To all EMCers,

Today we learned of an urgent need that one of our employees has for a bone marrow donor with very specific criteria. Jack Mollen, our head of Human Resources, asked that we make every effort to spread the word in the hopes that a match can be found for Nick.

If you or anyone you know fits the criteria and is willing to help, the instructions are below and Carole and Stacy (cc on this message) can also help facilitate.

For everyone else, please join me in keeping Nick in our thoughts and prayers.

Mark

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One of our fellow EMC family members is in dire need of your help.  Nick Glasgow, of our Renewals team in Pleasanton, needs a bone marrow transplant.  Nick was a healthy 27 year old when he came down with what was at first believed to be strep throat about  nine to ten weeks ago.  Eight weeks ago, he was informed that he has Leukemia and was admitted to the hospital immediately for chemotherapy.  Nick has endured two rounds of chemotherapy, and received blood, platelet, saline, and antibiotic infusions.  These have all failed to put Nick into remission.  Nick’s white cell blood count is too low for another round of chemo, and has been sent home as antibiotics have been stopped and his immune system is compromised.

Nick’s mom, Carole Wiegand (another dear EMC employee), has informed us that what is needed to save Nick’s life is a bone marrow donor who is a match.  The doctors have advised that they think it is highly unlikely that they can find a match for Nick as a match would need to be 3/4 Caucasian and 1/4 Asian.  The  doctor indicated that there was probably a 0% chance of finding a donor from the donor list , although they are still currently  looking for a match for Nick and this is due to the fact that there are not enough 3/4 Caucasian and 1/4 Asians registered to choose from. Time is of the essence in finding a donor for Nick.  Right now his white blood cell count is up to 1,500 (3,500 is low normal) of which the cancerous portion is  climbing and has doubled in just a few days.  Nick needs a donor match NOW.

Thank you.

What I am asking of you is this, if you fit the criteria of 3/4 Caucasian, 1/4 Asian, please go to http://www.marrow.org/ and start the process in being tested to see if you are a match for Nick.  Testing involves a simple blood test.  If you know someone who fits the criteria, please urge them to be tested.  Nick’s life is dependant on finding a match today.  Please, please, please take the short amount of time to see if you are the one who can be a miracle to this family. If you do fit the criteria and will be testing immediately, please let Carole Wiegand know…she is keeping a list in case it will be possible to have Stanford look at those potential people first.

If you wish to send Nick your well wishes please email Carole Wiegand directly.

Things get a little bit messy when it tries to read code snippets, but for regular text, it seems pretty cool.  I’m going to do a bit more research and see if there are any ways to customize what is read and what isn’t, but, in the meantime, check it out and let me know what you think.

Note: It takes a little while for Odiogo to convert the text to audio, so you might want to test it out on one of my older posts.

• Create a blog for your site. This is a big one.  Think about the sites that you generally visit daily/weekly.  The only reason you frequently return is because the content is changing.  A blog is a great way to keep the content fresh.  If you’re a designer, it is likely that you are not completing a project every single day, but it could be interesting to hear about what you’re learning or what projects are coming up in the future.
• Create an RSS feed for your blog. The RSS feed doesn’t necessarily have to accompany a blog; it is actually helpful to have a feed for any of your updates.  More and more people are using RSS readers.  They may be interested in what you have to offer, but they may not want to check the site every day for updates.  With an RSS feed, your readers can be alerted to updates, and in many cases, you might be able to attract a few readers that you may have otherwise lost.
• Digg and Stumble your articles. It is hard to attract visitors to your site. You only have so many friends and acquaintances that you can get to read your blog posts, especially when they are about a specific topic, like web technologies and design.  Sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are great sites to get your updates out to people. I have found that a great number of hits to my site are coming from StumbleUpon.  Traffic increased greatly when I started posting my own blog posts.
• Join and comment in forums and message boards. If you come up with a solution to a problem that you are pretty psyched about, share it.  I just did that last week.  I came across an error message and Googled for the solution.  There was no solution; so I figured it out and posted my solution to my blog and linked to my blog post from several forums that reported the same problem.  I have been getting traffic to my site from these sites ever since.
• On the same note as above - Inbound links are huge for your search engine rankings. If you’re a designer, make sure a link to your site is on all of the client sites that you produce.  Get your peers to link to your site.  Get yourself out into web directories. Get as many people/sites linking to your site as possible.
• Track your improvements to figure out how you can improve even more. There are several tools out there that will help you increase traffic to your site.  A great one that I recently found is http://www.websitegrader.com.  This will generate a free report for you and give your site a grade for its marketing effectiveness.  Right now I am at a 61 and rising relatively quickly (likely because my inbound links are increasing!).  Another tool that I like is http://www.statcounter.com/.  Just pop a small piece of Javascript into your front page code and this site will help you keep track of how visitors are getting to your site, from where geographically, and how many times.

That should get you started on your way to search engine and web domination.  I’ll write a part II to this sometime in the future.  Like I said, please feel free to leave some tips of your own in the comments section.

“Please enter a properly formatted URL. Thanks.”

When I searched message boards, the solution was editing the the Bad Behavior plugin. Unfortunately, I was not using the plugin.

So I contacted the people at Digg, who were extremely quick and helpful. I was able to manually submit the URL to Digg after clearing my browser cache, but my Digg This! button still didn’t work. Here is my workaround:

Go to the admin panel->Design->Theme Editor->single.php. Remove the code inside the anchor tag for digg and replace it with this:

<div style="float:left; border:1px solid #CCCCCC; padding:2px; margin-top:2px; margin-right:10px;"> <script type="text/javascript"> digg_skin = 'icon'; </script> <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </div>

For more information on using WordPress, and more specifically the Arthemia2 theme, check out Adding a New Wordpress Theme: Arthemia2.

Adding the theme to your server

Simply extract the theme from the zip file and upload it to the /wp-content/themes directory.  Then, head to the admin panel and click on the thumbnail for your theme by going to Design->Themes and scrolling through the Available Themes.

Add some Categories

When using the Arthemia2 theme, you’ll notice that there is a Headline and a Featured section.  To use these sections you’ll have to create a Category for each.  Again, in the admin panel, go to Write->Post.  Scroll to the Categories subheading and add a category called ‘Headline’ and one called ‘Featured’.

You will also want to add your own custom categories for the navigation in the middle of the page.  Add the categories to the Categories section the same way you did the first Headline and Featured categories.  Then you’ll need to change the index.php file to display the correct categories.  So head to Design->Theme Editor and click Main Index Template (index.php) on the right sidebar.

Scroll down until you see a line that is similar to:

<?php $display_categories = array(3,4,5,6,7); $i = 1;

Inside the array() method you need to add the key to the categories that you wish, in the order that you wish to see them on the index page. Note that you do not need 5 categories, and they don’t have to be arranged in numerical order. Using my categories as an example, if I wanted to make ‘personal’ the first category and I wanted to remove ‘design’, I’d change the code to:

<?php $display_categories = array(7,4,5,6); $i = 1;

Widgets/Plugins

First off, you should check and make sure that your server is running with PHP5. I was having problems with a couple of these widgets and until I found out that my server was still running PHP4, I ran around in circles with no idea what was wrong. If you don’t know what level of PHP you have, the easiest way is to upload a phpinfo file to your server. Verify the PHP level is PHP5 and you should be good to go.

First, you’ll want to add the ‘recent posts’ widget. Go to the admin panel->Design->Widgets. In the right sidebar use the dropdown to select Footer Left, and then press Show. Then find the Recent Posts widget and click Add. You can do the same with the ‘most commented’ widget in Footer Center.

For some reason, the ‘most viewed’ widget is different. You actually have to download the WP-PostView Plugin. After downloading the plugin, extract it, and upload it to /wp-content/plugins/. Then, go back to the admin panel->Plugins. The Plugins tab is on the right side of the admin panel. Then you need to activate both WP-PostViews and the WP-PostViews widget.

Add Thumbnails

If you want thumbnails for you posts, upload the images in your post. Still under Write->Post, scroll down to Custom fields and add a field with key ‘Image’ (no apostrophes) and then give the path to the image as the value. WordPress takes care of the resizing for you.

Random Tips

Full Articles on the Front Page
Instead of showing the excerpts for posts on the front page, I wanted to display full blog posts. Go to the admin panel->Design->Theme Editor and open the index.php page. To do this, scroll to:

<div class="spoiler"> <?php $values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); if (isset($values[0])) { ?> <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"> <img src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("Image"); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="left" width="150px" height="150px" /></a> <?php } ?> <?php the_excerpt(); ?> </div>

and remove it, replacing it with:

<div class="post"><?php the_content();?></div>

Be sure to make your div’s class ‘post’ so that it has the correct styling.

Change Excerpt Length
The default ‘excerpt’ length for this theme is 90 characters. If you want to change the length of the excerpt go to the admin panel->Design->Theme Editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) and change the $excerpt_length variable in the custom_trim_excerpt() method.

If there is anything else that would be helpful for you, post a comment and I’d be happy to try to help.

A couple sites that helped me write this article are:
http://michaelhutagalung.com/forum/forum.php?id=1
http://michaelhutagalung.com/2008/05/arthemia-magazine-blog-wordpress-theme-released/?cp=25

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. Bob Dylan

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