Remkus de Vries

Curiously Questioning Everything

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Should I blog more?

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I work with WordPress all day. I have been since late 2005. I started using WordPress for what it was supposed to do back in the day: blogging. The more I started discovering the possibilities WordPress gave me, in terms of earning my living with it, the less I started blogging.

I’m guessing the decline in my blogging frequency started out as a preference to rather be working on building my business than randomly writing blog posts. But it could be I just got lazy and stopped bothering. Either way, I kinda stopped blogging. Not full stop, but very close.

So, I didn’t think I had to answer the question my good friend Chris raised a couple of days ago. I started skimming his post titled “Should I stop blogging?” and was quickly assured that Chris has no intention in stopping himself, but that he was, in fact, encouraging everyone to actually start blogging (again).

Which of course made me think about my own blog.

Chris sums up 5 lies we tell ourselves to not blog and even though my blogging certainly didn’t stop because of all of those 5 lies, I did resonate with Lie #1 and #2 and #3 to some degree and I think I need stop telling myself those lies.

Lie #1: We need to be inspired to write

I’m plenty inspired on a day to day basis, but I find it difficult to transport that inspiration into something I share here. In some way because I can’t be bothered, but on a deeper level I don’t know where to start. So, I’m going to start looking for ways to do just that. Transform my inspiration.

I guess you could see this post as a start(?) :).

Lie #2: We’re not great writers

Yeah, well, I’m really not. I love reading Zé‘s posts and I think I recognize a great writer when I see one, but I’m not one of them. But perhaps I don’t need to be quite that great? Not having English as my first or second language is definitely not helping me to find a proper flow (you should see how many times I have to rewrite a sentence just to get a flow), but then again, maybe I should just lower the bar some and just write. Just write.

Lie #3: We need something spectacular to share

This is definitely a lie I tell myself and one that I need to stop repeating. This one, much like Lie #2, just needs for me to lower the bar.

381 Words in, but what gives?

So, what I’m really saying here is that I’m trying going to blog more. Instead of raising the bar high yet again and committing to a daily schedule like Chris, I’m keeping it light. I’m also not going the Karim road here either. I mean, two blogs a decade is nice and all, but that’s the schedule I was on there. Kinda. I’ve got to do better than that 😉 .

Blog at least once a week. Not just WordPress, because that’s too limiting for me, but anything that I find interesting. Maybe it’s a comment on someone else’s post or maybe it’s just me expressing … things. We’ll see.

Posting something here on is not a raison d’être so I do actually care what you as my audience are curious about and owuld like to see me blog about. In other words: I’m very curious of what you’d like to see me cover.

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Whew, 577 words 😀

Foto credit.

I’m focusing and becoming more aware again

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Back in 2004, I enrolled in an NLP course in Belgium led by the wonderful Paul Liekens. Learning to understand how we translate whatever our senses pick up and how language patterns get interpreted by our mind was, and still is, one of the most important things I’ve ever learned. It’s something I use every single day.

However, this post is not about NLP, it’s about something else Paul taught me: meditation. We would have these long weekends of 4 to 5 days where every single day before we started the day, we would commence the day by doing meditation.

Even though it felt very unnatural to me at first – I mean, come on, I’m supposed to just sit here wide awake and close my eyes and channel my attention inwards? Wut?! – I soon began to feel the positive effects of beginning the day with some dedicated “me” time. Presence time. There’s something to be said for taking a few minutes aside each day to bring focus to your thoughts and relaxation to your body. It’s a habit I took home with me and started to enjoy even. In the years after my visits to beautiful Belgium I continued to take the time to ground my thoughts and set the focus for the day (or sometimes week).

In spite of the benefits I experienced, after a few years this started to fade in a period where a lot of things were going on for me, resulting in my barely taking the time to sit down and meditate. For years I couldn’t find the time, which is ridiculous, to find a few minutes to center, to focus, to ground. This changed this weekend.

There are a lot of things going on in my world currently, and even though this forces my tendency to solve everything in my head, even more, I decided I would start to remember that meditation actually makes me more focused. Which in return makes me deal with all the stuff that’s going on more effectively.

And as of this weekend, I started to act on that regained knowledge. I’ve downloaded an app – yes, of course, there’s an app for that – that’s going to help me set 5 to 10 minutes aside per day to meditate. To be, to be focused and to become aware again. As a reminder I’ve allowed the app I’m using, Calm, send me a push notification on my iPhone and since I don’t let any other apps send notifications that works pretty effective.

I’m quite happy to have set this change in habit in motion again (thanks for the reminder Chris!) and am looking forward to solidifying this. So, how are you finding your calm and focused self?

Update: Just discovered this one today: possible age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. That’s not a bad reason to start either 😉

Liberation of the human mind

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Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government.

Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

–Emma Goldman

Help! WordPress Won’t Do Automatic Updates!

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As you may have seen WordPress 3.7 just got released and with it automatic updates. Now, in some cases, people may discover that their particular sites can’t update automagically. In my findings in the sites, we manage for clients the most common reason is that you have had to update WordPress previously by entering your FTP credentials. If you’ve done that once, changes are WordPress remembered those for you, but in this case, those credentials need to be placed in your wp-config.php file in order for the automatic updates to work.

Luckily, all you need to do is add the following lines:

define( 'FTP_USER', 'username' );
define( 'FTP_PASS', 'password' );
define( 'FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org' ); // this usually can be 127.0.0.1

If this doesn’t work, you may need to add a few more constants–find more here–but in my experience, this solved all the issues we encountered. If you need help from a WordPress specialist, feel free to contact me.

Why argue with this guy?

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Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle.

Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the atoledo lot of mankind.

Albert Einstein

Originally I had the following quote here:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet

but as Ozh pointed out that quote appears to be a bit too much paraphrasing Einstein. So, I replaced the original quote by the current one.

Introspection with no means of diversion

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Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?

But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

Michael Sacasas