Jeffrey Kishner

Moderating Blog Comments: A Time Suck or a Vital Task for the Health of Your Website?

August 17, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner Leave a Comment

Sasstrology gets a lot of comments on its blog posts, particular the popular ones in its archives. Frequently, the conversations have little to do with the original blog posts anymore. Rather, conversations have taken a life of their own.

Yet everyday I sift through up to 17 pages (in the WordPress dashboard sense of the word pages) of comments daily to skim for spam, abuse and mentions of my name (usually @jeffrey or mr. kishner).

I am grateful that the blog community is so active, at the very least because a blog post with over 2000 comments provides social proof. (‘If these posts elicit so many comments, they must be good!”) Yet I find it odd that I spend a chunk of my day moderating the output of way less than 1% of my readership. That is, if Sasstrology regulars just stopped commenting, I do not think it would have a discernible effect on traffic.

Or would it?

There is something as important as traffic. Namely, community. After all, it is an active community that gives a blog life. If you think of any website as a living entity, the amount of activity on it provides a measure of how vital it is.

For example, if a reader has benefitted from the blog, it is oftentimes thanks to her interactions with other readers, not from what a professional astrologer has written in a blog post. Readers help each other out with their relationship struggles much more frequently than I offer any useful input. Sometimes I think all I’ve done is created the space where readers can support each other, and that blog posts are just placeholders where that can happen with regards to a specific topic.

And that results in a more engaged readership, including readers who tell their friends about the blog.

Filed Under: Blogging

Is Web Publishing an Art?

August 16, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 3 Comments

Yesterday I watched an inspiring TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. In essence, she was talking about the need for artists to conceive of their creative genius as coming from outside themselves, as their daimon (Greek) or genius (Roman). Our inspiration comes from the gods, not from our small selves. When we succeed in creating a powerful work of art, it is because we were a receptive channel for its expression, not that we ourselves are geniuses. As Gilbert puts it, it is not the case that you are a genius, it is that you have a genius.

Recently, I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’m not being especially creative other than when I’m dancing (and trust me, my dance is no performance.) I spend most of my time editing and polishing others’ blog posts for publication, as well as working on business development and social media marketing. I write exceptionally little for the blog, except when I have something to announce or when I respond to a reader’s comment or bug report.

I used to be more more artistic in the traditional sense. In my teens and early twenties, I drew and composed. I wrote a lot in my thirties (Sasstrology is my third astrology blog, and I haven’t only blogged about astrology). And now in my fortieth year, I seem to be more concerned about making a living. Or rather, trying to blend art and commerce, to earn money doing what I feel is my calling (i.e., publishing).

I guess I’m struggling with the concept of publishing as an art. Certainly, I feel I have a vision, an aesthetic, that permeates Sasstrology. I highly value quality writing, accessible astrology, community-building. But is having an “a ha” moment about how to better sell an ebook a creative act? My sleepless nights are more about business ideas, not about how I’m going to poetically describe the tension between Jupiter and Saturn.

Maybe it comes down to passion. If my muse is communicating to me about growing the blog’s traffic or building content partnerships, that’s still the muse talking to me. It’s more about process than content, right?

Filed Under: Blogging, Media

I Will Never Be in Sunday Styles

August 2, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner Leave a Comment

And I don’t know why it bothers me so. I’m not wealthy, or gay, or hip, or a celebrity, or a fashion designer. I don’t write with flow about bittersweet romances from my past.

I don’t think I’m cool, as defined by this particular section of The Times: young, artistic, well-connected.

Instead, I’m creative, introverted, geeky, imaginative, expressive, contained. Perhaps not quite the profile that the paper of record is looking for.

Filed Under: Media

This Mars in Aries Hates Electional Astrology

July 5, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 7 Comments

As I’m working on my site relaunch, I am feeling torn about how early I should push it live. It’s pretty much ready, but the astrologer in me thinks I should wait until a few days after the solar eclipse. I mean, it’s not very smart to put out something new as the Moon is waning, right?

Yet I am impatient. Yes, my action planet Mars is in “right here, right now, baby” Aries, and when I’m ready to go, I don’t want to have to wait.

Besides, I don’t want to be the kind of guy who plans his life according to the “stars.” Although I know that there are some times that are more fortuitous for some events than others, I like to feel that I create my own success, that it’s not dependent on planetary aspects and cycles.

What’s your take? How much do you rely on the ephemeris to plan major life or business events?

Filed Under: Astrology

Too Much All at Once: The Excitement and Stress of Growing a Blog

July 1, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 3 Comments

Astrology works in funny ways. All of my big plans for Sasstrology are happening at once. I’m not sure if it’s the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (which isn’t aspecting any of my planets but is sextiling my MC at 29 Taurus, if a separating aspect counts) or the ingress of transiting Mars into my first house.

Here’s a list of what I’ve been doing:

I integrated daily love horoscopes into the blog. I paid a contractor in Pakistan to create a PHP tool to make it easy for me to import them into WordPress and eliminate the need to spend time in the WordPress dashboard clicking on checkboxes and pulling down menus.
I’m doing the finishing touches on a major upgrade to the blog that will include an updated blog architecture and a forum, so that I can leave Ning. I am learning quite a lot about “hooks” in Genesis as well as the importance of testing the compatibility of themes and plugins in a development environment, as I don’t want to “break” my blog.
I am working with a partner to automate the processing of astrology reports so that I don’t have to manually churn out all the requests for free and paid reports using my Mac software.

I am excited because, with these changes, traffic could conceivably increase by 50%. Yet because everything is happening at once, I am feeling overwhelmed. I am trying to pace myself. Certain tasks have to be done by a specific day no matter what, while others can happen when I have free time and feel inspired. However, when I am in the midst of a technical problem, I do feel obsessive about it, and I would rather solve it now than put it on the backburner. Fortunately, the folks at various WordPress and BuddyPress forums have been especially helpful, as I have no training in web development.

Filed Under: Blogging, WordPress

Upsetting the Status Quo Versus Staying Put

May 27, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 3 Comments

Uranus enters Aries today. It’s a big deal. The planet of revolution and destabilization is in the first sign of the zodiac, that of the pioneer, the self-starter. Its entrance symbolizes new beginnings that tend to be shocking or that upset expectations.

I’ve been feeling very anxious recently. I have been attributing it to the fact that Uranus has been in the final degree of Pisces, the sign that “houses” my Sun, Mercury, Venus and North Node.

How is this affecting me?

Ever since Ning, the build-your-own-social-network platform, announced that it will no longer be providing its service for free, I have been contemplating a major overhaul of Sasstrology. I do not want to shell out $20 per month to host a forum, so I’ve been looking into integrating an open-source forum/social-networking platform called BuddyPress into my blog, which runs on WordPress. Namely, I want “one brand”/one destination, and I don’t want the foundation of my site to be dependent on the whims of a company that can change its policies at any time.

So I’ve been spending numerous hours, behind the scenes, beefing up my CSS/PHP skills so that I can build Sasstrology 2.0 on my own (with the help of some very smart WordPress people in various forums). Although I feel confident I can do this, I’m also feeling worried about the future. I believe that Sasstrology has the potential to be a lot bigger than it is, but I am also taking some risks by integrating the blog with the forum. (And then there’s just the fear that, even though I’m building Sass2.0 in a development environment, something could go wrong when I launch it live on Sasstrology.com.)

When I get this anxious, I remind myself that nothing has to change. I don’t have to update the technical foundations of the blog. I can just pony up the 20 bucks per month to keep the forum on Ning. I can just keep doing things the way I’ve been doing them. I have a formula right now that seems to work well enough, so why rock the boat?

Which brings me to Uranus. I really don’t think it’s healthy for me to just do the same thing week after week. I need to push myself. To do otherwise is to settle, to die on some level. I’ve been working so hard for the past few years to get to where I am, and frankly I’m not even halfway to where I want to be. (And where I need to be if I want to support my family with this endeavor.)

So I will keep soldiering on. Somehow, knowing that Uranus will backtrack into Pisces again is comforting – I can keep working on the next version of Sasstrology behind the scenes without feeling that I am obligated to move forward. I know that an inner revolution is taking place even if I’m not immediately ready to share it with the world.

Filed Under: Personal

How to Add the Facebook Like Button to Your WordPress Blog

April 22, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 4 Comments

Facebook has recently made significant steps to socialize the entire web. Some of their new developer tools allow your readers to “like” your posts without having to sign in to your site using Facebook Connect. Rather, as long as they are signed in to Facebook, they can “like” a post and that action will show up in their Activity Stream.

When I read about this news at TechCrunch, I searched for information on how to integrate the button into WordPress blogs. Facebook has a form you can fill out to output code to put into your blog. However, this form only allows a static URL. If you want a button for each individual page on your blog, you have to do a little bit of hacking.

I did a little bit of google searching, but the solutions I found (Geekosystem and Ruhani Rabin) did not work on my blogs. (They resulted in errors.)

The following code works for me:

The key difference is that instead of the other URLs I used <?php the_permalink(); ?> which is WordPress’ default code for creating dynamic permalinks.

To implement this into your blog, just open the single.php file (or index.php if there is none) and paste this code after or before something that looks like <?php the_content();?>. You will have to experiment to see what works well. The only other change I made to the code is add a numerical value for “height.” Otherwise, Facebook uses a fair amount of space, presumably to display all the faces of your friends who liked the same post.

Filed Under: WordPress

What anyone can know just from your email address (Rapportive and Rapleaf)

March 18, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 7 Comments

I learned about this cool, new Chrome extension or Firefox plugin for Gmail called Rapportive. When you receive an email, it will present to you – to the right of the email – the social networks to which that person belongs. Within a day, I’ve seen links to one or more of the following networks to which my email correspondents belong: Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Friendster, LiveJournal, Bebo, Hi5, and Flickr. Rapportive also lists the city in which they live, and their current job title(s), not to mention of picture of them (if available). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Privacy

Psychotherapy Vs. Movement Practice

January 7, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 4 Comments

I earned my license to practice psychotherapy a few years ago, but I’m not certain talk therapy works. Granted, I was a client for a good 15 years, and I know I changed quite a lot during that time. But I have also found that psychotherapists are imbued with so much power – if only by virtue of projection – that talk therapy can be quite harmful. With one therapist, I felt strongly that she had a specific agenda, and when I shared this belief, she denied it, and suggested that I was just projecting my disowned wishes onto her – that it was my agenda, in reality. I still don’t know if she was gaslighting me, but since that time I think that it’s somewhat dangerous to enter a long-term therapy-client relationship, because all humans – even analysts – are flawed human beings. Yes, they can seek out supervision to work out their own countertransference, but if they’re not virtually 100% “pure,” they may bring their own garbage into the relationship and have an adverse impact on the client. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: dance, Psychotherapy

What does reputation management mean, anyway?

January 6, 2010 By Jeffrey Kishner 2 Comments

I’ve never really had a personal blog before – one in which I’m not opining about astrology – and I’ve been wondering how transparent I want to be.

It is a given that anything one publishes on the internet is nowadays more-or-less permanent. Therefore, one must think about one’s reputation. The thing is, whom do I want to feel positive regard towards me?

Of course, I want to be liked by everyone. But in reality, I need to care about two things: future employers, and future girlfriends. Right now, I’m married and am a struggling self-employed person – in which case, I don’t have to worry about a prospective boss or date googling me. However, anything can change at any time. I could divorce, or my blog could fail and I’d need to find a job, if only to pay my basic expenses.

Transiting Uranus is making its final conjunction to my natal Venus on February 9 of this year. My Venus is in my 7th house of partnership and rules my 10th house of career. So, basically just about anything could happen in my career and/or love life this winter.

But does a writer hold himself back out of fear of some future state of affairs?