I'm giving. Are you?

The holidays are coming up fast and, as usual at this time of the year, many of us are thinking of the less fortunate. For my part, I’d like to make a quick plug for my charity of the year:

Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research

They are still the only national research charity solely devoted to blood disorders in both adults and children. 24,500 people in the UK every year are diagnosed with a cancer of the blood and leukaemia is the most common form of cancer in children in the UK. They rely entirely on voluntary donations.

My mother died suddenly of leukaemia about 18 months ago, which is why I’m plugging them (instead of Cats’ Protection who I’d normally opt for).

They have a webpage here and tons of auctions on eBay.

Thanks for listening.

If you’ve checked out the info page, you’ll have seen that it’s about being a freelance writer without doing any marketing.

If all goes to plan, in a couple of days I’ll reveal a lot more – the title, what’s in it, who it’s for… and I’ll also start looking for proofers to get an opinion from the fledgeling freelancer public. Stay tuned and make sure you don’t miss it!

Yahoo news has an article today about an amazing therapy that has wiped out leukemia in two of three test subjects and greatly improved the condition in the third. This could be a big step forward in the search for a cancer cure.

Of course, it still needs extensive testing and the long-term effects must be evaluated (it’s only a year in at the moment but the patients remain in remission) but it’s great news.

Something to brighten your day and bring hope to millions of cancer sufferers around the globe.

I’ll be posting another excerpt from my upcoming release in my next post, so you can expect something extraordinarily useful (as usual, of couse!).

Watch this space!

Hah! I did it even though they said I couldn't.

I must be in a bit of a retrospective mood at the moment. Despite spending about six hours on a single piece of work yesterday, I found myself wandering back through some of my blog posts. Surprisingly, I rediscovered quite a few I had forgotten and several that were really quite good.

I then spent about an hour trying to figure out how to export all the posts from my blog into some kind of readable format, so that I could go through them without resorting to the unacceptably crap 3-items-per-page WordPress search.

Unfortunately, most of the applications that used to be able to read an entire blog and store it offline for ease of editing no longer have that ability: they’ve all been adjusted to edit a single existing entry at a time. Totally frickin’ useless.

And most of the responses I found through Google ran along the lines of “You can’t”.

But they’re wrong: there is a way!

Of course, WordPress has its own export facility (in the Tools on the Dashboard) but that’s as useful as the search: it vomits out some kind of bizarre, WP-specific XML file that’s about as readable as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actually, it’s probably easier to understand the XML: at least that has some kind of structure.

Given that I’m unwilling to accept that such things are impossible (otherwise known as being a stubborn old bugger who won’t give up), I kept looking. It took quite a while to find a single response on a forum that explained how to do it.

The solution is a nice, geeky workaround that uses a free online tool and a converter. It only takes three steps to complete, so here’s the skinny:

1. Use the WordPress export tool to create a copy of Ulysses. Umm, no… I mean to create an XML file with everything in it. Your browser will dump this on your computer and give it a title like “wordpress.2011-06-05.xml”.

2. Now pop over to the absolutely funky-as-hell Blogbooker website. This truly awesome (and free) tool will convert the entire contents of your blog – including pictures, links and cat spit – into a PDF book in a couple of minutes. It’ll even handle multiple authors, different page sizes and all the other stuff that “professional” tools throw a total wobbler over!

3. You’ll need some kind of file converter to get the text out of the PDF file: Adobe’s ridiculously huge, unwieldy, use-a-particle-accelerator-to-crack-a-peanut application, Acrobat, will do it (File/Export). There are plenty of online apps that’ll do the same job, though they might struggle if it’s a really big file – just Google “convert PDF to xxx” where ‘xxx’ is the output format of your choice. You could even copy/paste each page individually if there aren’t too many.

And that’s it. Incredibly simple!

Admittedly, my PC spent about an hour trying to convert the 2.5Mb PDF file into the largest Word document ever seen on the face of the planet before I gave up, killed the process and went to bed… but hey, it should work quicker if your computer doesn’t suck as badly as mine.

Let me know if you find a better way to do it!

Justin Bieber, teenage heart-throb whose hairstyle is popular with young lesbians.

A mere month after the frighteningly androgynous, look-like-an-eight-year-old Justin Bieber¹ signed his Island Records deal, another great event occured. Yes, in November 2008, I started working online.

Three years later, one of us is a teen heart-throb millionaire, plastered on young girls’ walls throughout the world. The other isn’t.

Despite the obvious lack of world fame, it’s been a good three years with some unexpected bonuses – new skills, regular work, better earnings and meeting some really cool folks.

Anyway, back near the start of my online saga, I produced a four-part HubPages hub called “Making Money Online: A Guide For The Absolute Beginner”. It received some nice comments and was useful enough that I turned it into a PDF file and made it available for free download here on ScrawlBug.

The 2011 version is now available from the Free Stuff page!

Updated with even more useful info, another job category, up-to-date views and a much, much bigger list of resources, the 2011 edition is a must-read for anyone who wants to get started earning online.

It costs nothing, of course. Feel free to donate if you feel guilty about downloading a document that took me many hours of hard work and a significant number of paper cuts to produce.²

The guide should help you avoid the pitfalls, spot the scams and – most of all – choose how you want to make money.

Feedback is gratefully received, as always!

¹ I know nothing about him really, apart from all the hate directed at him and the stupid haircut that all the yobs round here try to copy, much to my amusement.

² I’m lying – there were no paper cuts. And it didn’t take that many hours to produce. Enough with the guilt, already…

While ScrawlBug is directed primarily at the fledgeling freelance writer, I occasionally come across a nice little earner that can bring in some extra pocket money in return for a few minutes of your time.

Just the other day, someone introduced me to Microworkers. A rather neat concept in the field of online work, this site posts up jobs that only take a couple of minutes to complete – sign up somewhere, Digg an article, comment on something… that sort of thing. I thought I’d give it a go.

The money’s small – usually between 10 and 40 cents for an activity – but it’s international (most jobs aren’t limited to particular countries, though some demand US, UK, AU or other residents) and it takes up so little time that it’s easy to fit a couple of jobs in when you’re bored.

Not at all in the vein of primary income but I’m not going to complain if someone throws me $5 for a total of half an hour’s clicking, while I’m drinking coffee. I’ve been assured they’re reliable by several people, too.

If you’re interested, pop over. I have a referral link if you really feel like signing up under me or you can just go to the main site.

Note: this is not a paid or sponsored post. I honestly just thought some of you might be interested, especially if you happen to live somewhere where a couple of extra dollars makes a real difference.