Dealing With Writer’s Block

I confess that I have probably lured some of you here under false pretenses. This blog is not full of great tips about overcoming writer’s block. Quite the opposite. Today I have writer’s block. I accept that this is possibly not the ideal way to begin a blog post – it hardly screams ‘read on, I have so many interesting things to say,’ but luckily there are plenty of things going on in the SitePoint community, I’m just struggling to pull them all together in a coherent way. I used to write in my personal blog every day and I never faltered. There is something about having to come up with the goods that seems to makes it tricky. So… I don’t have advice for you – I’m asking for it. What do you guys do when you need inspiration?I guess I’ll start with the graphic that I’ve used today. Regular readers will notice that it’s not the one that I usually run with. This particular image is a collage of community members that I made a few months back after a viral tagging project that I ran on Facebook. It couldn’t really speak more about our community, so I’ve decided to run with it for a while.Today was the last day to put forward your nominations for the 2010 SitePoint Community Awards. That means that we’ll be busy collating all the nominations over the next few days and then it’ll be up to you to make sure that you get voting! This is your opportunity to thank anyone who has gone out of their way to help you with something over the last year. It’s always a fun time of year and I love seeing all the shiny new badges get handed out to the deserving winners. I’ll get back to you with voting information as soon as it comes to hand.I am really excited about our Facebook fan page this week. Our Get To Know Us campaign is featuring our Marketing Manager, Jennifer Sheahan. Jen is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to monetizing social media, so if you’ve ever wondered just how PPC ads work or how you could make them work for you, make sure you check out our People tab to read what she has to say. If you have questions then post them on our wall and Jen will do her best to answer them.The other thing that is going on over on Facebook is the archive of past biographies that I’ve been promising you for some time now. I have done most of the work and will be ready to unleash it over the next few days.I will take this opportunity to let you know about something exciting that is coming up soon. Based on the popularity of The Great Photography Competition that we ran a few months back, we have decided to run an even bigger and better one. The subjects will be related to the upcoming holiday season. Keep your eyes peeled for details.And look at that. I’ve blogged. It’s amazing what you can do when you stop thinking. Have a great week. Next week I’ll write about something interesting – I hope.Hot Topics This WeekDo you have any experience of using WordPress as a CMS? If you do, head on over to our WordPress forum and join in the discussion.I don’t usually link to discussions about SitePoint articles, but with the strong social media theme that we are running with at the moment, this seems appropriate. There is a discussion thread in the Search Engine Optimization forum which is all about managing PPC campaigns.The age old question of trailing slashes is being discussed in the HTML and XHTML forum this week. What are your thoughts on that?Last up for the week we head to the Coldfusion forum where all the talk is about Ajax dependent drop-downs.Ciao. Have a great week.