Initial Feedback to Blogging Courses

I found a moment to put together a list of all the positive messages you have sent in via email and text during the first three weeks of the beginners blogging course.

These are all totally unsolicited. Imagine what we might hear if we asked? (There will be a proper evaluation of the course later on.)

All I can say is, it’s been a pleasure. You are great people to work with!

There is of course much room for growth. As the tag line reads on my other blog - “Learning - It’s about the journey.”

- Libby

“… participating in your Academic Blogging course is the most thought-provoking and stimulating process I’ve engaged in academically for a long time! It’s dawning on me how blogging could, if I choose, profoundly change the way I do my research work, connect with others in my field and beyond, and go about the whole business of creating ‘knowledge’.”

“I just keep wanting to let you know how much joy and excitement and hope you’ve put back into my life.”

“I feel quite excited about the journey we have embarked upon. Still not sure what i will do with my blog but i am trusting the process.”

“What an amazing group of people you’ve brought together… what a power house and how brilliantly you are bringing us out - thank you.”

“thank you, thank you, thank you. I didn’t expect to be feeling quite so inspired and empowered by my first blogging session. I feel seen and encouraged to open into all of me and offer it out to the world.”

“thanks for a great session…. I can see us having a reunion in ten years time remembering where it all started….”

“Many thanks Libby for getting us all off to a great start.”

“I’m starting to realise from what you’ve been saying is write what you love and the money will come - probably in mysterious ways.”

“Enjoyed yesterday and found it very useful.”

“I’m really enjoying the course.”

“It was a great session, thank you Libby - and thanks to the rest of you for coming at the subject from such differing stances. “

Uploading PDF v Word

When uploading documents to your blog, we recommend you convert them to PDF’s before hand.

In essence, PDF is best because it creates an image of the file which is easier to load (displays quicker), doesn’t get it’s formatting mashed which Word can do and is a established convention for sharing longer documents. There are many other reasons why it has become the standard, but trst us on this for now. But let us know any really good reasons why you might prefer Word.

You can easily do this within Word for Mac by going File > Print > PDF (bottom left) >  Save as PDF.

Word for PC strangely doesn’t support this. It will be separate step. We are looking for a free program to do this for you. Stand by… Gra will add a comment in any moment now…

You can set a PDF to allow cutting and pasting so people can quote from you (future post to be written about how).

You could put Word docs up as a trial run and wordpress will allow them.

Blogging your way to wealth

We have a very holistic approach to blogging here. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like money! As a wonderful Buddhist monk called Geshe Michael Roach (who was also a New York diamond broker) once said to a group of business students I was teaching:

I’ll show you how to make money. Lots of money. But you might like to think about how you make it…. and how you spend it.

Another Buddhist friend of ours, Andrew Black, is one of the world’s top poker players. Highly skilled and impenetrable he is too. Also very mindful of how he makes it, and how he spends it. A very interesting story about “The Monk” by writer Val Blomfield’s son Vishnapani here ;-)

Now where was I… oh yes, making moolah.

Here’s a good blog to help you make it. We’re all for it. Spread it around.

Rookie Millionaire.

See also the entry on Yaro Starak. There will be loads more on this blog re: SEO, analytics and the like. But what we are really keen to contribute is dialogue around the bigger stuff too.

At what price authenticity and human becoming? Let’s walk the middle path, and die happy with how we made it, and how we spent it.

I love hearing Gra talk about all this. He’s amazing. Gra - please can we have one of your thoughtful posts on why SEO’s gaming Google isn’t quite as cool as some might think it is?

I’m going to get Geshe Michael Roach’s book The Diamond Cutter at last (he gave me the first chapter years ago) and keep exploring.

I’m really keen to integrate my authentic self through the path of blogging and connect with lovely folk who want to share the journey.

If money be a side effect of this process, then so be it.

 

Editing yourself

Some serious bloggers like to show where they have changed a previous post.

See this for an example.

There are no hard and fast rules about how to do this, but I will be looking for more and more examples to help you develop your own protocols.

Gra - would you like comment?

The question was asked by someone in our Academics Blogging course, so we will look for specific examples of conventions evolving in that world. Please add a comment if you find any yourselves.

About Widgets

Thanks to Ivan Pope (again) for leading me down the rabbit hole via his highly absorbing widget haven, the one and only Snipperoo. I’m now getting all widgety!

Widgets are nifty little things you can add to your blog or other website to personalise it. Wordpress’s official blogger Lorelle calls it “accessorizing” (that’s one for the girls).

Facebook applications are widgets, eg. that lovely Bob Dylan one, tag clouds are widgets. The search box on the top right of this blog is a widget.

“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword we’ve chosen for this sidebar-chopping plug-in we have developed. They could have been called Gadgets or Gizmos or Wizbangs or Whatevers. On the surface, they’re just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML. Way down deep, they may be something entirely more significant. Anyway, here’s a peek…” more at automatic.

Note for Authentic Blogging students: we are all using Wordpress 2.2 or later so it already supports widgets under Dashboard > Presentation > Widgets.

To find out more go to Snipperoo and Wikipedia. These sites go a lot deeper in terms of the commercial and social implications of widgets. Snipperoo is where you go to get loads of cool widgets.

To find out how to use widgets on your Wordpress blog.

If you want more flexibility in how you “pimp your blog”, then you might need to upgrade to Wordpress.org.

Using images

 

Yachts in San Sebastian bay. Summer 2007

(That’s me at the helm - not blogging, just breathing)

 

Just briefly, here is the FAQ from Wordpress about using images. Because I did say I would blog it. So I did. So there.

Use lots of images. Photos, cartoons, illustrations. They make a blog easier to engage with. Collect them online, find them on flickr, take photos, copy them from other sites, make them link to where they came from or what they are about, make your own!

If you want to edit photos (to change size, optimize for quick display on screen, etc) use your own software (eg. iPhoto) or try FastStone (PC only at this stage). Mac or PC users could try GIMP. Both are free.

I’ll post about slideshows, embedding videos, podcasts, music and other audio visual content soon.

Warning: Editing images can get pretty geeky and technical, so go gently. The easiest way to get images working for you in the early stages might just be to right-click and save the interesting, relevant ones you find on the internet, especially if they are already sized right to fit your blog’s template and if they load fast. Then just upload them to your blog following the wordpress instructions above.

Technical Note

The image above was taken with a mobile phone camera (Nokia N70). It has been stored in iPhoto and exported as a jpeg, reduced in size to 250 x 333 pixels.

I chose a mobile with the best camera I could afford at the time, so I’ld  always have something handy. Was thinking of getting a new Nikon D70s Digital SLR with a big fat 18-200mm lense at the time, but gee whiz, I just don’t think it would have gotten quite so much use.

Incidentally, I have worked professionally as an events, travel and portrait photographer on and off over the years. My folio is here. I am interested in hearing from folk who have projects they would like me to work on… with proper cameras.

Wordpress.org links

These are my top sources for doing good and fancy things with Wordpress. I mean the wordpress dot org host-yourself version, not the free Wordpress dot com hosted version.

If starting out of for quite complex issues, the best place to begin is the Codex at codex.wordpress.org which seems to have documentation for almost every circumstance.

For example, to find out about how to host or arrange multiple wordpress blogs in many combinations, the codex entry for Installing Multiple Blogs has a great set of links to downloads and hacks of various sorts.

Developing Themes:

• The Loop In Action
• Theme Development
• Dissection of a Wordpress Theme

Plugin Development:

• Writing a Plugin

Really, I just end up referring to the codex mostly.  But, the codex has gaps and the Wordpress support forums are  often useful too.

At the end of the day, too, there’s nothing too scary going on under the hood so those with PHP experience will have no problem find out what is going on.

Tags vs Categories

Here I want to write a little about Tags and Categories and what they mean, and when you might want to use each of them.

When blogging, use categories to add internal structure for you and your readers. And use tags to join an unstructured global conversation around common topics.

More about tags and categories on wordpress.

We’ve all dealt with categories a lot; fill in a form for insurance and somebody is going to ask your occupation. Tricky. I never get anything that matches quite what I do — the answer is always somewhat of a compromise. But the designer of that form is really happy, because they make you fit into their list of occupations — their taxonomy. That’s categories. Somebody makes up a list and you have to fit in. The world is full of famous taxonomies — the classification of all the species on our planet is the biggest and most famous of them all. But think of the Dewey-Decimal system in the library as well.

When you’ve got your own blog, you can make up your own categories and put your own posts in them. You’ve got your own taxonomy to play with and you can use it in lots of different ways to classify blog posts.

Now, tags are a different question born from a different problem. Say me and fifty thousand others get together and try and hammer out the categories we need to describe all the websites on the internet or all the knowledge on the planet or something nice and humanly complex. Will we reach agreement on some set of categories? Maybe a little. We’ll run out of time, argue like mad over lots of individual distinctions and end up getting nowhere.

Tags evolved to solve this problem. Tags are just words, anyone can make them up, use them and apply them. There’s no rule book or plan of categories or hierarchy controlling them.

This works in the real internet world because people tend to use similar tags for things and it is possible to search for them and cluster them together. Lots of stuff gets tagged. Blog posts, photos on flickr, events, videos on YouTube and so on.

So, you can tag your posts with some words, and if others on the internet tag their stuff with the same word, then a tag-based search engine like technorati.com can put them together.

For example, the top popular tags at Technorati at the moment are: music, iraq, al gore, britney spears, and so on.

Go deeper on tagging at wikipedia in the Folksonomy entry. A folksonomy is, I guess a taxonomy made by folks.

Event organiser

A bit off topic, but I know there are people out there that also struggle to get consensus on dates and other things. So check Doodle out.

 

Schedule an event…

… such as a board meeting, business lunch, conference call, family reunion, movie night, or any other group event.
View example, create poll

 

Make a choice…

… among movies, menus, travel destinations, or among any other selection.
View example, create poll

How does Doodle work?

1. Create a poll.
2. Forward the link to the poll to the participants.
3. Follow online what the participants vote for.

Adding RSS blog posts to a web page

If you have a blog and a regular website, often it is really nice to get headlines or a little bit of blog info into the regular website. You can put a news sidebar on a page, and give people links to go further into the blog.

Alert! This is pretty technical and assumes you know a bit about using php and html to build web pages. You don’t need to know this to be an authentic blogger.

[Read more]

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