WP Candy – an active site with WordPress developers and users chiming in. It has news, opinion, tutorials, reviews, a forum and much more.

WP Questions – ask for short-term expert help with your WordPress questions

On Smashing Apps (free and unusual online resources for designers and developers), two posts: 21 Mindblowing Free Themes and 13 Plugins to speed up your Blog.

With Windows, one can create shortcuts to a file in folders other than the file’s original location. The shortcuts are ephemeral. If the original file moves, or is deleted, the shortcut leads nowhere.

With unix, one can create one or more links to a file in new locations. The new links have equal weight to the original. If the original link to a file is deleted, the remaining links still references the content of the file directly.

I prefer the latter. It allows for more versatile ways for organizing disparate information. I haven’t found a way to have such available while using Windows. Maybe “there’s an app” that’ll do that.

The enneagram has a varied history. Its diagram has nine points around a circle (0 and 9 at the top point, points 1 to 8 clockwise around the circle. The connections among the points form a triangle and hexad (six components). The hexad has a path formed by the repeating fraction for 1/7 in base ten – 0.142857142857… as well as the path formed by following the circle clockwise (1-2-4-5-7-8, skipping the 3-6-9 triangle).

My understanding of its application is thus – working backward from what’s popular now to earlier understandings. The vast majority of the hundreds of books that have been published on the enneagram describe a typology of human personalities. The ideas have roots in the work of Oscar Ichazo. People who studied at his Arica Institute brought their understandings to new communities. Some in the Jesuit community have embraced this typology. I’ve found value in finding my place in that typology, and how the typology describes directions of growth or decay in the evolution of the type with which I identify.

There’s another take – a typology of body types – that has similar but different connections to the enneagram’s mathematical roots. I’ve not studied this in depth. I have a friend who lived for decades in a community that used this typology on a regular basis. She finds the typology useful in understanding how the body types encountered in self and others affect connections of the individual to the world.

What seems to me the deepest roots come to the West via George Ivanovich (G. I.) Gurdjieff. One of his students – John Godolphin ( J. G.) Bennett – built on these ideas in what he termed Systematics. Tony (Anthony George Edward) Blake has devoted his life to keeping the flame of a certain approach to concept-development and self-development alive. He has edited much of Bennett’s work, and written many books, including The Intelligent Enneagram.

Systematics has been applied in corporate America through the efforts of Charles Krone. I know of this through my father’s career in Organizational Development within DuPont. Dick Knowles once managed a DuPont plant in West Virginia. He describes his time there – and what he learned through his work there – in his book The Leadership Dance: Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness. Observing the differences in how people performed during crises versus in every day life led to new understandings. He developed a particular way of putting the “pieces” of Sytematics into a new variant of the enneagram that he has termed the Process Enneagram. I consider it a tool that, if used with study and humility, could foster seismic shifts in the way organizations run.

I thirst to work with transformational tools – such as this one – within organizations. I know not how to engage [the small, local organizations with which I'd be most interested in working] to consider the use of tools as complex and foreign as the Process Enneagram in steering an organization. If any reader is interested in trying/using/discussing this tool or others to re-conceive an organization, I’d be thrilled to talk with you.

I found the article an excellent starting point – a guide through deeper material. It points to the four primary raters of web sites and their guidelines, and suggests not trying to “game the system” but to pay attention to those guidelines. For those who’ve digested that material, there are links to eight sites with deeper material on SEO.

I also ran across a new “community discussion and aggregation platform” based on Drupal called VoiceBox. It was funded by the Knight Foundation as part of the Knight Drupal Initiative and built by FunnyMonkey. Such efforts tell me that WordPress is getting competition in the “really easy to use” category of Content Management Systems.

In order to make this a more general site for professional purposes, I’m restructuring the content.

It took 24 minutes to: run the “Simple Script” to install WordPress, edit this “Hello world!” post, and enter and format the post “WordPress heralds a new era …” — which talks about how easy it is to get a site ready to go. [The text of that post has moved to the page "Building Web Sites."] Making this site live was a demonstration of how easy the process is.

I’m going to leave the Theme [basic look & feel of the site] as the default (based on “Kubrik”), and tweak the colors (green v blue).

By an hour or so in, I’d changed the sub-header, added categories & tags, changed the “permalink” structure, and modified what appears in the right-hand column of the home page, and more.

A day in, I’ve edited and added, starting to pull the site into better shape.

July 10 Friday: I want to keep this site looking like a new blog, with only a few posts — emphasizing what can be done quickly. So I’m making changes to the blog by adding pages (e.g., added “Northeast Kingdom” a day or two ago) and editing the three posts that are currently in the blog.

September: Start re-structuring info – move initial long post to a new page, add other new pages.