Archive for December, 2007

Aussie Bloggers Forum is born!

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 30 December, 2007 in Recommendation. 4 Comments

The secret can now be revealed: Snoskred, Meg and I (and a team of very helpful moderators) have been working on the Aussie Bloggers Forum over the last couple of weeks. It has been an exciting time, with a lot of community-in-action networking (and a lot of hard work, including a sterling effort by Snoskred’s partner as forum administrator).

So what is the Aussie Bloggers Forum about? Here is what the front page says:

Aussies, and bloggers, can be really nice people :) Put the two together and you have the potential for a wonderful community.

At Aussie Bloggers, we are passionate about blogging and helping other Aussies do the same. But you don’t have to be an Aussie to join the forums, all nationalities are welcome here. If you are interested in blogging at all then join us in the forums today.

Unlike other forums out there on the web, questions are welcome and you will find lots of friendly Aussies willing to help. Helping out mates is part of the Aussie way, after all.

One aim we have for this forum is to gather a range of Aussie bloggers who have skills over different blogging platforms and social media sites to help provide information and advice to other Aussies who are not as experienced.

Let’s face it, the blogosphere is a really big place! We’ve enjoyed connecting with other Aussie bloggers and the friendships we’ve formed. We hope these forums will make meeting other Aussie bloggers much easier.

We want this to be a happy, helpful place where advice and networking occurs in an non threatening and collaborative environment. Nastiness won’t be tolerated.

If you are a ridgy didge, fair dinkum, true blue, dinky die Aussie who is already blogging, or thinking about it - then you’ve found the right place.

I encourage you to register today - it is free, fun, and a great way of sharing what you know about blogging and life in general.

If you need more convincing, watch the slideshow.

Self-Linking and The Blog Link

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 28 December, 2007 in Blogging. 0 Comments

Ian left the following comment on my Blogrolling post yesterday:

I use my blogroll to show the blogs I am keeping tabs on regularly. Thus it gets added to when I see one I like, and cleaned up occasionally when a blog goes stale from my perspective.

As for self-listing in the blogroll, I don’t. I think that linking to my own blogs sort of comes across as a bit wanker-ish.

This got me thinking about how I do link to my own posts to promote them - either from within my own blogs (when writing sneezy yarns) or on social bookmark sharing services (like coRank and bloggerati.com.au).

I started The Blog Link a few months back as a Drupal community site. While it did receive some attention from spammers, it didn’t really grow into a community as such. I’ve spent part of today installing and fine-tuning Pligg (a ranking platform similar to Digg, coRank and bloggerati.com.au) so that I could, at least, have a place that I owned to throw links in for my own  favourite metablogging posts (whether I wrote them or not).

You are welcome to join in and add your own posts (or those of others) - register for a free account. If the categories aren’t complete enough for what you want, or something goes wrong, please let me know by leaving a comment here or contacting me via facibus AT gmail DOT com.

Flagship Blog Project: Week 4 Maintenance and Transition

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 27 December, 2007 in Tips. 1 Comment

Week 3 of the Flagship Blog Project didn’t go so well - the pre-Christmas work rush really got in the way.  By December 22 I was supposed to have achieved the following:

I didn’t get the linkbait post finished until December 26 as Donna and I took Christmas Day off. I’ve since promoted it through Twitter, Bloggerati.com.au and coRank, but haven’t gotten to complete the other steps yet. Que sera sera.

In week 4, Maki asks us to look at setting up a sustainable system for growing the blog.

Week 4: Maintenance and Transition

  • Ensure that hired writers write a few posts. Give feedback.
  • Create a regular posting schedule for yourself or your writers.
  • Develop a second link bait and release it on social media channels.
  • Reduce the amount of time spent on the blog by 50%
  • Make preparations to allocate time for the next cycle.

As I said earlier, I am not paying writers (yet, anyhow) for Intrapreneur Blog. What I will do, before the start of 2008, is:

Tis the season to be memey: Eight things about yours truly

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 22 December, 2007 in About and Tips. 6 Comments

There are memes everywhere in the lead-up to Christmas. Awards, gender-swapping on Twitter, and eight things.

Maria Murphy tagged me for the eight things meme. She said nice things about me:

Andrew Boyd — He is one of my friends who has encouraged me to blog. He has a lot of ideas and cares about others.

Thanks Maria, I will blush for sure now :)

Like all memes, this one is replicatable and encourages participation. Here are the rules:

  1. Link to your tagger and post these rules
  2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself
  3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged

So here are eight random facts about me:

  1. Random loud noises tend to freak me out but I find loud music soothing when driving - KMFDM, White Zombie, Hilltop Hoods and Metallica are current favourites.
  2. I once represented the ACT in TaeKwonDo at the Australian Nationals (yellow belt division, and I didn’t last long, but I was there!).
  3. I eat weird stuff for breakfast and love it - leftover Chinese takeaway is my favourite, but I also love leftover curry, leftover pizza, and Curry Tuna and Corn Soup.
  4. I do not have a whole degree - the two half degrees do not add up to a whole one :) Despite this, I manage to make a decent living as a consultant information architect (IA).
  5. I am interested in serial killers - not obsessively, but I did start MonsterWatch.net and I am a big fan of Dexter.
  6. In the past I have collected stamps, coins, science fiction paperbacks and cacti; bred fish, reptiles, parrots, poultry (including quail, fowl, waterfowl and pheasants); written science fiction, science fantasy, heroic fantasy and fan fiction; coded in C, C++, Modula 2, VBA, Java, Javascript, perl and PHP; moderated various online forums and pre-Internet, assisted friends with Bulletin Boards.
  7. I fear stupidity more than I fear sharks/lightning/savage dogs/spiders/venomous reptiles/heights/the number 13/voodoo/you name it put together - for stupidity kills more people than all these things combined.
  8. I once ate some rockmelon just before being very ill with food poisoning - it was not the rockmelon’s fault, I had eaten some dodgy lentils (Ronny Biggs was right - never trust a hippy!). Even though this incident took place more that 25 years ago, the smell of  rockmelon still makes me feel slightly nauseous.

The eight people I would like to tag are:

  1. Meg Tsiamis of Dipping Into The Blogpond: Meg is an inspiration and a good blogfriend. She has done a lot for raising the idea of community within Australian blogging in a very short time - she promotes community first and herself a distant second.
  2. Snoskred: Snos gives 110% to all she touches.
  3. Darren Rowse: I am sure that Darren doesn’t get tagged by this sort of thing often enough :) He is one of my blogging heroes.
  4. Steve Collins: I razz Steve all the time about showing off his iPhone which he takes with good natured humour. Steve is a good guy and incredibly generous with his time.
  5. Ruth Ellison: Like many IAs, Ruth works too hard but still manages to get to my speaking engagements when she can - more so than many of my close colleagues, which is saying something.
  6. Seth Godin: where would intrapreneuring or marketing be without Seth?
  7. Zern Liew: a good example of blogging with a heart and an inspiration to Australian intrapreneurs and authors.
  8. Stephen Hall: my mentor and national service offering lead within SMS. The world is a poorer place for Stephen not blogging - he is a very good IA, the consultant’s consultant, and a good friend.

And the people I would have loved to have tagged but Maria got to them first :)

  • Matthew Hodgson: Matt inspired me to blog properly and continues to inspire others.
  • Donna Maurer: Donna inspires me every day to be a better IA and a better person.

As memes go, this is a fairly harmless one. Even if you aren’t tagged, I recommend that you get into it :)

Flagship Blog Project: Week 3 Marketing the Blog

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 16 December, 2007 in Tips. 2 Comments

In week 3, Maki asks us to market the blog.

Week 3: Marketing the Blog

I’ve started promoting Intrapreneur Blog as discussed in my last Get a real blog post. I’ve started promoting it via social media (claiming the blog on Technorati, creating a Squidoo Intrapreneuring Lens, and adding it to the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community).

By 22 December 2007, I plan to do the following for Intrapreneur Blog:

Note: a little promotion goes a long way - I now have the number one spot for search term intrapreneur blog on Google.

Get a real blog: Promoting the new domain name

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 16 December, 2007 in Get a real blog. 2 Comments

This is the eighth in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

You’ve got the blog, you’ve got content, it all looks slick - now you just need to tell everyone about it.

There are two big reasons for this:

  1. You need to keep whatever readers you’ve gathered to date, and
  2. You need to bring your blog to the attention of a lot of new potential readers.

Here is a list of promotional activities I’ve undertaken over the last week for my case study example, Intrapreneur Blog:

There is a lot more that is possible in blog promotion - I’ll cover this in further detail shortly.

Note: Intrapreneur Blog is new - if it were an established blog, I would have also done the following:

  • posted about the new blog on the old one,
  • posted about the old blog on the new one, and
  • possibly put a server or HTML redirect onto the old server.

A note on redirects: this series is about moving away from a Blogger or Wordpress.com hosted blog - if you have one of these, chances are you will not be getting server access to be putting in a server redirect. That said, you might be able to change your old template to include a simple redirect as follows:

<html>
<head>
<title>redirecting to my new blog domain</title>
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=“Refresh”
 CONTENT=“5; URL=http://intrapreneurblog.com/”>
</head>
<body><h1>Intrapreneur Blog has moved!</h1>

<p>Intrapreneur Blog is now at
<a href=“http://intrapreneurblog.com/”>”http://intrapreneurblog.com/“</a>.</p>
<p>Please update your bookmarks accordingly.</p></body>
</html>

The above code will redirect your readers to the new domain name in 5 seconds. Please note that this does not redirect inbound links that go beyond the blog’s front page - if someone has linked to a specific article then that will keep pointing at the old domain structure.

Next: well, we’ve reached the end of the eight-part series. Please stay tuned for What Happens Next to continue the conversation we’ve started here - can you guess? :)

Creating a Content Development Strategy

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 10 December, 2007 in Blogging and Tips. 4 Comments

I’m creating a content development strategy this week for Intrapreneur Blog as part of the Flagship Blog Project Week 2.

Maki’s advice is as follows:

Creating a Content Development Strategy for Blogs

  1. Decide the most important goal for your blog. For example, you might use blogging as a branding tool or a means to generate direct or indirect revenue.
  2. Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals. Create a weekly schedule which includes these content types (e.g. expert interviews, industry roundup, mullet baits or resource lists etc.)
  3. Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce. Find an informational need that is poorly fulfilled by others and create content to plug the gap. Experiment with different content types to attract attention.
  4. Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format. Effective differentiation tactics involve creating a authorial persona, writing from experience, sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.

Following are my current thoughts. They may change, but they are an important starting point - and having something to compare against expected behaviour is the first step in a self-improving system.

Decide the most important goal for your blog.
I would like Intrapreneur Blog to (a) get famous and make me some money and (as a subsidiary goal) (b) spread awareness of intrapreneuring.

Make a list of content types that will achieve your goals.
Content types that fit the intrapreneuring niche are:

  • Expert interviews (although I am not sure about expert interviews as a more than monthly thing - I’d be surprised if there are more than a couple of dozen expert intrapreneurs)
  • Intrapreneur blog roundup (a set of links to other blogs that have covered intrapreneuring in the past week)
  • Book reviews (again, only a  few books around on intrapreneuring, so I can’t see this being more than a weekly thing until I run out of books to review)
  • Tip of the week - now this one has some legs. The issues that intrapreneurs face are legion, and include include finding the pain, developing the solution, finding a champion, dealing with obstacles, managing successes as well as failures, and a lot more besides.
  • A resource list on a separate page.
  • News that is important to intrapreneurs - such as notable successes making it into mainstream media

Maki then suggests that I create a weekly schedule. Here goes:

  • Monday: Interview/Book Review day (one or the other)
  • Wednesday: Tip of the week
  • Friday: Intrapreneur blog roundup

As a separate category, Intrapreneurs in the News will happen whenever new things come to hand.
Observe the type of content that other blogs in your niche produce.
There aren’t a lot of other blogs in this space - as a matter of fact, if you google on Intrapreneur Blog two of the top ten results are from earlier posts in the Get a real blog series. That said, I will be watching the following:

Differentiate your blog by altering the content focus, type and format.
Maki gives the following options for differentiation through content:

  • creating a authorial persona,
  • writing from experience,
  • sharing your opinions and revealing your personality.

Of these, I’ll take the last two :)

So I’ve set this in motion by sending out an interview request for next Monday. Wish me luck :)

Get a real blog: Migrating content from your old blog

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 10 December, 2007 in Get a real blog. 0 Comments

This is the seventh in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

Content migration is a bit like installing blog software, it is either easy or hard. Unlike installing blog software, however, the easy way is still a fair bit of work, especially if you’ve been blogging for a while and have racked up a lot of posts.

Note: the following instructions apply to WordPress specifically - most other blogging platforms have some form of assisted content migration (i.e. some mechanism for doing it the easy way). That said, this is an overview rather than a comprehensive guide - I’ve tried to mention the really important stuff, but there will be a hundred variations on this advice depending on:

  • how complex your old and new blogs are in terms of plugins/tagging/graphics,
  • the platforms of your old and new blogs, and
  • your familiarity with HTML/XHTML.

The easy way
The easy way is assisted content migration. Here’s how you would do it if moving from a Blogger blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog.

  1. In the new blog, go to Dashboard > Manage > Import
  2. Click on the Blogger link.
  3. Click on the Authorise icon.
  4. Click on Grant Access (or if you haven’t done this before, enter your Google ID and password). If successful, you will be presented with import options. If not successful, you will be doing it the hard way (see below).

Going from wordpress.com or another WordPress blog to a new WordPress blog is easier - WordPress exports (Dashboard > Manage > Export) an XML file that contains posts, comments, categories and pages - you then import this using Dashboard > Manage > Import and select WordPress. It doesn’t import tags if you’re using an earlier version than WordPress 2.3 on either side - if you are using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin on the old blog then it does save the tags as categories (and if you are a tagaholic then this can be a nuisance to clean up, but it is still better than doing it the hard way).

Note: Regardless of migrating content the easy way or the hard way, you’ll need to change internal links (links from within posts to other posts) to reflect your new domain name/URL structure.

The hard way
The hard way is manual copy/paste. I don’t need to tell you that this could be a real pain, especially where there are hundreds of posts containing a lot of images.

Depending on what your source blog is, it can be easier to copy from the smart editor (Visual editor in WordPress) than the raw HTML code - it is worth testing this to see if the links are preserved (that is, they stay and work after pasting into your new blog). If you are familiar with HTML/XHTML you can edit links as you import individual posts or the whole lot by search-and-replace.

Graphics need to be moved to the new hosting and relinked, unless you can be 100% certain that you will never be shutting down the old blog, and the links within your posts are absolute (that is they contain the whole link, for example http://facibus.com/onblogging/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/ipblogvanilla.gif) as opposed to relative (for example, ../uploads/2007/12/ipblogvanilla.gif)

Migration checklist
It is worth checking the following after content migration to ensure that they are working:

  • post order matches that of the old blog (if not, you could have to re-timestamp some or all of the new blog posts)
  • comments are intact and link to the comment author
  • plugins are up and running
  • posts are categorised the way you want them (i.e. your category list is not ten miles long with all your tags turned into categories)
  • graphics are intact
  • links from one post to another are intact and reflect the new domain name/URL structure

Next: Promoting your changed domain name to retain old readers (and get new ones!)

Flagship Blog Project: Week 2 Developing a Strategy

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 8 December, 2007 in Tips. 3 Comments

Intrapreneur Blog and I survived week one of the Flagship Blog Project :) I’ve put the story so far into the Get a real blog tweaking post.

In week 2, Maki asks us to develop a strategy for creating a stream of content.

Week 2: Developing a Strategy

  • Develop a content development strategy.
  • Start writing down content ideas and file them for future use.
  • Create the necessary pages (Set up a great About page etc.)
  • Subscribe to the RSS feed of news sources and notable blogs in your niche.
  • Create an email marketing folder with contacts of blogs in your niche
  • Create a list of social media channels that are relevant to the blog.
  • Put up an ad looking for writers and monitor their applications.
  • Write a few more posts for the blog.

Here is what I intend to do by Friday 14 December:

  • Create a content development strategy (and this is a bit complex, so I will make it the subject of a separate post),
  • Look at content sources (people I know that I can ask to contribute), the right mix of quality vs quantity, and affiliate links vs internal content,
  • Think about adding an automated intrapreneuring news page,
  • Look for social media channels that mention intrapreneuring and engage with them where possible (and I’ll include the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community and Bloggerati.com.au in this search), and
  • Write the outline of a blog series and a set of individual post headings.

As I said before, I won’t be engaging paid content writers for Intrapreneur Blog, at least not initially. It will be interesting to see what happens next :)

Get a real blog: Tweaking the blog

Published by
AndrewBoyd
at 7 December, 2007 in Get a real blog. 0 Comments

This is the sixth in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

OK, so you’ve got your blog up and running on your hosting provider of choice. The domain name URL works, and you’re looking at a fairly blank canvas. For a WordPress blog, it will look something like this:

ipblogvanilla.gif

Some people like blank canvas - I see potential. That is currently what your new blog is - potential. Let’s bring it to life a little.

There are a number of things that you can do to a blog to tweak it - I’ll cover the basics of themes, plugins and sidebar widgets here (notwithstanding that there are a lot of other possibilities, like theme customisation with PHP and CSS coding).

Themes
Themes generally change the look of your blog - the number and position of sidebars, the size and colour of text, the position of comments in relation to the post that they are on, that sort of thing. Some super-themes (like K2 for WordPress, my personal favourite) add a lot more flexibility, making them easier to customise.

The following instructions apply to WordPress blogs - the basic principles are the same regardless of your chosen blog platform.

  1. Find the right theme: It may be that you are happy with one of the default themes (and you can find these under Presentation > Themes in the Dashboard). Otherwise, you’ll need to find a theme and download it. A good start is to look at the WordPress Theme Viewer and browse through the available options.
  2. When you’ve found the right theme (or right enough for now), download it, and unzip it to your local machine’s hard disk.
  3. FTP the theme to your blogdomain.com/wp-content/themes/ directory.
  4. Go to Presentation > Themes in the Dashboard and select the theme that you would like to see.
  5. Click on View Site to see the theme in action.

Things to look for in a theme are:

  • Configurability: you will need to be able to add and remove sidebar widgets, change your theme’s header and other graphics, and if you are so inclined, insert advertising blocks. If you need to dig into individual files and hand-code every single change, please trust me, you may soon grow tired of it.
  • Compatibility: it needs to be said that some themes are fatal - they will not work with the current versions of blog platform software.
  • Fit: if you have an ideal customised design in mind, finding a theme that is close to it will cut down on your work.

The trick is to try a few different themes then stick to one that works for you - it becomes an important part of your blog’s branding. 

Plugins
Plugins are just that - pieces of code that plug into your blog platform and extend your capabilities. There are plugins to:

This is just the start of it - there are hundreds of different plugins, and more coming out all the time. There are also a lot of different places to get plugins - one of the largest for WordPress users is the WordPress plugin directory. 

Sidebar widgets
Sidebar widgets are snippets of code that are placed in your sidebars. They can:

  • be tied to plugins (and display things like Twitter entries or Flickr photo thumbnails),
  • display categories of posts,
  • display your top commenters,
  • position Adsense or other advertising blocks, and
  • a thousand other things besides.

To access widgets in WordPress, select Presentation > Widgets. There are different types - the ones that you’ll need more of are the Text widgets - these contain the snippets of code from AdSense, Alexa, Technorati, Amazon etc that bring your blog to life. You can also use Ultimate Tag Warrior to manage your WordPress Widgets - it does a fine job, but there are compatibility issues with UTW and some later versions of WordPress.

intrapreneurblog.com - the tweaking so far
Looking at Intrapreneur Blog, I’ve done the following to tweak it:

  • Activated the Akismet plugin to take care of comment spam, 
  • Installed the K2 theme,
  • Uploaded a header graphic,
  • Changed the K2 options to display two sidebars,
  • Changed the blogroll to link to Maria’s blog, Matt’s blog, and my blogs,
  • Changed the time to be GMT+10 (Eastern Australian Standard Time),
  • Changed the permanent link (permalink) structure to show date and post name rather than just number,
  • Changed the sidebar options to display a basic set (recent posts, post categories, and a tag cloud), and
  • Written the first post (and copied this to the “About” page). 

The front page now looks like this: 

ipblog.gif

Next: Migrating content from your old blog