Before 2009, I had never heard of a portable career, laptop lifestyle, digital nomad or location-independent lifestyle. If I ever considered work and not being tied to a place in the same thought, it was to dream about someday writing a book. After all, that's something you can do no matter where you live. Then in 2009, I lost my "safe" job. After applying for about 200 positions and garnering one whole interview, and an appalling three-month stint in a call center, I decided to …
How to Create Stunning Images, even if you Can’t Draw a Straight Line
It's hard work to create images to go with your blog posts and social media, especially if you're not an artist or a designer. Unfortunately, it's something you need to do. Study after study shows that articles and posts with images, and social media posts with images, get shared exponentially more than posts without images. So what's a non-designer to do? How do you come up with images for your: Articles Blog posts Facebook Google Plus Pinterest Twitter and all those other social media …
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How do your Online Business Costs Compare?
For many of us, portable careers are the key to living comfortably overseas. While many expats rely on teaching English, or blogging about their travel or expat lifestyle and related subjects to generate their overseas income, more and more expats are running an actual business, or working virtually for an actual business. Back in 2009, when I started this site (yes, it has been that long!), I conducted a reader poll and found that 75% of you would need to generate some income overseas. I …
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WordPress 4.2, “Powell” is Here
WordPress loves to name its new releases after great jazz musicians, and this one honors pianist Bud Powell. It adds new features to make it easier to add content, and supports more characters. That makes foreign languages look better on the screen, and gives you access to Emoji on WordPress. :-) (Did you see what I just did there?) Native embedding just expanded as well. Now, when you want to share from Tumblr or Kickstarter, you can add the link the same way you add a link from YouTube and …
Can I Ask YOU some Questions?
Some of you may have noticed that I'm not adding new WordPress tips, hints and information to the site as often as I used to. There's a reason for that. . . and I'm happy to be able to tell you a little bit about it. (And yes, it is WordPress related.) Late last summer, I agreed to work with a new client, writing about WordPress and web-related issues for them. A couple of months ago, they asked if I would change and expand my role with them. They're interested in creating a product to ease …
Modern Studio Pro Theme – Classy and Responsive
StudioPress has just published an attractive, new, minimal-ish, responsive WordPress theme, called Modern Studio Pro. While not minimalist, exactly, it's lean and clean. Here's how the designer describes the new theme: "Modern Studio draws eyes exactly where we want them — then doesn’t distract them. "For designers, highlighting imagery is the most important function a website can perform. Modern Studio does this by cutting back on the clutter and color, so that it’s your shutter and colors …
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