Who’s going to clean the toilets when we have all “reached our potential”?

 

 If we all do what we are passionate about… if we all seek to live out our potential… as suggested by me and a million other thought “leaders” and success coaches…

who’s going to clean the toilets?

someone who’s passionate about toilets?

Or could it be we are suggesting the perpetuation of hierarchy here.. is heirarchy inevitable. Are class systems inevitable, inescapable. Will there always be someone “below” us.. less evolved than us…

I truly truly wonder what you all think.

(Many thanks to Flickr and I’m George. The one I really wanted to use was by Vitor Sa, but he is not sharing it.)

Making your blog your website from scratch

Now a blog is a website, so this title might be confusing for established bloggers and net types. But many students think of a website as being separate to a blog.

This is mostly relevant to how they want their readers / audience to navigate or more through their blog/website when they get there.

So this post is about how to turn your blog into a “website” or about how to experiment with landing pages and where your blog posts sit.

Here’s an example of a simple wordpress.com blog that’s been cleverly set-up to look like a static website with a blog page as well – widgety goodness (another one of our projects – and a great one-day conference all about widgets in Brighton UK on 6 December).

It was inspired by the inimitable Lucy West from the Monday group, from memory. And I think Jeddah Mali wanted to look at this option too. So Jeddah & Lucy – this one’s for you.

Others might like to experiment and please always ask users for feedback, keep surfing to see what others bloggers and website creators are doing, and review your own experience against your intentions and goals from time to time.

To create a ’static’ front page (& move blog posts from the front)

1. Consider the user experience you are trying to offer.

What do you want to communicate? How will you say it, show it, make it look and feel? What emotions, ideas, thoughts are you wanting to put across?

2. Create a new front page (or use an existing page you have created, eg. “About”) (A)

That has words, images, links etc as you want your front page to appear.

(Dashboard > Write > Write Page)

(or Dashboard > Manage > New Page (see text at top).

Format it as you will. Explore formatting options eg. colour, bold (see last button for advanced text editing) and experiment. Remember to save changes.

3. Create a new page for blog posts to move to (B)

See above. Simple add in a title and no text. A new tab will automatically be created if your theme displays tabs. If not, try a new theme.

This might be called “blog” or “news” or “updates” or “musings” or “let’s talk” or something else depending on what you want to do with it.

4. Position new front page and move blog posts.

Go to Dashboard > Options > Reading. Select:

<A static page>

Front page <select the page you just created or chose “A”>

Posts page <select the page your blog posts will move to “B”>

Update options.
If you have an existing website

- Integrate / Embed or Replace your Exisiting Website

To give this title justice, the other points to be made are linked to discussions with Garth Spiers, Julia Dunlop, Trevor Cousins and Assuntina Cardillo-Zallo:

- You can integrate your blog into an existing website (more to come on options for that)

- You can replace an existing, static website. Simple create the pages and subpages you need (see Page Parent option when editing a page – the blue box on the right). Cut and paste from existing website, save and upload images. Keep checking that the user experience and navigation are as you would like them to be. It can take some time, but at least you will end up with a blog site that engages readers much more and can be easily updated, hence ranking higher with Google and achieving more of the vast potential blogs have to offer.

Additional help is available if you need support due to time or technical reasons. We work with good people who can arrange a smooth transition at reasonable rates, but you can just do it yourself if you focus or find a clever friend to help a little.

Julia and others from that discussion. Would you like to add anything here in the comments?

Syndication, RSS and all that

One of the essences of a blog or even a paper journal is that it is made up of a list of entries. As you add posts to your blog, you extend the list of post you have made, and when people read your blog, they are looking through the list.

In this post I’m going to dig into the list-ness of blogs and talk about how RSS is used to communicate about lists of things including blog posts.

Each individual blog post has a bunch of common elements. An author, a date/time that the entry was published, the content of the post itself (your wise words), categories, and lots of other stuff. If you are a WordPress user, when you write or edit a post, all this metadata is available on the right hand side next to where you write your words. We call this extra stuff metadata. Literally data about data.

So what?

Well, it turns out that because all your blogs posts have similar stuff in them, you can make a list of them, and all posts have these similar bits. And all of everybody’s blog posts have similar stuff in them too. We can make a list of your blogs posts, or a list of a whole bunch of blog posts together.

So, all this list-ness became apparent and people started getting excited about doing things with these lists, like:
* can I get a list of all the blogs I like together so I can read them at once?
* can I put blog headlines on my webpage?
* can I search through lots of blogs for something I’m interested in?

Okay, so to do this we need a standard way of making a list of blog posts. And that’s what RSS is. RSS (full name Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way of making a list of blogs posts (or almost anything really) and communicating it easily.

That’s the standard RSS icon above. You’ll see that where a blog is offering an RSS feed (most do). It might show up in the page itself, or in the address bar of your browser. Clicking on it will offer to subscribe you to the feed. Subscription here means that you are going to get your browser or another RSS reader application to go and get the blog details and be able to display them to you when you like.

Say you have twenty blogs you like to read. But getting to twenty websites is a pain. It takes too long. Well, if you put those blogs into an RSS reader, and it goes and fetches blog headlines and posts for you, and displays them together. Bingo, I can whip through twenty blogs easily. Or a hundred. It makes it easier to take part on the global conversation if you can read through lots of blogs easily.

So, that’s the background to this stuff. Next I’ll take on finding and using a feed reader.

Pronetos – social network for scholars

Have just signed up to experiment with Pronetos, and will let you know how I get on. Meet you there?

Pronetos is the social network for scholars.

It is a home for University Faculty, Graduate Students, and Research Professionals of every academic discipline who want to be recognized as leaders in their field.

Pronetos gives you a platform to network and collaborate with your colleagues all over the world.

With Pronetos you have a forum for building ideas, a place to keep up with the latest trends and topics in your field, and the ability to nurture your professional legacy.

Bloggers Meet-up & a Little Red Boat (clap clap)

Frances Aldrich (with Anna “Little Red Boat” and Bobbie Johnson uncharacteristically dull in the background). Thanks to Jane Dallaway for organising the evening and for the photo!

We live and work in an amazing city called Brighton. It’s becoming know as the San Francisco of England. But not. There are loads of bloggers and social media bods on every corner. Second Life just opened their second life here too (the first is in SF).

The Brighton (hard core) Bloggers got together recently as part of the Digital Media Festival, and asked us to come along. We ended up just kind of telling our story and inviting others to. It was a really nice way to find out more about why people blog. As I think Bobbie or Dean Harvey said, “It’s a bit like an AA meeting”. A witty mob are the old bloggers mate. Reminds me of when Peter Morris said a website is like ” a hungry elephant in the backroom demanding to be fed”… or like Michael Leunig’s cartoon (man clenching guts feverishly “Doctor, Doctor, help… I’ve got a book inside me, take it out).

Blogs take the pressure off, but maybe it never goes away.. that gnawing feeling writers have. Better out than in I say, earthily, like a good burp. Hence the new category, the shameful admission.. “The Book”…

There I was telling students blog posts are “meant” to be short and only include one key point. Well I’m not here to regurgitate Naked Conversations. I’m here to stay on my own authentic blogging journey and reserve the right to rabbit on and meander down the page from time to time, so there! When we did the goal setting exercise in the Tuesday night group, I joined in. Part of what I wrote in the free writing exercise, letting it all spill out, was that I want to do some more reflective, longer pieces here. Not just putting up resources for everyone. But blogging for me! Staying on the path. Making deeper sense of it all.

Back to the AA meeting. My favourite new blog discovery of the night (obviously I have been living in my socks drawer)… was Anna at Little Red Boat. Along with Maxi our cat-person, Gra, HHDL and Michael Leunig, I think she might be one of my gurus… well, blogging gurus as least. In a perfect world Anna, I would be dropping a copy of Michael Leunig’s best to your door this Christmas – like Maxi leaves mice at the foot of Bea’s bunk bed stairs. An offering. But I know myself well enough to know it… unlikely. But if you love what you see, let me know and I am oh so happy to share some of his books with you.

Lastly, a big warm thanks to the stunning Frances Aldrich (from our Uni of Sussex academics group) for getting out the door. You look like you were enjoying yourself and made some engaging contributions…. Anything you would like to add?

If you get the clap clap reference (hint: The Belle Stars) then you will really know how old I am.

Books

We are very into books here at Authentic Blogging. The way they sit in your hand, by your bedside. The way you can hold them up and pass them to each other to share.

There are several books that have been a major inspiration for our approach to blogging. Their wisdom and examples have been synthesised into our own experiences blogging and teaching blogging, and just living in the world, doing business, particating in dialogue.

Here they are:

Naked Conversations – no surprises there

The New Rules of Marketing & PR – or there

The Artist’s Way – recovering your creative self

Writing Down the Bones – connecting with your passion and truth

On Dialogue – connecting with your own and the truth of others, towards evolving high level, progressive answers to any human problems or opportunities – from war in the middle east to how to sell a widget

On Becoming – self education in the fullest sense of the word

Authentic Blogging (in development right here and now… join the conversation!)

Read our free e-book on the Essence of Authentic Blogging to find links and quotes that bring it all together. Blogging for purpose and pleasure. For personal and professional growth and enterprise success. For entering the new communications paradigm with authenticity and strength, engaging and participating, connecting with your self and your world as you grow.

Starting with the self and radiating out from the there.

Finding your place in the blogosphere

I love the way everyone finds their niche, their home, their place in the blogosphere.

Today’s example of a person finding themself with blogging, and maybe even making a business out of it. Very American and challenging for me in some ways, but passionate and doing it.

I like the idea of a Week of Positive Blogging. Maybe it should be balanced with a good week’s worth of whinging too?

Libby

Widgety Goodness 2007

Wow, it’s been over a week since I posted. Loads going on with running the three initial courses (2 x mainstream, 1 x academics), developing our delicious new blogging course for business (social enterprises and others), invitations coming in from all over the place… and now, Widgety Goodness.

What is that you might ask? Well, if you have ever been on Facebook (ah, yes I guess the answer would be for most), you might have noticed all the applications you get sucked into using and sharing. Well, these are widgets. See previous post about what a widget is here.

Suffice to say, widgets are scorching right now. Particularly for marketing bods.

The Widgety Goodness 07 one-day event in Brighton 6 December is the first ever widget conference in the UK, and tickets are flying out the door. All going well, we’ll be doing it in New York next year.

I’m working as the backnetwork facilitator among other things, with the ever-happening Ivan Pope and co. I marked him as my “muse” in the relationships profile for backnetwork, which is largely why I took the gig. Ivan sometimes describes himself as an artist, entrepreneur, anarchist. How could I resist!

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