Green Ink Edits :: freelance writing, editing and proofreading services

Recently Read: 5/17/12

Dave — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:00:24 +0000

“SoHo is not a macaroni salad kind of place. This is where the world’s brightest young talents come to braise caramelized racks of corn-fed songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil. Even when they promise something simple, they’ve got to tart it up–the meatloaf has been poached in seawater, or there are figs in the tuna salad. If cooking is an art, I think we’re in our Dada phase.”

From Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Recently Read: 5/15/12

Dave — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:41 +0000

“You are a very impressive man, Lieutenant Mamiya. Japan will be sure to recover from her postwar chaos as long as there are many Japanese like you. My own county is hopeless. It was almost better under the czars. At least the czar didn’t have to strain his empty head over a lot of theory. Lenin took whatever he could understand of Marx’s theory and used it to his own advantage, and Stalin took whatever he could understand of Lenin’s theory (which wasn’t much) and used it to his own advantage. The narrower a man’s intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in this country. I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here. And that is not to imagine anything. My job is to make others use their imaginations. That’s my bread and butter. Make sure you keep that in mind. As long as you are in here, picture my face if you ever start to imagine something, and say to yourself, ‘No, don’t do that. Imagining things can be fatal.’ These are my golden words of advice to you. Leave the imagining to someone else.”

From The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Recently Read: 5/10/12

Dave — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:31 +0000

“The boy didn’t need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted to stay was in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose. When he was eighteen and the army called him, he saw the war as a trick to lead him into temptation, and he would have shot his foot except that he trusted himself to get back in a few months, uncorrupted. He had a strong confidence in his power to resist evil; it was something he had inherited, like his face, from his grandfather. He thought that if the government wasn’t through with him in four months, he would leave anyway. He had thought, then when he was eighteen years old, that he would give them exactly four months of his time. He was gone four years; he didn’t get back, even for a visit.”

From Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Recently Read: 5/8/12

Dave — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:00:25 +0000

“The fact is that these wise people exercise the most irritating kind of despotism; it is because of this ugly word that those who have lived in the great republic known as Paris find it intolerable to live in small towns. The tyranny of public opinion–and what public opinion!–is as stupid in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.”

From The Red and the Black by Stendhal

Recently Read: 5/3/12

Dave — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:00:52 +0000

“She didn’t put her arms around me or try to comfort me, and I was grateful for this. She just sat there quietly, her thumb moving regularly on my shoulder, while I cried. Not for those three children, I can’t claim that, but for the unbridgeable distance that lay between them and me: for the millions of miles, and the planets separating at dizzying speed. For how much we had had to lose. We had been so small, so recklessly sure that together we could defy all the dark and complicated threats of the adult world, run straight through them like a game of Red Rover, laughing and away.”

From In the Woods by Tana French

Recently Read: 5/1/12

Dave — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:00:22 +0000

“Some people might have thought that Lord Mountdrago was mad; after all the years during which Dr Audlin had been treating the diseased souls of men he knew how thin a line divides those whom we call sane from those whom we call insane. He knew how often in men who to all appearance were healthy and normal, who were seemingly devoid of imagination, and who fulfilled the duties of common life with credit to themselves and with benefit to their fellows, when you gained their confidence, when you tore away the mask they wore to the world, you found not only hideous abnormality, but kinks so strange, mental extravagances so fantastic, that in that respect you could call them lunatic.”

From “Lord Mountdrago” by W. Somerset Maugham

Recently Read: 4/26/12

Dave — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:00:02 +0000

“But he didn’t have the Windsor genes for nothing. His ancestors had passed on a few tricks of the trade. Always pee beforehand, that was rule Number One. Rule Number Two: stand on one foot more than the other, and switch feet after a while. Rule Number Three was Denise’s: always admire things you wouldn’t mind being given later on. And Rule Number Four was his very own: just when the whole bloody thing is getting unbearable and you’re being bored witless, you turn to your host, as he now did to Pitman, and say, loud enough to be overheard by those around, ‘Damn fine show.’”

From England, England by Julian Barnes

Recently Read: 4/24/12

Dave — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:00:55 +0000

“Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire,

o una sola ma grande come il mare,

come il mare profunda ed infinita…

Sei il mio amor… e tutta la mia vita.”

[Trans. "I've so many things to tell you, or one thing--huge as the sea, deep and infinite as the sea... I love you... you're all my life."]

From La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini (music) and Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica (libretto), trans. by Black Dog Opera Library

Recently Read: 4/19/12

Dave — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:29:40 +0000

“He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”

From The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Last Week’s Hitch in Our (Online) Gitalong

Jen — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:45:59 +0000

WARNING: Long, technology-related post ahead!

The love of my website life. (Image courtesy of Flickr user Phil Oakly, via CC license)

As you may or may not have noticed last week, Green Ink Edits went offline for about 48 hours. I’m in charge of our technical needs, and I had been thinking for some time of switching our website format over to a WordPress-powered self-hosted site. Our previous website was perfectly functional, but it was a pain to update, and it was stored in a totally different location from the Green Ink blog. I wanted a site that would be easy to update and would contain both our regular site information and our business blog in one place.

When we first got started in 2008, I chose to go with a Microsoft Office Live Small Business website because it was super-cheap ($15/year) and super-easy to set up. Unfortunately, I realized the limitations pretty quickly – I couldn’t change much of anything about their templates. I could add my logo as the header, but it looked a little goofy, and I couldn’t add any HTML on my own – I just wanted to code the header image so that if you clicked it, it would take you to the home page. I couldn’t do that – there was nowhere I could edit the HTML of the site. This also meant that whenever there was weird formatting as a result of the built-in WYSIWYG editor, I couldn’t go in and try to strip it out of the HTML. And the template itself looked just a smidge dated at the time. But for the price, I was willing to make it work, and we lived with that website until May or June 2011.

By 2011, the template looked more than a smidge dated, but there were no newer templates to choose from. I found out that Microsoft was planning to discontinue the entire Office Live Small Business enterprise soon – though they’d continue to support the customers they already had for a few months before changing to Office 365, it was clear they weren’t looking to offer anything new and improved. I started to look into ways of creating a website with outside software, and I stumbled across a really good deal for WebEasy 8 Professional – half-off the already pretty reasonable price. I snapped it up. I worked on a website for days before I uploaded it, trying to get everything just right. I figured out how to disable the website based on the Microsoft template and upload our own web files instead (that by itself took about 4 hours). I finally finished and uploaded it, and it just…looked kind of fuzzy and small to me. Plus it was a huge pain to update the text, and we never did figure out how to update SEO keywords and tags. I wanted something better, but I didn’t want to hire a web designer and I was afraid of changing things myself.

WordPress seemed like the right answer. I use WordPress.com for my personal blog, and Dave has used it for blogs in the past, so we are both familiar with the interface. I like that it’s easy to use but provides a lot of control for advanced users. I had never done anything with a self-hosted WordPress site before, though, and I was a little nervous about it. I was pretty sure I would not be able to do it with Microsoft as our web host, and to be honest, I really wanted a host that provided the whole one-click installation of WordPress so that it was easier for me. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t just allow you to point your domain name servers to another host – I was going to have to end our service with them entirely, reclaim our domain name, and move the whole shebang elsewhere. I read this could take one to seven days, and it would affect both our website AND our email addresses. I was nervous, but I felt it was necessary.

With the help of more experienced friends, I picked a web host that supported the one-click WordPress installation, Web Hosting Hub (WHH). I read their instructions carefully for transferring a domain. Dave and I sent out email messages to recent contacts with alternate email addresses. We put notifications on Facebook and Twitter that the site and emails might be down. I printed out Microsoft’s instructions for how to end their services and transfer the domain to a new registrar, read them through several times, crossed my fingers, and canceled our service. The instructions said we’d get notification of cancellation, then an email with our registry key, which we could use to unlock our account at the REAL domain registrar, Melbourne IT, and then, finally, transfer the domain.

I got the cancellation confirmation, and then…nothing. I printed out WHH’s instructions on how to transfer domains to them, studied those instructions, set up our email addresses and installed WordPress on our new host servers, and still…nothing. I submitted a Microsoft support ticket, and got no answer. I searched high and low for a support email or phone number and found nothing. I searched the support forums and did not find the exact answer to my question – it seemed everyone else had gotten their registry key as planned. At this point, it had been 48 hours since I canceled with Microsoft, and I was freaking out a little bit. Finally, I found a forum thread where a user said Microsoft made the process as difficult as possible and gave support contact information for Melbourne IT. I contacted them, found out Microsoft had given them the wrong email address as my main contact (which is why I never got the registry key email), and they had everything straight for me in under 4 hours.

(This, by the way, is my BIG KUDOS to Melbourne IT, who were fantastic to work with and very, very helpful, even though we were dealing with a 12-hour time difference. I would have stayed with them as my primary domain registrar if it wouldn’t have cost me $25/year more than I was already paying for the hosting service with WHH.)

From there, everything went much more smoothly. I got the domain name servers pointed to WHH in case the transfer took a few days; I got the domain itself transferred to WHH; I got our email accounts set up in Gmail and working; and I got our content and logo and all kinds of new plug-in toys installed on the new WordPress-powered site. While we will probably be tinkering with the content on the site from now on, the important information is there.

I’m sharing all of this for our fellow freelancers, so that you can learn from our experiences. Hopefully I haven’t scared you away from making big changes to your website or changing web hosts – it’s not that scary once you’ve been through it! If any of our colleagues have questions about the process, I hope you’ll let us know in the comments.