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Blogging course

There’s an online course on blogging that’s available for free if you blog about it (which might seem counter-intuitive). Anyway, you have to give it a plug in order to get free access, which is what this post is about.

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

  • The best blogging techniques.
  • How to get traffic to your blog.
  • How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

2008 01 30 Comments (2)

Comment trolls

I have a comment troll over on my business blog, and it’s painfully hard to do the right thing, which is to ignore them. Feeding the trolls only ever results in more insulting comments; luckily, as the blog owner, I can “unapprove” the comments instead so that they are hidden to all but me.

They must not realize that I can see their IP address when they post a comment, since it exposes them as being on the network of a vendor in the technology space that I write about. That leaves me with the deliciously wicked alternative of outing them if they become too annoying: although they’re not using their real name or email address, it’s a relatively small company location (although owned by a larger company that will be concerned about having its employees seen as acting unprofessionally), and they should be able to track down the offender internally.

The funny part is that after I blocked the offender the first time from further comments, he began posting under another name and email address; a bit of googling showed the addresses to be recognized pseudonyms for the same troll on some internet forums related to our industry.

I continue to be amazed at the things people will say when they think that they’re anonymous.

2007 08 17 Comments (0)

Me and W.R.

What’s more flattering than being adored by a chicken?

oh Sandy

2007 07 12 Comments (0)

A social media convert

Damir, my other half, is a much more traditional engineer than I: he likes to ponder over new technology for a while, while I’m leaping about in it, shouting “c’mon in, the water’s great!” and trying not to get eaten by the sharks. When he does jump in, however, it’s with both feet.

In the past 3 weeks, he learned WordPress and MediaWiki, and last weekend relaunched his website using WordPress for the site content and MediaWiki for a knowledge base. He’s working on getting 100 articles into his wiki, both for general interest (that is, if you’re interested in getting data out of PLCs and into Excel or SQL Server for data analysis) and as a support reference for his customers. A lot of the material is pretty basic, but consider that his audience is the electrical and mechanical maintenance staff at automotive manufacturing plants.

I’ve been talking about moving my corporate website, small as it is, onto WordPress for about a year now, ever since I converted the site for my wine club, but somehow never seem to find the time. Obviously, the bar for websites in our household has been raised, and I have some catching up to do.

2007 07 05 technology Comments (0)

Repatriating my business blog

A year and a half ago, I was invited to move my blog over to a site that was more of an old media site, but covered the technology space that I do: business process management, service-oriented architecture, business intelligence and other integration technologies. However, I’m blogging about all sorts of other things now, so have decided to move my business blog back to my own domain (actually, I had that domain redirected to where it was hosted, but you get the picture).

I’ll likely put a lot of my technology-related blogging over on my business blog now, and I need to see how things settle out in the next month or so in terms of what content goes where. I still believe that I need a “professional” blog and this “off topic” blog; not because I’m trying hide this blog, but because there’s people reading the other blog who aren’t interested in this one, and vice versa.

Some things I’ll post on both sites, like the daily auto-post of links from del.icio.us. [I've decided to post the links only on my business blog, to reduce confusion]

2007 06 22 Comments (0)

Instructional comments

I realize that Akismet can’t catch all the spam comments in a blog, and my wine club site gets hit pretty hard with spam comments (over 110,000 since I moved it to WordPress), but how could any filter think that a comment entitled “instructional blow job” is not spam?

2007 05 30 Comments (0)

Posts of links

Some time ago, I started running an automated script each night that posted my del.icio.us links to my business blog. However, most of the things that I link to seem to be more related to this blog, so I’m now directing those posts here, in the Links category.

By some weird coincidence (or not), the day after I started doing that Tom wrote a post railing against the practice of doing these same “link” posts. I don’t want to stop doing them, since I believe that they add value, but I’ve created two different feeds if you consume this blog via a feed reader: one if you want all the posts, and one if you want everything except the link posts. There’s also a third one for the comments on posts, if you want to track that.

Consume to your heart’s content.

2007 03 12 Links Comments (0)

Blogging from Ubuntu

Finally got my Ubuntu installation done yesterday, and I’m just trying out the Blog Entry Poster to create this post offline then post.

I don’t think that I’m going to use this blog writer very often: doesn’t support categories, which means that I have to go in and edit each post after publication to set the categories.

Other than that, having fun with the new O/S.

2007 03 10 Comments (0)

Don’t piss off a blogger

I got someone fired today, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. He was republishing the full feed from my business blog on his blog, and although he was leaving a link back to my original post, he followed it with “posted by <his name>“. Some of my regular readers had even left comments on my posts on his blog, meaning that they were not clicking through to my site and therefore not engaging me in the conversation. Since my blog is really my only form of marketing for my analyst, consulting and speaking services, anything that separates me from my readers can potentially cut into my business, and this had to stop.

I checked out his site, which appeared to be just republished full feeds from a number of other bloggers in my industry, and when I checked his About page, I found out that he’s the VP of sales for a company in my industry. Okay, republishing full feeds from someone else’s blog on your own blog is a violation of copyright, and therefore illegal. But doing it from a relatively well-known blogger who writes about your industry, when you’re the VP of sales for a technology company? That’s just plain stupid.

I did the only thing that I could: I outed him, and named his company, although I did not say that this was a company blog, which it’s not. In my books, if you hold a VP title in a company, then first of all, there is an expectation that you set some level of policy in the company, and if you’re cheating in one area of your life (like blogging) then who knows what else you’re doing in other parts of your life (like dealing with customers). Secondly, with that level of title, anything that you do in the industry can be construed to be on behalf of, or at least related to, your employer. In fact, any employment agreement that I’ve either written or signed (having been on both sides of the table) has stated that if you do or invent something that’s directly in your employer’s line of business while you’re working for them, it belongs to them, even if you do it on your own time.

Various emails ensued from the VP and his CEO, and the CEO informed me earlier today that the VP is no longer in their employ. Oh, and the VP title? Turns out it was just a puffed-up title for a salesman because he was their only employee in North America and they felt that they needed a big title for him.

It was not my intention to get someone fired by blogging about their activities, but considering that the activities were illegal and were impacting me personally, it’s hard to work up a tear over it. Somewhere along the line, someone has to put a stake in the ground about responsibility on the internet. This week, I put a stake in my little bit of territory.

2007 03 05 Comments (0)

What’s in my sidebar?

I’ve had a couple of questions about how I create the sidebar to this blog, so thought that I’d document it here for posterity.

First of all, I use the sidebar widgets WordPress plugin from Automattic, and a widget-friendly theme. After doing this for one blog, I would never again use a theme that didn’t support sidebar widgets: this makes is unbelievably easy to create a sidebar without coding, or to use code for selected sections if you prefer. Basically, when activated, it replaces any sidebar code that’s already in the theme with what you specify in the Sidebar Widgets submenu (under the Presentation menu) in WordPress.

I added on a few third-party widgets that are available as plugins – a Google AdSense widget and a Bloglines widget — then either used the standard widgets or text widgets with my own code for things that there aren’t widgets for. It’s pretty easy to create your own widgets, which I might do for some of these to make it easier to use across the multiple blogs that I have.

I use a total of 13 widgets in the sidebar of this blog:

  1. Search, which is the standard search widget. No parameters.
  2. Text, title “My Photos”, containing a Flickr badge that shows one random photo from my photo collection. I started with the standard Flickr badge code then tweaked it until I liked how it looked. I didn’t like any of the Flickr widgets that I saw at the time.
  3. Text, title “What I’m Reading”, containing a code snippet from LibraryThing to display the most recent book added to my collection, which is typically what I’m reading right now.
  4. Categories, with the title left blank for the default, and “show post counts” checked.
  5. Google AdSense, with the parameters copied from the code generated by Google for an ad of the same dimensions. This is really not any easier than using a text widget with a direct paste of the Google code.
  6. My Bloglines Sub, with my Bloglines ID plus the name of the folder that I want displayed; this displays my blogroll for this blog, which is just a folder in my feed reader, hence does reflect what I’m actually reading. I use different Bloglines folders for the blogrolls on different blogs, and I have some feeds that are not displayed in any blogroll. This capability is one of the primary reasons that I love Bloglines as my feed reader.
  7. Text, with the link to the Breast of Canada site. I met Sue Richards at BlogHer last year, and she gave me one of her fabulous calendars in exchange for a bit of publicity.
  8. Recent Posts, standard widget with no parameters.
  9. Archives, standard widget with the parameters left blank to default.
  10. Links, standard widget with no parameters that picks up any Links that you have specified in WordPress (now called Blogroll from a top level menu since WP 2.1).
  11. Text, containing links to my posts and comments feeds. I was going to include these in my Links but I don’t like the lack of control in links so just hacked the HTML directly in a text widget.
  12. Text, containing my Upcoming.org events badge.
  13. Text, containing my StatCounter and Google Analytics code to track visitors (I haven’t decided which I like best, so leave both in there). This is not visible on the page itself.

I haven’t taken a look at other available widgets lately, but it might be time to check them out and see if there’s anything new that I want to include here, or something that will take the place of one of my text/code widgets.

2007 03 04 Comments (0)