of active labels, including all the ones specifically created for WordPress, can be seen right under my search engine.
Here’s the other cool thing about WordPress categorization. You can use more than one per piece. In fact, you can use as many as you want. Although it was greatly time consuming and frustrating (because of those unwanted codes interfering with the layouts), I went through every piece to add more categories. With the exceptions of certain commentaries, personal history articles, most website announcements and the majority of entertainment reviews, everything else has at least two classifications. Since I’ve decided against using tags for now, these category labels will let readers know where these pieces, and other ones of a similiar nature, are filed.
Besides also correcting the occasional spelling mistake (I know there’s one I missed but I don’t remember where I saw it), I also made a series of deletions that were long overdue. In the fall of 2006, I acquired a new email address from Hotmail which has been the main contact for anyone wanting to get in touch with me. The earlier address is on the verge of extinction and I’ve eliminated all mentions of it on here. Sometimes I acknowledged the change in updates on certain pieces and sometimes I didn’t. Either way, it’s time to grow up. No more silly email addresses. It’s strictly dennischarlesearl@hotmail.com from now on.
Besides cleaning up a large number of pieces (thankfully not everything needed to be tweaked), I also went over all the posted comments which had unnecessary slashes inserted into various words. Without changing any of the sentiments, whether they were positive or negative, the direct feedback on this site now looks as it did on Windows Live.
So, with that huge job taken care of, what’s next for The Writings Of Dennis Earl? How about more writing and expanding my readership?
Stay tuned.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, October 30, 2010
10:50 p.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 
From The Published Archives: “Can we trust citizen journalists?”
Between April 2007 and January 2008, I contributed more than 100 pieces to Fading To Black, a blog devoted to covering “the downward spiral of the newspaper industry in the 21st century”. Since this website made the transition from Windows Live Spaces to WordPress recently, certain content had to be left behind which included the complete lists of every FTB piece I ever posted. Rather than bring back the lists, I’ve come up with a different approach.
Considering how long it’s been, I thought it would be interesting to revive some past offerings from my published archives which brings me to this item that was first seen on Fading To Black on November 17, 2007. Pierre Burton’s son, Paul, was the editor-in-chief of The London Free Press at the time and would contribute weekly columns about the media. That same day, he posted a commentary with the headline, “Can we trust citizen journalists?”, which I used in quotation marks for my own FTB commentary on his work.
In his column, he talks about the shocking Canadian scandal involving Robert Dziekanski, a young Polish construction worker and miner who was relocating to The Great White North to live with his mom in Kamloops. Ultimately left befuddled, aggravated and scared after being stranded for 10 hours at the Vancouver International Airport on October 14th that year (his flight actually arrived two hours behind schedule on the 13th in the afternoon), Dziekanski, who spoke no English, eventually isolated himself in a secure area of the airport and start throwing things in a fit of rage. Four overzealous RCMP officers, a mere 25 seconds after confronting him, used their tasers five times to try to calm him down. The move worked too well. He died. He was only 40. (Wikipedia has the whole story here.)
No one would’ve ever known about it were it not for Paul Pritchard and Sima Ashrafinia. While the latter used her cellphone, the former secretly taped the 10-minute incident with a digital video camera and the footage (contained on a memory card) ended up initially in the custody of the police. (For some inexplicable reason, they were not interested in Ashrafinia who actually tried to comfort Dziekanski.) When they refused to return it to him (after initially promising they would after holding it for 48 hours), fearing a possible cover-up Pritchard hired a lawyer, was reunited with his footage and promptly sold it to the three major networks in Canada (CBC, Global and CTV) for an unspecified sum. (CBC reported that it was “several thousand dollars” without giving an actual number.) The revealing footage contradicted the RCMP’s official views of the matter.
The result was a firestorm of fierce criticism entirely directed at the RCMP as well as the Vancouver International Airport. Several investigations were launched. Although the officers responsible for Dziekanski’s death have never been prosecuted, the RCMP did apologize to his mother this past April Fool’s Day in a press conference. Zofia Cisowski graciously accepted. She also accepted an undisclosed financial settlement and later dropped her lawsuits against the law enforcement institution and the airport. In June, Special Prosecutor Richard Peck announced that he uncovered new evidence about the case and advocated for its reopening. Interestingly, according to CanadaEast.com (the final paragraph of the above link), three of the officers have since been relocated and have been demoted to “administrative duties” while the one that remains is in trouble for another incident, this one involving a vehicular fatality. He’s already been suspended with pay.
Back to Berton’s column. I was disappointed he didn’t firmly answer his own headline, a question that remains deeply relevant today considering the ongoing, unethical antics of Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe. So I answered it for him.
Although you can still read this piece on FTB, I’ve decided to re-post it here with one major change. In the original posting, you’ll see the words “full column” at the very end. In 2007, clicking that part of the piece would take you to Berton’s original column which I quoted four paragraphs from. Today, however, it’s a dead link. However, when you click “full column” in my re-posting here, you’ll be transported to a different address which features the exact same column. Enjoy.
“Can we trust citizen journalists?”
Journalists cannot be everywhere, although news organizations have often tried. They know that simply being there can often mean the difference between ignominy and the industry’s biggest prizes.
That’s why we follow our political leaders around on otherwise dull tours where they give the same old speeches — we never know when they’ll say something different, when someone will do something unscripted or stupid, or when disaster will strike.
The spoils go to those who are there as it happens.
But with staffing forever being cut in the face of corporate realities, we are increasingly not there to see it happen. We “pick up” all kinds of stories after the fact, from those involved, from experts, from eyewitnesses . . .
Sadly, the headline to his column – “Can we trust citizen journalists?” – is purely rhetorical. He admits to being skeptical about citizen journalism but beyond offering general points about professionals who question the trustworthiness of amateur footage and how they argue that they’re better trained to report these kinds of important stories, he avoids taking a strong stance on either side of the issue.
There’s no question that footage of the Kennedy Assassination and the beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny, all captured by non-professionals, played pivotal roles in the coverage of those stories. But because these newsworthy events were recorded by ordinary citizens unfamiliar with the tenets of journalism, it was up to professional reporters to dig deeper to find as much relevant information as possible to put that footage into its proper context.
Raw footage that shows an event worthy of the public’s interest is invaluable. But professional, more responsible journalists who know how to mold that video, along with other pertinent facts, into an accurate report are more so. It’s a continuing shame that media corporations don’t agree.
}}}full column{{{
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
5:30 p.m.
- Commentary
- Sun Media/Sun TV
- TV
on October 19, 2010 at 5:30 pm Leave a Comment