I don’t often make posts about the blog itself. For the last couple of years now I’ve committed to making it an ad-free experience. Some of you will see that we no longer have to deal with the ugly FTRREPORTING title in the site’s URL. Don’t worry though, all of those links will still work and redirect to their proper pages. Everything should say Stenonymous now. If your browser says this website is “not secure,” that’s a “lie” that you can fix by typing in https://stenonymous.com.

Unfortunately, for a short time last month, the stenonymous.com domain and search box were not working. Guess what? Now they do! Users can sort by relevance, oldest, or newest.  Most of the unlisted pages and all of the uncategorized pages are purged. They were old and had nothing of import, so now readers won’t have to stumble onto them.

The Table of Contents has been updated with anything that wasn’t on it before from this year. I’m still not entirely happy with organizing it this way, but it’s a lot better than the old way.

Let’s talk about content real quick.

1.  Usually I do a monthly jobs post. This month I’m going to try something different and try posting that around the 15th, because as luck would have it, now that I do a post around the 1st of every month, governments routinely post their jobs immediately after my post!
2. I’ll be on a short segment of NCRA’s Stenopalooza tomorrow, during the NCRA Strong POW session. If anybody needs CEUs, it’s still available. But I am sure to write a little bit about that this month, so keep an eye out. I’m going to be talking with an audio expert. What I’d really like people to think about is how they can use this information to educate clients and fellow stenographers. Think about the stories that my fellow Strong members are going to talk about and think about how we’re all normal people making a difference. You can be that person.
3. Despite my general hesitance to cover the organization, STTI held a webinar last Wednesday. Most of what they said seemed reasonable. It was the panelists’ opinion of the direction of the field. It’s only when we got to about 40 minutes in and they mentioned the stenographer shortage that I’d like to address. If you’re somebody who has not really researched the shortage a lot, please be on the lookout for that article this month.
4. I actually had a freelance writer interview someone in the Open Steno group. As I understand, she’s a transcriber that used Word’s autocorrect features to make her own shorthand. It’s the same concept of steno, shortcuts to words, and it shows you just how valuable what we do really is in terms of inputting the words fast! This is why I have always been a proponent of letting transcribers know there’s a better way. Why force people to invent workarounds when there’s something tried, tested, and working right now with machine shorthand reporting? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.
5. I have two other things I’m trying to decide how to present. One, some page rate data I had started work on months ago. Two, some really great ideas pertaining to marketing I got from a book I read and what it means for us. Look out for these in late May. If my procrastination talents prevail, perhaps summer 2020.
6. Far future project. I’m going to look into whether it’s possible to embed my automatic marking program into the website itself to make it more intuitive for people. I talk a little bit about the coding behind it here.  In the meantime, Todd Olivas already has a similar tool, but it might still count Q. and A. as words.

Remember, I don’t censor comments here unless it’s caught in my spam filter or completely off topic, hate filled, nonsensical. Same goes for my Facebook discussion group. That hasn’t changed! All are welcome. Also remember, if you generally like the stuff you see here, you can donate or buy a Sad Iron Stenographer mug. If every reader this month donated $5, we’d be ad-free for ten years. If every reader bought a mug, we’d be ad-free for 20. Don’t do the math on this one, just trust me.