Made your New Year’s Resolutions, yet? Or aren’t you going to bother this year?

Every year, I make resolutions.
Every year, I set ambitious professional goals.
Every year, I keep up with them for a while.
Every year, one by one, they fall by the wayside. Something else always comes along that has a higher priority or greater urgency.

This year, I want to try something a little different. Instead of big, ambitious goals for myself and my freelance business, I’m going to try baby steps. Instead of a two-page list of annual resolutions, I’m going to try a trimmed-down list of four manageable daily commitments.

Just for today:

• I will be pleasant and welcoming to each caller on my business phone, rather than resenting the interruption or assuming that the call is from a telemarketer.
• I will set and meet a mini-deadline for each client project, aiming at finishing each project ahead of schedule.
• I will spend an hour on marketing my business, whether it’s designing a new brochure, seeking out networking opportunities, updating my website, staying in touch with former clients, or brainstorming with a colleague about new seminar ideas. One hour—even if I have a project deadline. One hour—even if I’m tired.
• I will read something that will improve a skill or push my mind in a direction it doesn’t normally go: a book on PHP programming, an issue of Technical Communication or Intercom, a few articles from Arts and Letters Daily , or that art history article that a friend forwarded—anything to jumpstart the creativity that happens when I move outside my standard routine.

  How about you? You can use the Comments feature to share your resolutions—or lack of them—with your Rochester Chapter colleagues.

  Kat Nagel
  Proof Sheet editor

A few months ago, I made an error in editing the Proof Sheet template that caused the Proof Sheet posts from January through the end of June to disappear. All the Proof Sheet posts from January through early March have now been restored, and I hope to have the rest available by the end of October. New articles, held until the database problem was resolved, will start appearing in October. I have also put in place an automated backup system that will make it easier and faster to recover from any future problems.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Kat Nagel,
Proof Sheet Editor
(Note to self: Never mess with a line of code containing “php?” unless you are absolutely sure what it does.)

Articles posted in December have disappeared. Sorta. They’re still in the database, but not visible on the site. I’m working with the host’s tech support to resolve the problem and get ‘em back online ASAP.

We’ve moved the Proof Sheet to its own domain to resolve a space problem on the STC-Rochester web server. Your new Proof Sheet will be in blog format. This makes it possible to search for previous articles by topic, as well as by date, and provides a convenient way for readers to comment on specific articles. We hope these new features will make you happy. (The blog format also allows for much more efficient content management, which will make your editor very happy, indeed.)

Current Season

Our plan, at the moment, is to post the table of contents for each current issue on the STC-Rochester site with a link to the newsletter site for the full-text articles and columns.

Individual articles will be tagged with categories. There will be a running history of Chapter and Society news, and you will be able to browse through features and columns by topic.

Archives

Previous issues from 1998 through Winter 2006 will eventually be available in a dedicated archive section. Prior to 1998, the Proof Sheet was printed and mailed to members. Thanks to Ann Wiley, those issues have been scanned and will soon be available online as image files. Selected articles will be converted to text and reprinted here as blog entries.

Questions?

If you have any questions or comments about the Proof Sheet, please contact the editor, Kat Nagel.