It has given me much over the last several years. I have made new friends, educated myself, found fun things to do and share, and been amazed at just how crazy/sad/caring our society can be. My future career and the very livelihood of millions of people depends on the infrastructure, technology, and freedom of the internet.

I don’t generally jump on bandwagons and I’m rarely vocal about causes. For this I will make an exception.

There are some crazy ideas being tossed about in Congress and the Senate right now. These have a huge potential to be poorly interpreted, cripple freedom of speech on the internet, and set our society back in time. While I understand the desire for large corporations to “protect” their “intellectual property,” I value individual freedom more.

What can you do?

First, watch this video.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Next, take a few minutes to contact your legislators and express your view about the laws being considered.

Let’s keep the internet free.

I looked at full-size previews for each of them. Some were artistic and colorful, others were sparse and clean.

None of them worked when I loaded them up. The padding was off, there wasn’t enough contrast between the text and the background, the widgets were in awful places and couldn’t be moved without delving deep into the CSS.

I found one that works for now, but I won’t really be happy until I design my own.

I had an elaborate plan to run some tests on a sandbox server. It involved backups of the database, extensive use of a text editor, messing with some settings in various .php files, and seeing what happened. When I broke it, I would just restore the backup and try again.

I was about to start, then I thought, “Maybe I should search Google to see if any one else has done this.” The first two hits linked back to the extensive and detailed WordPress documentation.

Guess what? After a few setting changes and some work with my FTP client, it worked! Mostly. No text editor, no shell scripts, no extensive *NIX-style hacking skills.

“Wait,” you say, “did you just write mostly?” Yes, I did.

I even fixed the “mostly” by–GASP–searching for my new problem. It turns out the original instructions overlooked another setting change.

The whole thing took less than 15 minutes. I learned several things about WordPress, but more importantly I learned this:

When productivity is on the line, set your pride aside and Read the Fine Manual*.

* I know, there is a more colorful interpretation for RTFM, but this is a family-friendly blog.