Join the club.

That’s the Urban Dictionary’s definition of a flake. Ouch.

I’m such a flake, I decided to start a whole new blog about it: The Complete Flake. It’s all about my efforts to get things done in spite of myself, and maybe help others figure out some solutions along the way.

Check it out!

Okay, I’m talking WAY in advance here – a year – but I’m too excited not to blog about it. Plus, I want to save my dream itinerary for future reference:

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My friend Lindy and I decided I should go visit her in Alabama sometime after Mardi Gras when the weather is still cool. Then I realized I have several cousins and a girlfriend to visit along the way there and back. And look: Austin! In March! I might actually be able to go to SXSW 2011!

Travel planning = half the fun. Saving for it = not the other half.

My twenty-something nephew is a pretty impressive guy.

He’s tall, good-looking – and hungry. He wants to make something of himself and he’s willing to work hard for it. I remember when Sam [not his real name] was fourteen and getting ready to enter high school. He decided to try out for the state champion football team. All summer long, he beefed up, worked out, and got me and his grandmother to drive him to practice after practice in the sizzling, Southern California heat.

He got his wish.

Eventually, my nephew became a star offensive linebacker in several more championship seasons, then went on to a full-ride football scholarship. The future looked bright indeed. NFL dreams danced in our heads.

Then it all came to a crashing halt.

First, a shoulder injury sidelined Sam for a semester, then another injury required surgery. Finally, Sam decided to give up his football dream – and with it, his college scholarship. I’m just guessing here, but I think it’s a safe bet that he was pretty depressed for a year or two. Who wouldn’t be?

I didn’t hear much about Sam from the family until a few months ago, when his mother mentioned that he had started a small business making healthy snack foods in his kitchen and selling them to a couple of local health food stores. She gave me some to taste, and they were delicious. The more she told me about it, the more I wanted to do something to help.

On the spot, I offered to set Sam up with a free website to help his little company grow.

It’s what I do, after all. Helping Sam out wouldn’t cost me a dime and would give me the enormous pleasure of knowing that, some day in the hopefully not-too-distant future, I had something to do with his success. Of this I have no doubt: my nephew WILL be successful at whatever he does. I wanted to help him get there faster.

Sam called me as soon as his mother relayed the message. He already had a site but he wasn’t happy with it, and he was excited to have the chance to start over. He had heard good things about WordPress, so we were off to a good start. I explained that WordPress is a content management system, not just blogging software, and he could have a very businesslike site without having to learn any coding. I would set it up for him, give him a nice-looking theme, free hosting, and show him how easy it is to post and change content with WordPress.

I was curious how Sam came to start a healthy snack food business, and he told me that he had indeed been depressed after coming home from college. At 6’3″ and 280 pounds with no daily practice to go to, Sam’s weight had ballooned. (It probably didn’t help that he got a job in an ice cream parlor.) Physically and mentally, he felt terrible.

Then Sam came across some information about the raw food diet and decided to turn his life around. He read everything he could find about healthy eating. He lost the weight and felt fantastic – so good, in fact, that he wanted to share what he had learned.

See what I mean about being impressive? Sam wasn’t trying, but he even got me thinking about trying raw food! He’s just a born salesman – in the best way: he wants to help people.

I was even more excited about helping him reach them with a really fantastic website. We agreed to get together in a few days so I could learn about Sam’s needs.

Then it all went south, and I’m still trying to figure out how to fix it.

What happened was this: I’d had a difficult day with a client who, months after approving a site, had changed her mind. I didn’t want to leave her disappointed so I agreed to make changes. I showed her some options, but to her they all looked like BLOGS, and there was no way she wanted the site to look like a BLOG.

Here’s where I have to tell you I’m just a LEETLE bit biased in favor of blogs.

For one thing, I’ve been blogging since the Pleistocene era, first hand coding all my pages at Jump2Books.com [now defunct], then at Blogger, then moving on to Noah Grey’s late, lamented GreyMatter, MovableType, and Typepad before finally settling on, and falling in love with, WordPress five years ago.

I learned a lot along the way.

I saw first-hand how powerful WordPress can be in getting a small site ranked in the search engines, engaging users and fostering relationships. So I may have been just a tad defensive when my nephew called and mentioned in passing that he didn’t want his site to look like a BLOG.

“May I ask what you don’t like about blogs?” I said, gritting my teeth. “I mean, I understand that you can have your site any way you want it, but I’m just curious.”

“Well, for one thing,” said Sam, “I don’t want people leaving all kinds of comments on my site.”

“But, but–” I sputtered testily, “like I said, you can have your site any way you want, but I have to take a minute to say that you’ve got it all wrong.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause on the other end. I started back-pedalling as fast as I could.

“You know, I’m sorry. I’ve had a REALLY bad day, and I guess I’m a little defensive. Let’s talk about this when we get together, okay?”

“Uh – okay,” said Sam, and that was the last I heard from him. I called and left an apologetic message but got no response.

I want to tell Sam what I should have said in the first place:

Commentors are the people who walk into your virtual store and ask you for help deciding what to buy. They are interested enough in what you have to offer to engage with you. How could you not want that?

A blog is just a way to carry on a conversation with your prospective customers. It’s a chance to educate them about your product, let them get to know you so they feel a personal connection, and–don’t forget–get the attention of search engines every time you publish another post.

I’m going to try again with Sam [now that I've calmed down!] I think I’ll email him a link to this post and see if he’ll give me another chance to help him reach his audience. I’ll let you know what he says.

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• WordPress-powered Blogs Poised to Own Google Search Results (trishussey.com)

Now that I’ve moved this site and a dozen or so others to the new server, I’ve installed WordPress MU on Bornfamous and plan to consolidate the blogs of friends, relatives and personal projects into it, so there will only be one WPMU installation to keep track of instead of eight individual WP installs. So nice!

I know I should have just moved them directly into MU instead of setting them up with new WP installs all over again, but it was a panic situation with the old server down for days, and I still wasn’t comfortable with MU.

Not there yet but there’s only one way to get there, and that’s to jump in, one blog at a time. Thanks to Andrea R for the tutorial–and many more that I haven’t gotten to yet.

I am SO. LOVING. this theme, called Compositio, from Design Disease. [And it's free--go figure.] It’s so perfect, I don’t want to even TRY to customize it. Maybe just a logo. Or not.

White Desert, Egypt

It took a while, but BornFamous is finally back on the new server. I had to move the domain back to the old one until I could move all my other sites, for reasons you don’t really care about.

Anyway, it’s been an adventure. I finally learned what I’ve been avoiding for YEARS: how to export and import mySQL databases—and even how to edit RIGHT IN THE DATABASE. I wouldn’t say I have totally gotten over my database phobia, but I’ve come a long way, baby.

What a RELIEF.

“At laaasst… my blog has come along…”

Yep, the server was down for like, EVER, so I decided to move to a new host. Then I took a little procrasti-cation to think things over. Because what’s the point of keeping a blog if you don’t, um, BLOG any more?

So I had to ask myself WHY I don’t blog any more. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in blogging, I’ve just lost interest in personal blogging. I’ve run out of things to say about me. [Which is probably a good thing. I like to think it's a sign of late-blooming maturity. Very late.] What does interest me, much more now, is blogging itself. The nuts and bolts of setting up a blog, specifically a WordPress blog, and all the wonderful things you can do with one.

ANYWAY, all this is my way of leading up to the big announcement: BornFamous will no longer be a personal blog. But I’m not getting rid of it, no sir. I’m going to transform it into a… drum roll, please… PROFESSIONAL blog. About blogging. And WordPress. And maybe design, though as you can see, design is not my strong suit. But the focus of BornFamous will be the learning process, and sharing what I learn with you.

The personal stuff will still be here for the search engines and the curious, but I’ll be moving it off the front page soon, as I start fresh with this new direction. So. Excited!

Yes, it can.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mLvzARScak[/youtube]

I can’t help it, I have ADD. No, really.

Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Vegetable Garden

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at time when obesity has become a national concern.