I respect teachers more than any other profession, especially with the weight of experience behind me; with the understanding that Teaching. Is. Hard. Work. So I often think of the teacher who inspired me to try teaching in the first place: Mr. Hofflander in Biology I and II.

It’s not often you can thank your teachers. But a new site from TBD makes it a little easier: Dear Great Teachers, Thanks for Teaching Us.

I put my two cents in.

Dear Mr. Hofflander,

Thanks for doing biology the right way; which is to say, doing it in a way that leaves a permanent mark on your students, one that pushes them – possibly – to become teachers themselves, and one that helps them cope with the fact that, even though they may not be cut out for teaching, they will find their own niche, just as all successful species find their own niche through a process of natural selection and differentiation.

You inspired me to make mistakes and learn from them.

Your student,
Corey Vilhauer

Grade: 12
School: Lincoln High School
City: Sioux Falls, SD

Thanks, Mr. Hofflander. Again and always.

Via: @sigepcory.

Well, I started a content strategy blog. And I’m pretty excited about it.

What are you waiting for? Go visit Eating Elephant. And learn about content strategy, you nerd.

And sometimes they do die. Sometimes they’re shot. Sometimes they are caught in the crossfire, to break out a cliché.

Sometimes they are snuffed out.

At work.

They die at work. And they die knowing this was something they’d signed up for.

There are people who do the jobs that I could never do, no matter how much I think I could do it, no matter how often I think I could really take a risk and push myself into the nether regions and do something hard and dangerous and edgy.

I don’t. And I probably never will.

There are people like Sabah al-Bazee, killed during an attack in Tikrit, Iraq – a photographer, cut down by shrapnel, leaving behind a wife and three children. Killed. At work. There are people like Ronald E. Johnson, a guard at the Sioux Falls Penitentiary, a plastic bag tied around his head, his body left to die as two prisoners stole his clothes. Killed. At work. There are people everywhere – not just those who put themselves in dangerous jobs, but their families: their partners and their children and their parents, feeding off of adrenaline but still wondering each day whether their job will kill them.

Then, there’s me. Typing on a computer. Creating spreadsheets. Completely safe, never in danger. Alive.

Always alive. At work.

Not only enjoying what I do, and thankful that I get the chance to do it, but absolutely confident that I’m never in danger. That my wife will never wonder if I’m coming home that day. That my kids will never have to find out their daddy died at work.

Thankful that I’m coddled. Thankful that I can merely appreciate the hard work, without having to ever put my body in harm’s way. And still, constantly, awe-fully, amazed that there are people who will.

At the time, I didn’t even think you could get ONE JOB like that in Sioux Falls, let alone find 15 people to fill a sort-of-creepy back room at Monks.

Turns out, I’d have been wrong.

You wouldn’t have been a kookaburra. You’d have been a wise sage. A prophet. Something cooler than a prophet.

Because tonight I sat in a room with a dozen or so people who wanted to nerd out about content governance and style guides and editorial ownership. And, I sat in a room with even more who wanted to LEARN about content governance and style guides and editorial ownership. And, at the same time, I had a boss show up who was willing not only to tolerate my little meet-up, but also pony up the cash to pay for drinks. And, at the same time as that same time, I got to giggle like a 3rd grader about dorky little content things while everyone else giggled along.

To think. This is my job.

It’s not for everyone. But I can’t help but be a cheeseball and say, damn it, sometimes life works out.
Thanks, everyone, for being friends tonight. We’ve got a more robust community than I had ever imagined. See you next month.

(Hashtag content strategy.)

You know, you sit around and you go, “Oh, I hope people like me and I hope they friend me and I hope they do all of this superficial stuff that doesn’t cost anything.” But what you really want is to, like, not suck enough that people you really admire wouldn’t mind doing something with you.

Because that’s the thing. The whole thing is getting to where … you know, just getting the opportunity to have yourself and your work improved by proximity to people who are better at what you do. That’s what it’s about.

Oh, god. It’s like this Merlin guy GETS ME, you know? I mean, YES, and, OF COURSE, and, EXACTLY.

Back to Work: Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin

Wait. No.

In the morning, early, when all that’s heard is the hum of fans and the occasional vehicle moving over wet cement, I am at my most productive. I’m in the office, and I’m the only one there. It’s 5 am, sure. And 5 am is usually pretty stupid. But it’s also the one chance I get to pack in two or three hours I didn’t have before. I drink some coffee. I cancel out that fan hum with some radio. I hammer out some weird deliverable that, ten years ago, I never knew even existed.

Hold on.

For a few hours each day, after the clerical tidying up, but before the afternoon chat session, I throw in my headphones and listen to music. Just loud enough to drown everything out. Just quiet enough to still be able to think. Pushed to the limit of deadline, I am at my most productive. And, unfortunately, at my most hipster-ish. That’s when Animal Collective and LCD Soundsystem come out. When I want music I can still think with. Music that helps me grow my ironic moustache.

Well, this is weird.

Because, outside of those couple of hipster-fueled musical hours, I never once said “I am at my most productive during business hours.” And, if you’re disagreeing with that notion, you’re wrong.

Sorry. You’re dead wrong.

Wait, what? No. Stop. I never said “I don’t get work done during business hours.” It’s just that, well, the work is different.

I know we need the basic structure. We need the workday. There’s a necessity in having everyone in the same place at the same time, working on the same things. I don’t even really find it work, to tell you the truth, which is kind of a snotty way of saying “my job is better than yours.” A billion advances in technology haven’t replaced the effectiveness of face-to-face discussion.

But it’s funny how many things at work, during working hours, with working colleagues and working clients, prevent us from working at our most productive. Meetings and conference calls and emails and all of those things that Merlin Mann somehow made a career out of shunning. Which makes it difficult to determine whether it’s a case of being LESS productive at work or being MORE productive in off hours.

Who can I blame for this? Probably Obama, huh?

We want success. We want top billing. Too often, we overlook the honor in lesser milestones.

Reggie Miller never won a championship. Patrick Ewing never won a championship. To take it a step further, their franchises – the Indiana Pacers and the New York Knicks – are championship-less since 1973. For all intents and purposes, every season since 1973 has been a failure.

Ask Reggie Miller, though, and you’ll find the opposite.

For Reggie, there were two goals each year: to win the championship, and to beat the Knicks. He never reached the first goal, but for one year, during the 1995 playoffs, he accomplished the second, beating the Knicks on the back of one of the game’s greatest performances.

He didn’t win the big one, but the drive to beat his rival was so great that it counted as success. It gave him peace.

In the end, history will play off the Pacers/Knicks rivalry as a third-tier story. It occurred during the Houston Rockets’ repeat championships, during both Michael Jordan eras, and – even later – parallel to the rebirth of the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s a footnote.

Still, there are few chances to see how a team finds ambition and pride in smaller goals. Each game was a challenge, each series a sort of miniature championship.
They fought not just to win the war, but to win each battle therein.

How often does this happen to us? How often do we feel disappointed when we win regionally, yet fail to find success nationally? How often do we look at a promotion as a step toward the top, not as something to be equally proud of? How often do we treat each project as a massive undertaking, instead of taking pride in each detail?

I’ve never written a best seller. I never became a nationally known copywriter. I have yet to headline A List Apart. But, more than anything, I’m learning that this doesn’t mean I’ve failed.

There are differing degrees of success, and we have to take them one at a time.

Reggie never won a championship. But he’s a few years away from becoming a Hall of Famer. He’s a relatively successful broadcaster. And, no matter what, he’s always got that 1995 series against the Knicks, where, for a few days, he felt like a champion.

Who’s to say he never succeeded? Come to think of it, who’s to say we haven’t, either?

It’s another blog.

Wait. Before you click away. Wait.

It’s a content strategy blog. It’ll touch on IA and UX and CMS and Web writing and all of those other cousin-disciplines, but first and foremost it’s going to be a content strategy blog.

I feel so grown up, writing a blog about one professional subject. *Blush.*

Why? Here’s why: I’ve been writing about content strategy, either here or over at Blend’s blog, for over a year now, but in both places the posts have seemed out of place.

At Black Marks on Wood Pulp, they’ve fallen upon the wrong ears; they’re shards of glass in the jelly of this might-as-well-be-a-daddy-blog blog – too sharp and too work-related to fit in with the posts about Sierra’s poop. And Blend’s blog is more of a news feed – a stream of data rather than a chapter book on professional development.

So, at the urging of Deane and with the help of Blend, I’m going off the deep end. I’m starting a content strategy blog. Just like everyone else who started a content strategy blog. Except mine’s going to be different.

Because it’s got a big jungle animal on it.

I’ll admit – I’m pretty excited to dive in.

Look for it. Soon. That is all.

And then, an hour too late, I read this little thing from an Ira Glass video on storytelling (via Brian Gilham):

Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me, is that if you’re watching this video you’re somebody who wants to make videos, right? And all of us who do creative work like, you know, we get into it and we get into it because we have good taste. Do you know what I mean?

Like you want to make TV because you love TV. You know what I mean? Because there’s stuff that you just like love, OK? So you’ve got really good taste and you get into this thing that I don’t even know how to describe but it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sort of crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point quit.

And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short, you know, and some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves.

But we knew that it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have and the thing what to do is… Everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you’ve got to know it’s totally normal and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. You know what I mean? Whatever it’s going to be. You create the deadline. It’s best if you have somebody who’s waiting for work from you, somebody who’s expecting work from you, even if it’s not somebody who pays you but that you’re in a situation where you have to try not to work. Because it’s only be actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

Hell yeah. I wish I could have imparted that kind of knowledge on the ad kids today.

I guess I’ll be happy I didn’t make any fart jokes.

So New York Magazine’s Vulture blog posted a little ditty about whether or not Don Draper chose the right woman on Mad Men’s season finale, complete with an episode spoiler right in the headline: “Is Megan Really Right for Don?”

Spoilers in the headline? One comment summed it all up:

“It’d be awesome not to have spoilers in the headlines.”

Point taken, apparently: New York Magazine’s response was to change the headline.

Unfortunately, the headline doesn’t stand alone.

Updating Content = Updating Metadata

As with any content management system worth its licensing cost, posts on Vulture’s site are published with an automated simple URL. The assumption is that this URL becomes the permalink of the article, forever and ever, despite any changes in content or, in this case, the headline itself.

The headline was changed, but the URL remains the same. The result: a spoiler is only partially averted.

The lesson is simple: our blog posts and articles and Web pages are so much more than art and copy, and – especially in the case of a major news blog – we as writers and content specialists need to always remind ourselves that changes do not necessarily cascade throughout the metadata.

It’s not only a problem in the URL, either. When we update an article, do we also update the timestamp? Do we let the reader know the article has changed? Does it now fit under a different category, or are there different tags that can be assigned?

Updating an article or blog post or even a static HTML block of copy can range from a spelling correction to a major re-write or adjusted attribution. Different levels of change lead to different levels of updating.

That being said, all levels of updating require a quick confirmation that EVERYTHING has been updated. It’s something I forget on this blog every day. I’d be willing to guess it happens to you, too.

The “Change Everything” List

It’s one thing for this to happen on your little personal blog. But when it starts popping up in a major publication’s news feed, it becomes a larger (not to mention, more noticeable) problem.

Having a simple workflow in place to address post-publication changes can help catch the small things that might fall through the cracks. For example, when updating a blog post, a content wrangler should check:

A. URL – Does the URL still reflect the nature of the article?

B. Metadata – Tags, categories and other items of taxonomy – are they still valid?

C. Post Status – If the post has changed drastically, is there a way to flag the post as “changed” or “updated?”

D. Date/Time – Some CMS programs will automatically update the timestamp. Determine whether the timestamp needs to stay the same (in the event of a minor spelling change or other item of insignificance) or if the timestamp needs to be adjusted to reflect new information.

There’s more, too, depending on the level of journalistic integrity, what your CMS allows and what your readers expect. Adjust and administer as you see fit.

But What About Links?

Yeah. Good question.

In the case of this Vulture article, the headline itself was changed rather quickly – enough to think that, if the URL was also changed, it would still be in the initial stages of gathering inbound links.

But what about an article that’s a few hours old? A few days?

That answer ain’t simple, folks. It’s a matter of serious discussion, comparing the benefits of giving the post a more fitting URL with the risks of losing those inbound links.

Some CMS packages allow for single-page URL redirection. Most don’t – at least, not as a base function – and changing the URL runs the risk of leaving a sea of broken links, especially as an article moves further away from its original publish date.

In the case of this Vulture article, what seems like a URL mix-up may, in fact, be on purpose. If the article blew up early and garnered a large amount of traffic, the editorial staff may have said, “Hold on, buddy. Spoilers are a part of the business, and we’re a news-based blog, so let’s keep that URL and just change the headline.”

That being said, there’s a lot to be said about the editorial process before we even reach this kind of decision. If articles go through a solid set of checks and balances, there will no reason to get this far.

Boiling it Down

Above everything, the question of changing URLs after publication outlines the necessity of carefully reviewing content before it’s posted: a policy of steering clear of immediate spoilers, in this case, would have prevented the need for a URL change.

We can’t be perfect all the time, though. I know I can’t be.

So develop a quick checklist and apply it to all post-publish edits. Do it right now. It’ll take no more than 15 minutes, and it’ll save you from spoiling the finale of Mad Men for some unfortunate soul.