Seems like I do this every couple of years, or perhaps it is more often, but it seems like a long-scale cycle.
My mind is always awhirl, thinking, thinking about writing, thinking about ideas to share. Thinking about a way to make money from my writing about things I want to write about. I know that I could freelance. This isn’t about that. This is about identity, changing technology, and fear of success.
I put all my writings on this site, well most of the blog writings, a few years back. I was happy with this. Reason Creek is where the my personal logic flowed. Then while working a temp job to evade the demons that pecked at my brain constantly as my brother Roger was dying and for a while after his death, I listened to hundreds of audio books as I proofed digital versions of old theses for the local university library. During that time I found there was a spot in my brain where Interesting Things which could be filed under the heading of Women’s Legacy Project were found. I purchased the domain and began pulling things out of my brain with which to organize the site. Let’s see… this would have been in March 2015. A year later, this past March, the site was doing well enough to attract a diverse group of women to tell stories on WLP about women who had changed their own lives.
Then… somewhere along the path in the last six months… I’ve stumbled off my productive path and into a patch of rumination brambles. It is now September and I am looking at all these things/aspects over which I’ve stumbled:
So I came over here to Reason Creek to vent and create an image of what is going on in my scattered brain. (I created the Mind-map image with Scapple.) I now think I see the problem I am having, in addition to the shading non shading of certain items; the items in red at the bottom of the mind map exist in two different roles and at two different levels in my way of seeing the world. I either need to become comfortable with the status overlap in two areas of my life or rearrange something.
Nothing is solved. But I feel better. My world is both expanding as a business person, and this requires shifting my identity as a writer out of a very comfortable spot into a place that is risk-based, and this is happening as my daughter prepares to officially change her primary status from daughter to wife. Her status change does not change my mother role and how I will see her, but it will change how I behave towards a woman with her own household in her own right.
Word of advice: don’t change your business model when rearranging your personal life. Needless to say, I do not take my own advice.
Security Recommendations for Blogging
Here a Hack, There a Hack, Everywhere a Hack, Hack
(Updated 2015 version)
In this world where hacking seems to be de rigueur, it is becoming more and more difficult and important to have a secure blog. The attacks that began a couple years ago on WordPress sites left an especially sinister taste in my mouth. But every single node along the information superhighway can be hacked. Heartbleed infiltrated via certain models of Cisco routing equipment. Little guys and big guys are not safe. Banks are robbed in real life. Sites are hacked in real life.
It seems that there may be a staging happening for a future truly sinister attack. I am not a conspiracy theorist! (Pardon me while I stamp my feet in vehement disagreement and adjust my tinfoil hat.) War is raging. It isn’t clear what the purpose of many of these hacking attempts might be. This is one of the most worrisome aspects of the hacking.
But do what you can. Keep your site up to date via software and plugins. Don’t host abandoned sites that you aren’t keeping up on your self-hosted account just because you can. If you have an account with a host and you have three sites on it, but two of them are just for testing or to maybe be developed in the future, and these two are not kept up to date as rigorously as your primary site – take those sites down. They are veritable thru-ways for hackers. Hackers want your server, not your blog.
Your chip embedded credit card info can be scanned from a distance, stolen, if you do not employ an RFID shield to protect your cards. Mortgages, bank accounts, and credit companies have all lost private data, client data. And these data losses are from these major sites.
So it isn’t surprising that hundreds of thousands of smaller sites have been hacked.
Hosting
I have moved my business from a self-hosted to a managed host. I may also be moving to another hosting company for my non-commercial site. Because I am an impoverished blogger I will be learning how to maintain much of the site myself; it may take a while, but it will be worth it. Managed and maintained are different things in the hosting world, but I will take that on at another time.
Why am I switching?
I need a different hosting company. I need a server company that I trust and that will be reliable and can let me know if anything looks flaky. Fiduciary responsibility mandates I do the best I can. I need to know that I will have backup that will kick in should anything happen at their primary location. I want a U.S. based company. I want a company that will take it seriously if sites that share a server with me suddenly look like Swiss cheese from a security standpoint.
Many hacks of websites are simply to use the websites as tunnels to the servers. I want to work with companies who are diligent in their attempts to foil hackers.
As a semiotic anthropologist I know something about information, more than most, but I do not know that much about computer security although I probably know a lot more than most bloggers. This is the most straight forward account I have found of security and the current situation bloggers are facing:
While these attacks against popular content management systems are nothing new, the sudden increase is a bit worrying. Until the botnet in question is taken down, however, there is not much that can be done aside from ensuring you are taking every precaution. That includes using a solid username and password combination as well as ensuring your CMS and plugins are up-to-date. From: The Next Web.
Tucson is a cool place that attracts cool people. That is a metaphor folks, it is hotter than blazes here in Tucson right now. I like supporting local community, and I like supporting local businesses. And Tucson is a blue oasis in a sea of red. And it has good karma. People have lived here for thousands and thousands of years; some say humans have been here for over 10,000 years. You can read more about community and good juice or strong referral and reputation credentials in the second part of my Juice, Juju, Karma, and The Business of Blogging.
It is difficult to decide what is the best platform for you. I hate to say it, but if you are a small blogger that operates as a small business working on the solo-preneur model, you may be up a creek without a paddle. Security costs. Ad Sense and Etsy incomes just are not going to cover a hiring a developer to create a Drupal site for you. (Think tens of thousands of buckos.) If you are someone like me who is thinking about being able to sell digital downloads in the near future you know that you need a site over which you have control. No one will take a iwantafreewebsite.blogspot.com seriously as a major business. If you do not have control over your own website and do not own your domain, which is your basic online branded identity, you do not own the most important intellectual property associated with your blog.
This is why most bloggers who leave their blahblah.blogspot.com or blahblah.wordpress.com sites for self-hosted websites do so. There are other popular platforms used for blog hosting, but WordPress has the largest percentage of the blog market. Some would argue that makes it a reason to not use WordPress as it makes it a huge target. At one time that might have been an issue, but now with increased security and the general growth and maturity of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the argument is moot. The company has very specifically addressed security with the purchase and incorporation of Akismet and Brute Protect.
Most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis are either running collaborative sites or will be selling digital products if they are not already doing so. With the hacking, the vast number of plugins a blogger has to use to have a sophisticated site you, it is not unreasonable to have to do several updates a week to keep up-to-date with security releases.
I was VERY uncomfortable with my attempts to create a pay site on a self-hosted WordPress site. By the time I added up my costs for a somewhat secure framework, a responsive child theme, a payment gateway, social media, and curation plugins I am spending way too much money and time with too many different sellers, plugins and updates, for products that while they are much safer than the free versions of similar products, are by no means guaranteed to be secure. If I am going to have to do all that I want a system where my efforts will allow me to scale up to add e-commerce, meeting software, webinar, direct feeds from my social media accounts, and integration with them for posting, and publication software.
So I am now hosting my business site through a well-established provider on which my ecommerce will be channeled on Rainmaker. And surprise, surprise, this is a WordPress-derived platform.
As long as I own my domain, and keep backups of my content, I would rather deal with one known agent rather than a dozen vendors from who knows where.
Feel free to ask questions. I will attempt to answer them, and if I can’t do that, I will talk to my network and get the answers.
What A Freakin' Amazing Week!
After several weeks of living in a funk I have re-emerged with energy and ideas. Watch out world!
TED Women – TEDx Tucson Women
I was lucky to be invited, or have an invitation wrangled for me by my friend Pam Vaner of My Sassy Notions, to a gathering organized by Mary Reed, TEDxTucson Leader extraordinaire, to catch a livestream of a session of TED Women 2015 with around 15 other Tucson women at Connect Co-working. These local women are so inspiring and I feel privileged to have been included. I hope to feature some of their doings on the Women’s Legacy Project. Tucson is such a cool place, filled with radically creative people!
I encourage all readers to check out the videos of sessions at TED Women 2015 in general and A Question Worth Asking: Babies at TED Events? in particular. Why? This is a key segregation issue that has held women back in innumerable situations throughout history.
TED has been around for over two decades I think, and I am so not buying that this is the first time that a woman was asked to leave because she had an infant with her.
Now do not get your panties in a bunch as the TED honchos got wind of this and must have realized that a potential bad media disaster could be in the offing, or maybe they really cared that an attendee was being booted because she was a mother with an infant. We will never know for sure, but the outcome was positive if not perfect. The primary livestream viewing area on site was made available to her, and another special “screaming baby” livestream room was set up so mothers with fussy offspring could still participate.
I have to commend BlogHer for being the first major conference I ever attended that provided childcare for attendees and allowed them to plan it into their regular old planning to attend the conference in a way that feels inclusive and non-segregationist. Babies regularly come into sessions with mothers at BlogHer Conferences too. Making women feel set apart or like second class citizens via segregation is something that should have disappeared from places of innovation and sharing by our best and brightest long, long ago. Better late than never, I guess.
The Container Store
The second rather nice warm and fuzzy happening this week was connecting with other Tucson bloggers via a blogging luncheon and tour at The Container Store before the Grand Opening weekend that is going on right now. The Container Store, by the way, is not an evil place. Becca Ludlum of My Crazy Good Life, garnered an invite for me. And I was pleasantly surprised to find Martha Bishop and Suzi Hileman there. And I met Desert Chica‘s Karen Heffren and the woman behind Tucsontopia but I cannot for the life of me remember her name. And others whose names/blogs my leaky brain has neurally mis-shelved.
I like it when people are cooperative rather than competitive, we all rise in collaborative effort. In a way I wrote about this sort of positive interaction in the Women’s Legacy Project article too.
Find of the Week
Instant Articles on Facebook looks like it could be great per mobile viewing if the people featured in this video are to be believed as they talk about what is being promoted as a “new tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook.”
I am not one of the people who can use this feature so I have no idea how much it will cost or if it will be useful for small publishers like myself, but it bodes well for the future of publishing. Facebook will not be able to corner the market on this kind of layering will it?
Anyway, it was a good week.
I've Missed You
I miss this blog! I miss my readers. I miss my topics.
In case you don’t know, I am working on a new site called the Women’s Legacy Project. It is more focused on a certain topic and a certain demographic than this free-for-all that is my life and my quest for a fair trade cuppa.
New endeavors always present a liminally-enriched and -challenged experience (and yes liminally is a slightly invented word.) Liminal is transitional – neither one or the other and sort of an eerie feeling and state of being between. The Wikipedia entry (at least in the version I called up today) is a pretty good coverage of the concept.
I am going to have to double up on the writing to be able to do that project, which is needed and a very good thing, and still have my sanity keeping writing and commentary here.
I have to run. Off to visit my Aunt Maralee who is age 89, and the last person genetically standing in the generation above me, and my cousin Linda who lives with her and takes care of her.
I just wanted to pop in and say, “Hi!” before I check out of the Clarendon Hotel and Spa (that I will write about here or on my Hill Research Site) where I stayed for the Press Publish Conference I attended yesterday.
Vera Bradley Is Not Who She Never Was
Regular readers will be surprised at my choice of topic for today in this non-compensated post about the little woman’s accessory company gone global from the Northeastern Indiana close to where I grew up – Vera Bradley located in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Except that the company is not actually in Fort Wayne from what I can tell, but rather has its HQ in Huntington, Indiana (which claims Dan Quayle as a local boy except that he grew up and went to school in Phoenix, Arizona.) And Vera was not a founder. They liked the name. It was the name of a mother of one of the founders. When I spent five days in the Fort Wayne area in August, I thought I would follow up with Vera Bradley folks I met at the Windy City Soiree last year. Health events in my family kept me from having the time to pursue interviews. The soiree/event was at Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago just before BlogHer 2013. The Vera Bradley Store there was one of the retailers participating in the event.
I came away with a very positive impression of the company’s outreach to bloggers as well as the social media and marketing people and programs. I received a great little, but not chintz (pun intended,) swag bag.
Why did I love it so much that I carried it even though my dog nibbled the corner as soon as I arrived back in Tucson from the conference?
I was not new to the brand with this swag. I had been given a few small gifts over the last 15 years from friends in the Fort Wayne area.
I also won a drawing for a large travel bag that I also really like due to the sturdy, soft, stuff-it-to-the-gills design that I have used on short and long trips.
This company is a great case study for women entrepreneurs and companies with women-focused and tailored products several reasons:
- Women founded company
- Small local company that became a large global corporation
- Two woman privately owned cottage industry to publicly traded corporation
- Brand identity incongruity when production patterns changed
Vera Bradley which trades as VRA on the NYSE was founded by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia Miller in 1982. It is headquartered in Huntington, Indiana though it is known as a Fort Wayne Company. Fashion and Fort Wayne might not seem like a likely combination but the city also claims Bill Blass as a native son.
To get a more complete picture of the history of the company and its identity, image, or brand ups and downs I recommend reading Indianapolis Monthly coverage of the company from 2009 that was updated in August 2013.
The basic story is that this was a home-grown, mid-western, crafty company that seemed sensible, old-fashioned, and part of a tradition or women’s culture that also included sewing bags, quilts, crocheted afghans, and many more types of fabric art that evolved out of generations of women decorating utilitarian textiles with personalized stitchery. Baekgaard, whose mother provided the name for the company, and Miller were not the first or only cloth bag makers from Northeastern Indiana. This bag was my Grandmother’s sewing bag. I begged my mother to let me carry it as a purse in High School, but she said, “No.” She did however make me one just like but with non-fragile handles.
Patterned bags are also nothing new. Here you can see my mother’s bead and metal flapper bag from High School.
The tradition of women’s decorative, utilitarian design inspired Vera Bradley original products and continues to be part of their bright, bold cloth items, though they included a leather line this Fall. But the partners developed some distance between them, and the IPO was in October of 2010 where shares opened at $24.85 a share, far above the $14 to $16 that was expected.
With the public offering success, it became obvious to everyone that the corporation was all grown up. Fort Wayne kitchen tables gave way to a New York apartment decorated much like a Vera Bradley handbag. Baekgaard’s Big Apple apartment signals her moving up in the world while still being a significant player in the company. Miller was tapped by Mitch Daniels, former Indiana Governor to serve as Indiana’s first Secretary of Commerce for the State of Indiana and CEO of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Miller is also on the Board of the Vera Bradley Breast Cancer Foundation.
The big hoopla over hundreds of Indiana workers losing their jobs in 2008 and 2009 shifted lots of Hoosier perspectives about the company. Customers who bought the product thinking it was made in the USA did not like finding Made in China tags in their expensive quilted cotton bags. I understand. Internationally sourcing corporations probably should not try to seem folksy. Therein lies the challenge. Acknowledging original design, place, and customer-base while attempting to appeal to people who wouldn’t be caught dead carrying bright and pastel floral quilted items is going to prove very tricky.
In their favor:
- Some jobs are returning to or being created again for distribution and a few production activities in Indiana.
- The quality remains quite good.
- There are people who like colorful travel bags and wallets and would not carry a similar purse.
- Cotton is still favored over plastic by lots of folks.
- They have regular sales with significant percentages off.
- Their social media is quite good. Check out their seasonal screen-savers and backgrounds available for free download in desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile sizes.
A few weeks ago I purchased another all-in-one cross-body that I will again carry as a wallet. If they have convinced me to still buy their product they may have a future. Quality and cotton count for a lot in my book, and they do listen to customers and constantly incorporate changes, so I will not give up on this once a women-owned, Hoosier business.
My Schedule Is My Own For Six More Days
I’m not the best employee. I think too much. I question. I daydream. I invent.
I’m not the best entrepreneur. I’m not rolling in dough and I like to sleep.
I’m a damn fine human being though. Next week, a week from today I will start working a 40 hour a week temp job. I hope to remain a fine person during this process.
6 months of working somewhere I worked 20, count ’em, twenty years ago. A score of years ago I stopped working in libraries because I have a Masters in Science, not an MLS. Working in libraries I was relegated to being a para-professional. There was no exam I could take and pass to join the profession. I was a member of a permanent underclass. I detest hierarchy.
Then there was the Quality problem. The academic research library at which I worked doing desk reference was undergoing a restructuring. TQM. I played the game. I was on the Strategic Long Range Planning Committee that was the initial group that led the way for the rest of the library system to implement Continuous Process Renewal. That team won recognition from the governor of the state. This required meetings, working in teams, at which I would spend at least half of my working the day. It was hell for me. I love process, but even as someone who loves to write about writing or talk about talking, it was too much for me.
I moved on to be a paraprofessional in an academic museum. I was a section head, but still considered an hourly employee. This is the thing about working in a university that sucks. The glut of qualified people near a university depresses the wages in the market. But here, I thought, there would be room for advancement as I had the right degree to move up in the ranks. But I picked an “unsexy” area in which to apply, get a job, and work. Visitor services, facilities, and security. Long story short, the new director, 3 years into my tenure there, was a pig. When I came back from the funeral of my brother he walked by then stopped and said, “Oh I was sorry to hear about your brother.” He then turned toward me and said, “There are so many things I want to do before I die. I’ve never slept with a black woman.” WTF. I should have sued for hostile working environment (I have more stories about him) but I didn’t, I resigned.
So 20 years on from leaving the library, I have a business that doesn’t make much money, but that makes me happy. I’m not getting enough done on it though. Working at home is problematic for many reasons that I’m not going into here beyond whispering the word… distractions.
So when I accidentally ran across a posting for a temp position, I thought, this may be the “stirring” that the dutch oven that is my life, needs. Why?
- Money. A steady paycheck for a few months will help me do some things that are not feasible without it. I would like to help my daughter with a few things as she begins her grad school career.
- Cleaning. I could hired cleaners, always my first action when there is extra cash. I love a clean home and do not love scrubbing.
- Priorities. This will force me to prioritize blogging, traditional book-writing, and ebook-writing in a way that I do not now do.
- Sadness. I think with the transition that is looming in my family, keeping myself very busy with things beyond my own concerns might be very good for me.
- People. I will meet, and in some cases become reacquainted with, people who share my love of information, information preservation, and dissemination.
In 6 months I will revisit this post and see where I am at and how these five considerations played out. Wish me luck.