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.

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Free E-Book on the Essence of Authentic Blogging

Here’s a living document I prepared for our first three groups of budding bloggers. I feel a collaborative book coming on.

Not sure I see myself in the same light as the company I am keeping in this collection, but some wonderful people to be gaining inspiration from all the same. David Bohm, Carl Rogers, Carl Jung, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, The Cluetrain folk, Scoble, Meerman Scott (in some order of importance).

We see this as essential reading for anyone on a quest for personal and professional growth through blogging, but it is a very first draft. Stay tuned for more…

Have a read and let me know which quotes resonate most for you…

FREE E-BOOK on the Essence of Authentic Blogging
More posts on writing to help get your words flowing…

Authentic blogging buzz… in the flesh

Starting to see some more of the interconnected magic we get from blogging and other social media. Good to see others benefiting from the distribution of our ideas about “What’s a good blog?“.

But the real connection here with Ron Tanner was made by real people at a live event with Will McInnes and the divine Sarah James, marketing and events consultant extraordinaire. There’s simply no substitute for face-to-face human contact…

(and PLEASE can we have another word for it besides “offline”! Cyber-punk writers like William Gibson emphasise words like flesh as opposed to virtual. I guess we do go to “press the flesh” at networking functions.)

Will reinforced our advice about the power of blogging by saying: “If I was starting out in business again I would simply use a blog”, or words to that effect. Who needs an expensive, complicated website? Not most SME’s that’s for sure. Perhaps Will might want to drop in here and qualify or clarify that statement…

Thanks for the plug Caspar & Tanner. Thanks for some awesome reality checks Will. Thanks to all for helping Authentic Blogging find its place and people.

Conversations by Design

Such a good presentation on blogging for those that want to do it right rather than just do it.

Thanks to Ivan baby for this one. Will say more when I catch up with 546 new posts that need to go up for the 324 new bloggers I started working with last week. Slight exaggeration there.

Slideshare is another great piece of social media action. It’s all happening!

[slideshare id=48984&doc=conversation-by-design-15335&w=425]

Libel & Defamation

As I know some of you bloggers will be getting stuck into people and institutions from time to time, here’s the bbc’s take on how to handle yourselfs. Just be kind, but true I guess. And don’t say I didn’t warn you. You could also think media karma… but please do take part in truth.

Hosting changes for barkingowl.com and presencelabs.com clients

Over the next couple of months we are going to be moving our hosting clients over to spanking new scalable virtual servers from slicehost.com.

As we do that, we are also changing the environment a bit to drop some little used services and update lots of things to make it easier for everybody. Here are some of the changes planned:

• We are moving to a single php code install for wordpress blogs, so we can easily track and keep wordpress updated. This means that you’ll always have the updated version of wordpress available to you, making blog spam catching better, security better, and keeping you at the leading edge of

• We’re moving to Ubuntu as operating system from the existing Debian. That’s a little change really, but makes the latest and best packages available.

• We are making web serving changes to enhance performance and security. You won’t notice anything here, except things will be faster.

More on this closer to the time — I’ll be in touch with you all personally to talk through the migration beforehand.

In Rainbows, How Much?

BBC Radio 1 are running a poll on how much people are paying for Radiohead’s new In Rainbows album..  See the poll results and comments here.

Authentic Blogging for Staff at Sussex

It’s early days here in the development of our courses for academics and blogging virgins. So I am going to show you this presentation on the proviso that you see it as a beta version okay.

Session one went well this week, with our first brave group of budding bloggers at the top notch Sussex Uni last week. It’s been a huge week, with three new groups starting. Lots to blog in a reflective way about how it’s all going. For now, I am just trying to get as many resources up for them (and you all) as possible.

There’s no substitute for actually being there, but some of these posts might get you thinking and feeling what Authentic Blogging might do for you. In a personal and professional growth, integrated human way. Yay.

Viva la online revolution!

[slideshare id=132666&doc=blogging-for-academics2577&w=425]

Also putting up the extra items that can’t be read easily in the presentation.

Academic Stakeholders - Stakeholder mapping is an exercise we run all our clients through. We say “Think of yourself as the first audience for your blog”, but then you really need to start knowing how to talk to your stakeholders. But then, as Gra calls it, blogs still allow a wonderful sense of “Enhanced Serendipity”, so you never really know who’s going to drop in and make a connection.

Academic Blogging Mindmap - Novamind Pro mindmapping is great but has a few glitches to sort in the next version, so here are the links from the main Authentic Blogging mindmap for now. Some of these are very specific and others are by way of example to begin exploring the concepts.

Collaboration

• Wikinomics

Deep (or person-centred or holistic) learning

I tend towards social constructivism and am much inspired by the Reggio project. See my previous blog “Learning” re: this. All linked to life orientation and current MA in Person-Centred Education at Sussex.

• Human becoming

More links to come…ie, reflection, story telling, dialogue… so much material to share! Feeling rather evangelical about the potential of blogging for human communication, connection and learning.

More posts on Academics Blogging…

Oh powerbook!

My trusty Powerbook g4 is back in the shop again. Sigh. After a couple of days of fairly weird behaviour, it got to the point of presenting a black screen and running the fan full blast.

Dead logic board suspected.

This is the third major fault since July.

I’ve only had it back for a couple of weeks since the last logic board replacement. We’ll see what happens.

What this practically means is that I move all my non-online files to Lib’s old iMac g4, which works great but is a bit slow these days. Still a pleasure to use. And reinstall the current set of apps i’m using. MySQL, PHP5, gCal.app

Thankfully, a lot of my working tool and files are held online these days:

* email in gmail

* calendar in google calender

* more and more documents and spreadsheets in google docs

* code in subversion archives at online service providers

and so on.

What isn’t online: local app, experiments in code not yet in subversion. Offline writing. *My Todo List* grr.

I’m hoping Apple will come through with something, given how many failures I’ve had lately.

Write like you talk

Two of us sat there yesterday in the midst of the Meme Mamma’s Monday group, listening to Lucy West talk her Journey Work talk. She really knows her stuff. I hope to tell you a little more about each of the founding course participants when they give me the okay.

Sarah and I said, just blog the way you talk. She was right on it. Clear, coherent, flowing, passionate and highly engaging.

I found this post at the legendary Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users.

Conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass

Okay, she’s American, and proud of it. That aside Kathy says a whole lot about writing style in the new online paradigm and many other worlds besides.

Hope it helps you talk your talk, and connect with others who share your passions.

This is also a grand example of a blog that PASSIONATELY engages the audience. Wow, look at the comments and discussion on this one post alone. She has been around for a long time, blogging, publishing, speaking out publically and has at times been highly controversial. My guess is, Kathy has always been pretty Authentic. She is who she is. She takes risks.

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