Blogging

In person, I work blue.  I focus on keeping my act clean when I’m wearing a tie or addressing a large group of professionals, but I do have to concentrate.  Get me in a smaller, more relaxed group, and I use my native tongue – which should probably get another layer of soap. In emails,…

When blogging, it’s tempting to use your web analytics software to examine what people are searching for, and then build your new blog posts around the search terms people are using.  After all, if people are searching for that, it’s a popular topic, so you should write about it, right? Wrong. You already wrote about…

In my series on How to Get Started Blogging, one of the first things I talked about was deciding what you’re blogging for: money, career, or something else.  That series focused on blogging for your career, but if you’re interested in going after money, there’s a WordPress plugin that I’ve found helpful. Whydowork AdSense will…

I keep hearing people patting themselves on the back saying, “Look – our President has a blog!” Hmmm.  It doesn’t smell like a blog to me because: There’s no comments There’s no trackbacks There’s no personal touch – it’s very, very clearly written by marketers (and certainly not the President himself) If the White House…

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about some guidelines for getting started with technical blogging.  I’ve now gone and broke one of them – not editing your WordPress template. When CSS sharpie Jeremiah Peschka read of my desire to make my site span the full width of the page, he offered to give me…

In my series this week on how to get started blogging, I’ve touched on the business of blogging for yourself, why you should use WordPress and how to configure it, and the best WordPress plugins.  Today I’m going to focus on look and feel. WordPress uses a “theme” system to bundle images, CSS files and…

Yesterday, one of my soon-to-be-former coworkers, Kiran, tipped me off to an NPR story on blogging and privacy. Steve Inskeep spoke with a grad student who writes a few Myspace blogs with his personal journal, political ramblings, and – whee – a blog about blogs. The student observed that he doesn’t know anyone who’s been…

I’ve encountered two instances this week where people dug in their heels and refused to even think about blogging as a communications medium. #1: A Michigan friend of mine has been struggling with web development for years while trying to build a site to document his sailing travels. He wants a simple site – the…

As I sit here in my car outside Starbucks, NPR is doing a story on blogging. They describe a site with One Minute Vacations – sixty-second sound clips of people’s trips in various cities. You can jump online, take a quick respite from your busy day, and transport yourself to Ghana, Stockholm, or any number…