Stories are a part of what make us human, giving us the opportunity to share our feelings and our experiences with those around us. However, many of us struggle with the actual writing of these stories and that’s where the techniques from The Hour Stories can come into play.

Heralded by Dale Adams Segal, the techniques will help you explore the story, how to tell it, and even how to get it published. Segal decided to open her own writing studio, The Writing Tables, in 1995 and this studio has “accompanied hundreds of writers and individuals.”

For some, it was about exploring and transcending such traumas as the Holocaust, illness, pain and loss. For others, it was about getting published and writing more. Dale herself has written award-winning television for children’s and family education. You can encapsulate some of her teachings through the cards available in the online store.

Do you use BlueFur to host your websites? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website URL, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

It might be just in time for Halloween for you to implement the Sun City theme on your WordPress blog. It features a strong orange, black, and grey color scheme which is great for the fall season, but it could easily be used year-round for a variety of different blog niches and topic areas.

Designed for WordPress 3.0, this theme includes customized attachment and image templates, as well as the ability to “sticky” your blog posts for highlighting purposes. It also has post thumbnails, threaded comments, collapsing sub-menus in the vertical sidebar, custom backgrounds, and support for translations.

The Sun City theme will automatically generate meta-keywords and meta-descriptions for your blog posts, but both of these can be easily overridden by using the provided custom fields. It also has an area for related posts on single post pages, comment tags, links to child pages, and more.

Go to Quirm.net to access the download link, check out a few screenshots, and view the live demo.

What has been happening in the wide world of blogging? Let’s find out!

Jennifer Mattern starts us off with a quick tip for all the bloggers in the audience. She describes how you can get your WordPress blog category archives to only show the post titles. This not only improves the user experience, but it appears to help with increasing overall page views as well.

Dough Roller usually writes about different ways to save money or make money, but one of the most recent posts is about money itself. More specifically, eh describes some of the features found on the new US $100 bill. It’s similar to the existing bill, but it comes with many new security features and other changes that you’ll want to know about.

Lidi Giroux likes to take a lot of pictures of all sorts of different things. Recently, she took a shot at a massive spill inside a grocery store and the spill pattern almost looks like a maple leaf. Almost. Well, you can go and see for yourself. It’s a pretty interesting photo.

Daree Allen is very happy that she can see again. That’s because she is sharing her experience with LASIK eye surgery. It’s certainly nice to get rid of the glasses for good, but it’s understandable that people would be nervous about having a laser shooting beams into their eyes. Have you undergone the procedure?

Jeremy Lim spent a good deal of time over in Singapore to take in the 2010 Youth Olympic Games. He was following Team Canada around to many of the different events and, as a photographer, you know that Jeremy took more than a few picture along the way.

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a seasoned veteran of trade shows, but I have been to more than a few in my day. And, as you can imagine, they’re not all the same. More specifically, there is a distinct difference in how the booth babes conduct themselves when you are at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and how they conduct themselves at Computex Taipei (Taiwan).

This could be partly a cultural thing and the phenomenon may extend into other similar shows in and around those regions, but my observation is thus: They wear skimpy, tight, or revealing outfits at both shows. That much is understood and the debate as to whether this is appropriate can be reserved for another day. However, at CES, the girls are more than happy to have their pictures taken as-is. Their clothing usually has a prominent company logo and that’s good enough for them.

At Computex Taipei, on the other hand, the girls will typically reach for one of the company products before they are willing to have their pictures taken. Their outfits have similar prominent branding as the girls who work at the Consumer Electronics Show, but it seems that they have been told to maximize the promotional value by holding a company product as well, posing with it.

The amount of attention that these girls receive at the shows is similar at both locations, as you’d probably suspect, but it makes you wonder if having the physical product in hand actually adds any marketing value to the companies who hire them. What are your thoughts?

Is your website or blog optimized for newer web browsers? Do you find that some elements can appear “broken” if a visitor is using an older web browser? If that happens to be the case, you may want to try installing the IE6 Upgrade Option plug-in for WordPress-powered websites.

In short, it displays a message to all visitors who are using Internet Explorer 6 to access your website. The message says politely and succinctly that the user should upgrade their browser to something more current and that the web experience on your website may be less than optimal while using IE6. Links for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 8 are also provided, making the upgrade process relatively easy.

The “upgrade” message is displayed using a lightbox effect, so your website remains somewhat visible through the semi-transparent overlay. The visitor can close this lightbox and accept the “less than optimal” performance, or they can opt to upgrade their browser to something newer and return to your site for the better experience.

For more information, including a screenshot of the plug-in in action, check out the developer’s site at Doc4Design.com. The free download link is also available on that page.

The date seems to get bumped up further and further each year. Inevitably, we will soon be seeing Christmas decorations in many stores and we will soon be bombarded with a huge assortment of holiday products for sale. The same thing can be said about other major holidays throughout the year, like Easter, Thanksgiving, and Halloween.

So, the question as a brick and mortar business (or even as a web-based one) is, “How early is too early?” On the one hand, you want to be able to capitalize on the keeners who like to get their holiday-related shopping as early as possible, cashing on that opportunity. On the other hand, many people are turned off by stores that jump into the holiday spirit, so to speak, much earlier than they would have liked to see the stores do it.

It’s only September and we have at least two major holidays (Thanksgiving and Halloween) between now and Christmas, but I’m already starting to see several dollar stores, for instance, selling holiday decorations and other related items. Is this too early? It really depends on your kind of business as well. If you sell unique items that take time to produce for customers, like custom photo books and the like, it makes sense to have a bigger window of opportunity. For a dollar store, I’m not so sure that it’s the right way to go.

What are your thoughts? What is the earliest that you’ve seen a store set up for the Christmas holiday shopping season? How early do you think is too early?