As you may have notice I’m not really posting here anymore. That’s ’cause I’m over at yoghurtspasm.com nowadays, blogging up a storm. Or some such. Feel free to check it out. It’s nice and bright.

Last week, I wrote a blog post “Five (5) Ways of How NOT to Run a Twitter Contest.” Today, I saw Smashing Magazine run a Twitter contest where they were giving away Google Wave invites. They posted a message on Twitter:

Win one of 25 Google Wave invites – to get one, just follow @smashingmag and retweet this msg! #smwave

Smashing Magazine and their Twitter Contest

So what’s wrong with running a contest this way? First, it’s a cheap way to gain followers, as I outlined in point #2 in my previous post. Second, Smashing Magazine was soliciting other users for their Google Wave invites. As one Twitter user (@DavidYell) pointed out, it appeared as though Smashing Magazine was “taking people’s google wave invites to get more follows.” While this may not necessarily be the case, the intentions of Smashing Magazine may certainly be misconstrued. And because there’s an invitation for speculation, I argue that it’s not a good way to run a Twitter contest.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. Here are 5 things you can do to run an effective (and fun!) contest on Twitter:

1) Ask for an Opinion. Do you realize that making people retweet a certain message is not only trite, but painfully boring? The propensity to run a contest this way is unoriginal. So what can you do instead? Focus on this word: engagement. For example, rather than make people retweet the same message, ask a question instead. For example, one thing that Smashing Magazine could have done is by asking readers to come up with an answer to this question: “Why do you want a Google Wave Invite? The most interesting or clever answer gets an invite!” When you’re asking a question or opinion, it allows Twitter users to come up with creative answers. And it’s so much more interesting to read through interesting responses than a barage of monotonous retweets.

2) The Trivia Contest. I think this idea has the most potential to interact with your audience. A simple approach would be to ask a trivia question on Twitter, and allow Twitter users to @reply with their answers. However, I think this approach can quickly lead to people scanning the Twitter search timeline and finding the correct results (and cheating isn’t fun; the cheaters will also dilute the whole purpose of the contest for others). So here’s a better way to engage with your audience. Ask the trivia question on Twitter, but motion users to reply with the answer on your blog. For example, a contest I held on Erudite Expressions could have been proposed on Twitter (example trivia question: Name the work in which Ernest Hemingway wrote “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honour;” the answer is here), with an invitation for users to respond with their answers on the blog post. If you think that people will be able to cheat by scanning comments left by other users, do this instead: ask users to leave a comment on a blog post of their choice which doesn’t contain the answer to the trivia question. If your blog doesn’t contain a timeline of recent comments (you could turn them off temporarily if you do have this feature enabled), it may lead to a great interactive experience (and your readers may find some other interesting content you have to offer in the process as well!). The contest winner would be chosen randomly from all submissions where the correct answer to the trivia contest was provided.

3) Hashtag Frenzy. The idea here is simple. Create a unique hashtag and allow people to incorporate it in any tweet of their choice. One company that ran with this idea was Moonfruit. Another company that went with this contest idea was SquareSpace. The upside potential is huge, as the contest may go viral. The contestants don’t have to retweet a boring message, they don’t have to follow you, and they can have fun in the process. The downside of this contest idea is that if it grows viral, it can lead to spam (i.e., spammers will start using this hashtag to promote themselves, their website, or their product). My only caveat for choosing to run a contest this way: don’t let contestants get multiple “entries” by using the hashtag multiple times (because it may upset other Twitter users and/or appear as spam-like). SquareSpace did a great job and realized about this issue about halfway into their contest, and they chose to make a disclaimer that using the hashtag multiple times would not increase your chances of winning).

4) Short Timeline (and Multiple Contests). If you’re running a Twitter contest, don’t make it last more than one week. For one, people could get bored waiting that long, and two, they might forget about the contest in the first place. This is definitely a personal choice, but a shorter time-frame allows you to better manage the influx of entries for your contest. Additionally, if you find that your contest has been successful, it opens up doors to run another contest in the future. If you can repeat the contest multiple times, it also allows you increased exposure, as people will try to enter a second time if they didn’t win. SquareSpace did exactly that: they picked a winner every 24 hours.

5) Validation of Results. I see too many Twitter contests in which the winners are chosen, but I have no idea what tools the organizers of the contest used to select the winner. If I enter a contest, I want to be certain that my submission did not go in vain. In other words, I want to see a validation of the contest. Check out sites like Tweetaways, TweetsWin, and Twtaway. If you’re running a contest where #hashtags are involved, check out these tools to help in your search:  CoTweet, PubliciTweet, TweetGrid, and Monitter. I personally don’t recommend using Twitter Search because it often is unreliable and/or doesn’t find tweets that are more than a few days old (but if your contest is short, as per #4 above, Twitter Search may be a good choice).

However, I want to bring the focus to what to do with the tracking. Whether you run a contest based on a trivia question, an invitation with the use of a hashtag, or something else, the validation process is critical. How do I know that I was entered into the contest? That my submission was both received and counted? This is where Random.org comes into play. From the site:

People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music. The service has existed since 1998…

Random.org insists that it relies on true randomness (based on atmospheric patterns), and you can read more about that here (it is a fascinating read). Why do I recommend using Random.org? Because it allows you (the contest organizer) to input all valid participants into their engine, which will output a random winner (it can select multiple winners as well, if your contest is structured that way). The most appealing part is that Random.org functions as a perfect validation tool: the participants can log in (to a unique website which will be generated by Random.org for you) and see if they were entered into the contest. The unique identifier could be the participant’s email address, their twitter handle, or whatever you choose. The best part? Random.org guarantees privacy because they will not reveal people’s email address or Twitter IDs. For the purposes of running a contest on Twitter, the optimal choice is the entrant-accessible drawing in which privacy is ensured and those who want to verify their entrance into the contest can easily do so. For more information, I highly recommend checking out this video which explains the entire process.

Conclusion

This was a follow-up post on things NOT to do when running a Twitter contest. I hope this post gives you some great ideas on what you can do to run a great contest on Twitter (i.e., don’t do what Smashing Magazine did!). If there is one element I would recommend above any other in advancing an effective contest on Twitter, it’s my insistence on relying on the validation tool, such as that offered by Random.org. Yes, it does cost $4.99 to use their service, but if you’re running a contest with hundreds or thousands of entries, it’s a small price to pay to ensure fairness.

If you have some other ideas on how to run an awesome contest on Twitter, feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments. And if you see other contests on Twitter where the organizers are making users retweet a boring message, please point them to this post.

_______

Other helpful resources:
1) The official Guidelines for Running a Contest on Twitter (note the policy on multiple tweets; my addendum is rule #2 here)
2) Five Helpful Tips for a Rockin’ Twitter Contest (hat tip for the apps that track hashtags)

            I was surfing the web today on how to get a blog domain. Suddenly I crashed into a blogging website called SquareSpace. The site is pretty much new. It was created in February 2007. The site has confusing buttons and less orginized tools than WordPress. But if you want, you can import and export posts there. That’s right, you can post on SquareSpace and whatever you posted will show on that site, and also on your WordPress blog, without posting again. Or you can post on your WordPress blog, and it will automatically show on your SquareSpace blog, without reposting. It might even double the traffic you have at your blog now.

            And for those who like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, and all those other websites, social integration will be coming soon. So what are you waiting for? Join today at http://www.squarespace.com/! BTW I’m registed, check my SquareSpace at: http://milionare.squarespace.com/.

I’m in the middle of a site redesign for my law firm’s website: petermlopez.com. It is still in the very early stages, and content is sparse, but the basic look and feel is there. Please visit, have a look around, and feel free to offer thoughts, ideas, suggestions, tips, pointers, cash, or anything else you think might be helpful.

I am using SquareSpace for the site construction and hosting. The website tools are quite remarkable and easy to use. I would highly recommend it. If any of you are familiar with SquareSpace, please let me know, I would love to pick your brain about it.

My design skills are somewhat lacking, but I’ve played around with one of the templates I liked, and I think the foundation is there for a decent site.

Last night I migrated my blog from a self-hosted WordPress install at Dreamhost to one hosted at WordPress.com. I had hoped to move my blog to Google’s Blogger, but I could not find a way to import the WordPress WXR (WordPress archive file) Blogger.

Why? Well, to start with I wanted to use Blogger for the following reasons. It’s free. You can easily add Google Gadgets and there are many many gadgets. Google is clearly building a distributed social network framework that Blogger will surely add to nicely. I’m referring to profiles and other social networking features add-ons that are similar to what Ringside Networks was trying to achieve. This concept of a distributed social network I find very interesting. I was advocating this concept as far back as 2006 when Steve Bjorg and I were thinking and talking about the Open Web Initiative. I expect to see some very interesting things from Google in this space over the next two years. Alas, migrating to Blogger was painful and I couldn’t find a single tool that allowed me to do so without data loss.

Why did I move to WordPress.com? I’m tired of maintaining my own blog. Also, the server at Dreamhost my blog was running on is really slooooow. Lastly, I wanted a service that would continue to host my blog even after I’m dead. This statement could be received poorly by some. You may think it’s morbid. It is. You may think it’s arrogant. It’s not. I have kids. Enough said.

Yes, I know about Archive.org. This doesn’t do a sufficiently good job of archiving for me. Specifically, you can’t really navigate a site using Archive.org and I want a journal my kids, grandkids, etc… can browse and read after I’m gone.

I tried Squarespace. Deepak Singh just migrated his blog (http://mndoci.com) here. Sqaurespace must be the nicest blogging service online. Were it not so expensive ($14/month with a custom domain) I may have considered it. I would have paid as much as $8/month, but $14 is just too steep for blogging, no matter how good it is. Also, Squarespace failed my: “what if I die” test. If I stopped payment, which presumably I would after death, they would nuke my blog. They should just remove user access and leave the blog there.

You have likely noticed I change the domain from www.oblogn.com to AaronFulkerson.com. I have been blogging at O (b LOG N) since 2004. It has changed domains a couple times in this period. This blog started out as a friend blog with some fellows I went to UNC with. There are still many of their posts. However, when I performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com I mapped their author names on their posts to my author name. This was an oversight on my part.  I hope some of Konrad Rezka’s racier posts do not later get me into trouble.

This became a personal blog sometime in 2005; so, I have been meaning to change the domain for a while now. I couldn’t get Fulkerson.com, which would be awesome because then I could host at aaron.fulkerson.com. Nor could I get Roebot.com. Hence the new domain: aaronfulkerson.com

Now, you may be asking: What the hell is O (b LOG N)? It’s a pun on the run time complexity of algorithms. O(logn)…get it? waka waka….

I will no longer be updating this blog as I have now moved it to Squarespace.

The new URL is either

www.steves71.co.uk

or

www.steves71.squarespace.com

Please everyone redirect their Blog Links to http://blog.weddingsbynathan.com

Thank you!!
Nathan

Someone emailed me yesterday to ask why I have a site here and a site on Squarespace.  Well, first of all, I’m 11, ok.  11 year olds don’t really have a rhyme or a reason.  But if you must know, I like both WordPress and Squarespace for totally different reasons.  WordPress is great because it clearly tells me where my visitors come from, and I think more peeps find me here through search engines like google and yahoo.  That’s a good thing.  I also think WordPress has some cool widgets.  The challenge I have with WordPress – I tried setting up my own site using WordPress, and it was just too complicated for me.  Remember, I’m a kid, and I’m not one of those boy geniuses who started their own internet company when they were like, 12.  I fish, and I go to school.  And then I fish some more.  Maybe some day when I’m older, I’ll get better at this computer stuff but for right now, I like sites like WordPress and Squarespace for their simplicity.  They are both easy for me to use, but in different ways.

Now, I host my main site on Squarespace because it was easier for me to understand how to register my own domain there, and then to put up lots of links and ads and use my amazon associates account and a bunch of other cool stuff.  Plus, I like the layout features and the templates better.  Again, just easier for me to use.  Oh, and my site just looks cooler there.  Like a real website, yanno.

I’ll still use WordPress, particularly so more people can find my stuff.  I do like WordPress.  I just like Squarespace better, for now.  I’ll keep trying both and every now and then, I’ll give you updates of what I think of them side by side.  You can check out the Squarespace side of my website here:

http://www.squarespace.com/?associateTag=sickfishing

And in the mean time, keep fishing, because first and foremost, that’s the most important!

After using SquareSpace blog services since March of 2009, I decided to jump ship to WordPress. It wasn’t an easy decision but paying $14/mo. vs. $14/year made things much simpler to decide.

I hope to pickup blogging on a daily basis, but importing my data from SquareSpace has not gone well as advertised.

…yeah. Wow. Seriously, I need to get a DS. Scribblenauts looks like it could potentially be one of the best DS games ever. Yeah, I know there’s an ocean of slurry out there, but below the surface there are rich seams of minerals and precious metals. Ok, potentially flawed analogy there. Hit the jump for more potentially flawed analogies!

Ok, so I’ve decided to impliment a new reviews policy. We tried to roll with the firetruck system for a while, but that didn’t quite work out (too American) , so we’ve spent endless hour thinking, puzzling, eating, sleeping, listening, musing, writing, reading, drinking tea, and have eventually devised an entirely NEW system, based on fruit and vegtables. The closest analogue to this system I can think of is Mornington Crescent, but read our page on the subject for a slightly more detailed explanation.

Two more challenge rooms – FREE DLC for this superb game! It’s almost difficult to believe, except that, well, it’s true. And it’s awesome!

On a lighter note, apparently Anthony Burch is putting together a DVD of the first series of Hey Ash, Watcha’ Playing ? . Perhaps an anachronism for an internet series to be putting out DVD’s, but , hey, I suppose they’ve gotta make their money some way. It seemed to work for Rooster Teeth.

I’ve had a cunning idea. I may apply for a grant to something called the Youth Opportunity Fund. This could facilitate plenty of things, including better recording and editing equipment and software, better hosting and maybe a switch to a different blogging platform? I’ve heard good things about Squarespace…

Anyway, once again, that’s all for today. Sorry it’s a bit shorter than usual, I had a Youth Cabinet meeting, and got home quite late, so I’m too tired to write any more coherently than I already am. Enjoy your day, and see you tomorrow!

I’ve been using (and cursing) the Squarespace Content Management System for over a month now, and I must say that free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress (not to mention paid services such as Typepad) have much more flexibility and accuracy when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and operating in HTML mode. I’m quickly growing tired of:

• Broken tags, especially the most basic ones
• The inability to customize page titles (especially for “child” pages…by default, Squarepace pulls the page title from your file name)
• No functionality for inserting keywords (I don’t want to hear that keywords are passe…do you really want to take that chance?)
• Odd behaviors such as uploading replacement files and still accessing the old one (even though a mouse hover points to the new URL)
• Not having access to your directory tree
• Their refusal to provide raw server logs for inspecting serious user problems and error messages (they say the logs don’t exist!!)

These aren’t quirks with easy workarounds; these are serious problems in conception, service, customer appreciation and functionality. Also, the Squarespace customer support is a tad worse than mediocre; they have a documented tendency to literally throw up their hands and say there’s nothing they can do to resolve your issue,

The bottom line? Avoid Squarespace like the plague. If you’re a client, they certainly don’t care about you. Why should we care about them?

NPR is running a three day series on “The Business of Free”.  When almost every web based business is giving away its service in the name of capturing market share, there is one that is charging for its service and making a profit.

In New York City, Squarespace CEO Dane Atkinson favors a more old-school approach. As Atkinson says of his company, “It’s a publishing platform on the Internet that thankfully charges all of its customers.”

That’s right. Squarespace is proud to charge businesses, bloggers and others for its publishing tools that can create Web sites — even though there are companies providing similar services for free.

Atkinson says that the privately held Squarespace is very successful. But, he adds, some so-called experts still prod them to offer a free service.

“And we know the reason we are succeeding is because we don’t,” Atkinson says. “So every time a book comes out or people expound on how free is the only way to go, it gets our hair standing up. There is another alternative; there is another way to run your business.”

Marketing is about segmentation and targeting. Squarespace recognized there exists a segment that values their services is willing to pay for it. While the Free experts that Mr.Atkinson refers to would say Squarespace will gain market share with free model and gain the most scarcest of commodity – attention, Squarespace, correctly decided, not to be a service for everybody and is decidedly targeting specific segments.

One way is to run your business based on the latest book or fad. There is  another way to run a successful business – based on data and analysis!

OK so check out our new version of this webspace over on Squarespace.  It’s a little bit easier for youngins like us to use and has equally cool features as WordPress.  We’re still showin’ the love for WordPress and mean no disrespect yo… but I’m 11 you know, and I need total simplicity.

Over there on Squarespace, you can participate in our discussion boards, buy your fishing equipment, share your stories and pictures, and get a really cool look at what we have going on.

So without further ado:

http://sickfishing.squarespace.com

And eventually we hope, our website will just be called sickfishing without the squarespace part.  We’re getting there

This was a half-day session aiming to build on the blogging lessons from the main course. The idea being to build on the students’ basic knowledge and introduce them to

Tools of the trade

We used WordPress.com in the lessons, but there are other blogging platforms, each with slightly different features.

• Free blogging platforms – Blogger, Tumblr
• Paid blogging platforms – Typepad, Squarespace
• Self-hosted platforms – WordPress.org, Moveable Type

There are comparisons of the various services at Online Journalism Review and TopTenReviews.

Other useful services that we discussed include:

• Facebook – a social network
• Twitter – a flexible micro-blogging tool
• Delicious – a ’social bookmarking’ website
• Google Reader – useful for reading blogs via their RSS feeds
• Firefox and Firefox plugins – a web browser that is preferable to Internet Explorer in many ways and allows for customisation via easy-to-use plugins.

Blog promotion

Four key concepts:

• Write good content
• Post regularly
• Link generously
• Comment on other blogs

We also looked at the concept of using other social media profiles as outposts.

It’s worth bearing in mind the basics of SEO – incoming links, keywords in tags and titles, relevant anchor text and regular content are all good.

Also, while online interaction is great, you can’t beat meeting people face-to-face for making longer lasting connections and building relationships.

We also looked at more traditional ways to promote a blog – by telling people about it, adding the URL to email signatures/flyers/posters, etc.

Other tips

The following is a random selection of hints and tips aimed at improving your blogging.

Develop an editorial calendar that will allow you to plan blog posts over the year (including any lead-in/previews).

Consider guest posts:

• Writing on other people’s blogs will introduce you to a new audience
• Having others write on your blog will provide your readers with a fresh perspective, a new writing style and it’ll help spread the load of writing new content.

Group blogs are blogs with several contributors. Each contributor may have different topics, days of the week to post on. A group blog spreads the amount of effort required from each person, as well as providing a place for structure and support.

Involve your audience – blogs and social media allow audience engagement in ways that broadcast media do not. By interacting with your audience you can strengthen your relationship with them and learn what content they prefer.

While asking your audience and listenting to them is important, you should be wary of pandering to the vocal minority, whose views may not be representative of all your readers.

Statistics – your can use Feedburner and Google Analytics to discover what your readers (including the silent majority) respond to.

Mix up your blog posts – use video, audio, text and photos to provide a rich and varied experience for your readers.

Write like a person – blogs work well as a conversational medium. It’s much easier to converse with a person than a press release.

Know your target audience – build up an impression of who your readers are, what they like, how they get their information and so on. This will help you write for them. Getting out and meeting your readers face to face (ie at events) will help with this.

Comments guidelines – if you have a lot of people commenting on your posts and moderation becomes necessary, it can be useful to have comment guidelines in place. This will explain to people what behaviour is not tolerated and what action (editing/deleting posts and banning commenters) may be taken if they are breached.

Finally, the best way to learn is to look at other successful bloggers and their blogs and see what they do.

I have found the limitations of WordPress.com too much and have decided to move http://brightbeehive.com to http://www.squarespace.com. Even as I move over to Squarespace I am finding limitations there also which is a bit frustrating. Still, I think Squarespace offers templates that are more malleable than WordPress.

What do you think? What have you thought? Would be interested to learn from you all.

I’ve neglected my duties as a Photo Ninja.  I guess I have been working on other things instead of posting.  Hopefully i’ll get some photos up soon.

I’ve been neglecting WordPress because I paid for a blogging service from Squarespace.  The blog I was writing to wasn’t showing up on Google even after two weeks of using it.  I liked the service alot but $8 a month compared to free on WordPress was a little too much as well.  WordPress does a much better job in Google searches.  So all the effort of those two weeks, will be transferred to WordPress over the next few days.

I have been toying with the idea for some time now about creating a look and feel to add to my personal brand. I’ve been fumbling with photos and wordpress themes. I’ve used college and Apple logos trying to find myself.

I am a news junkie. I love the news. I don’t know when my obsession with news began although I do vividly remember Ronald Reagan being shot and watching the news coverage in elementary school.

The first time I remember watching CNN was during the first Gulf War in the front room of a fraternity house because one of the first soldiers who crossed into Iraq was one of my pledge brothers. I remember watching for what must have been 24 hours straight and then reading in the college newspaper how the psychologists on campus said this was not healthy behavior. I didn’t care. I wanted more. I’ve been hooked ever since.

Everett would send us tapes with sounds from his tank firing guns at the enemy along with letters and pictures from the frontlines. I imagine if he would have had the voice memo app or even a flip video camera or a computer, we would have received this information (once secured) in an electronic format. The new letters, pictures and cassette tapes are in the form of blogs, flickr, and Youtube. Back at the house, we were getting the news in two forms…from journalists in a hotel room in Baghdad and direct from someone who we knew who was there.

It was during this time that I decided to pursue a major in public relations housed in the School of Journalism. I immediately latched onto the sarcastic and often skeptical sense of humor that seemed to be a characteristic of nearly all of my journalism professors.

I became a student of journalists reporting the news. Murrow, Cronkite, Kuralt, Rather, Brokaw, Brinkley, and Jennings among others. So, it made sense for me to choose something that reflects the news and perhaps one of the earliest tools used by both journalists and the father of  public relations, Edward Bernays in the 1920s…a typewriter.

My favorite brand is the Underwood Standard Portable Typewriter, the first laptop. I own a 1923 Underwood and recently reflected on how typing out a story was so different. Before backspace, white out or correcting tape, the reporter would rip the paper out and start over. And although it must have been frustrating, I’m sure the sentence structure and creativity improved following each mistake. So after a few rounds of playing with designs, for now at least, I’m going with a vintage typewriter key with my initial as gravatar/avatar/and logo.

Tips for creating your personal brand using social media:

1. Own it and make it personal – Photos are generally best and it is usually best to use the same one across all your applications. I’m bending the rule slightly. I’ll go back to a picture on facebook once I’ve “branded” my friends there, but on the other social media applications I use, I’ll stick with the logo for consistency and repetition.

2. Business cards – We can’t get enough. Today, you can be creative without it breaking the bank. You can use sites such as Moo.com or die print companies to get creative with your cards. I’ve received business cards in the shape of guitar pics and poker chips. I’ve also used the Bump app on iPhone to share information electronically.

3. Resume – There are a few online resume companies like Emurse.com to get your qualifications and experience out there. The resume is not only a tool to seek employment but it outlines your credentials when people are researching your background for interviews, meetings,  speaking engagements, etc. Based on the hits I receive from Emurse (they send you instant e-mails with the Web site domain of the person viewing your resume) many who check out my profile on LinkedIn will view my Emurse resume. Friends, family, and vendors have all peeked at my online resume. Emurse makes it simple and easy to create and makes it easier for the viewer to download or share copies with others.

4. LinkedIn – I am attempting to work on my LinkedIn profile even though it’s not my favorite social media tool. I don’t know why it isn’t one of my favorites because it is so useful and easy to use. It also links all my friends from school, professional organizations, and previous employers in one spot. And many companies are posting their openings exclusively on LinkedIn.

5. Video – Many are suggesting a video resume. You can use Youtube and even 12seconds.tv to tease people to your resume or portfolio.

6. Skype – If you work internationally, then Skype is convenient and cheap to use. I also use skype as my instant messenger application. I’ve mentioned in a previous post.

7. Wardrobe – It’s still true, what you wear is part of your brand. It doesn’t mean that your brand has to be traditional business dress, however, it does reflect who you are and how you work. Perhaps you want to create your own logowear or make some tshirts to promote your brand and depending on your target audience, decals work.

8. Lapel pins – I couldn’t help it, did a quick search and this company made lapel pins and cuff links from vintage typewriter keys and she was great to work with. You can also find customized lapel pins here, we’ve used them many times.

9. Twitter – If you don’t have an account get it. We just hired a person who I met for the first time at a tweetup. She’s going to be great and I’m convinced we would probably not have been connected if it weren’t for Twitter.

10. Blog or micro-site – Got something to say and you want to combine social media tools. WordPress aggregates this information nicely and many are now talking about Tumblr and SquareSpace.

11. E-mail – Finally, combine all of the above efforts into your e-mail signature so that every e-mail you send becomes signage for your new brand/organization. An easy way to create a signature without having to know HTML is to use a Firefox plug-in like WiseStamp. For the iPhone, I’m experimenting with the Signature app.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised that even though my readership is small, several readers have asked how to make a website like mine. I’m going to charitably assume you mean my blog, which is what you’re reading, and not my temporarily abandoned website. Therefore, here’s a post about choices I’ve made, research I’ve stumbled upon, and hacks I’ve created. I will start with the most rudimentary information, since it’s what has been requested, and move on to the more difficult work and choices.

Blogging services

The first question a embryonic blogger wants to ask is what service to use; there are several. WordPress, Blogger, and Squarespace are the most used sites among my friends, family, and colleagues.

WordPress

I chose WordPress for two reasons: I had professional experience with them through StyleFeeder, and I appreciate their dedication to open source communities. However, WordPress.com blogs do not get to see many of the benefits of WordPress’s open source community; if you want to revel in the programming aspect of it, visit WordPress.org, download their server software, and tinker with it. Not up for that game? Well then say goodbye to easy extra functionality via WordPress plugins; you can’t use them. Also, there’s no javascript support at all, so you can’t even hack code together. Everything that you accomplish has to come through their already-provided widgets, which was tricky for me but also enjoyable.

The site does have many useful background tools, some of which are shared with Blogger. However, the default viewer statistics seem to be much more advanced on WordPress than Blogger (unless you use Google Analytics, which WordPress.com blogs can’t do). Also, media storage and other functionality such as media sharing that looks equivalent between the two sites is actually, in my opinion, much more user-friendly on WordPress.com.

In my experience, WordPress is used mostly due to their open source software, which isn’t any good to me, and also mostly by companies. While I’m very happy with my choice of home, average Joes tend to avoid it in preference of Blogger.

Examples:
gregfreed.wordpress.com
ranyachantal.wordpress.com
writingcontests.wordpress.com

Examples of WordPress.org blogs:
www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
blog.futurestreetconsulting.com

Blogger

Very many of my friends from Emerson and back home and most of the people I’ve found through Twitter so far use blogger. In my opinion, the sites looks messier in design than WordPress equivalents, but content should drive most of your visitors, meaning that the cluttered Blogger look shouldn’t dissuade you in itself. Also, how clean or cluttered your site looks will depend mostly upon the amount of time and effort you’re willing to put into design.

Blogger, at first glance, has more functionality that a WordPress.com blog and is more user-friendly for simple tasks. For example, you can put javascript on Blogger, allowing you to automate “Twit This!” buttons and other sharing services, which will garner you free PR. WordPress.com does not have this functionality, and making a workaround (see below) via html has already cost me several hours and will cost me more time in aggregate hours in the future.

Examples:
steadyblue.blogspot.com
mundaneproject.blogspot.com
dallasdreamer.blogspot.com

Squarespace

I only know two people using Squarespace. Both of their sites show extreme customizability and are built for heavy traffic and easy use. I’m under the impression that their blogging and site building experience has been fairly intense, but they both have something to show for all of their time and effort. Paul Wesman has worked in communication for years, and his blog shows his dedication to corporate quality and readability. Sadi Ranson-Polizotti is a deaf friend and mentor who is renowned for her knowledge about Bob Dylan, Lewis Carroll, and the written word; she has a new book of poetry, For Goodness’ Sake, due in August through Twilight Times Books. (Boy, do I wish I had an affiliate program right now… lolz.)

Examples:
www.paulwesman.com
tantmieux.squarespace.com

Hacks, or making my WordPress.com blog work for me

I discovered Problogger early, which has been both helpful and not. On the one hand, they have very good advice; on the other hand, most of their advice seems to me like common sense, or rather, like the decision that I came to when I thought to myself for a second about what I was trying to do with my blog. Either that, or their advice was far in advance of where I happened to be.

New readers are hard to come by, and you want your blog to be ready to receive them when they arrive. Problogger posted an article recently about the nine first steps for new bloggers. I’ll try to cover what I think they missed below.

Design

Readers coming to your site will have a series of questions in mind, such as Who does this blog belong to and why am I reading it? or Where’s the good info at?! Not having readily available answers to these questions puts your new reader at risk of leaving the site and never thinking of you again.

From Tim Ferriss I learned several points, but one most crucial theory: Do not have an easy exit point for new viewers. Every link that a reader can see within seconds of entering the site should be directed back at your site. Yes, you want to plug other people’s blogs wherever possible, but you don’t want a reader to leave your blog before they’ve even seen one post, and they will if they have reason to believe that you’re leading them into more interesting content than they expect to find on your site.

The topmost section of your website should be dedicated to you. Have an About page so that potential readers can get to know you and feel like they belong with your content. Have a Contact page, letting people know that they can feel free to contact you. List your most recent or most viewed posts at the top of your sidebar so that readers can find the interesting content they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Just don’t provide an easy out or the viewer just might take it.

RSS widget

That said, making the RSS feed I have in my sidebar was a bit tricky; maybe it’s because I’m a nub, maybe it’s because I wanted a custom RSS feed where I could decide what content my blog would link to. In order to accomplish my task, I created a Google Reader account. In Google Reader I subscribed to all the blogs I wanted to keep up with, which included Facebook friends, actual friends, and family in addition to the helpful blogs like Problogger and the blogs that created material I was actually interested in. Start sharing posts you think your readers should see; they will be allocated into an RSS feed at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/YOURGOOGLEIDHERE, which can be accessed via the “Shared items” menu. Access that page, and you will see the link Atom Feed next to the universal feed icon: . Copy the link location.

At that point, go to My Dashboard->Appearance->Widgets and drag the RSS widget to your sidebar (I drug mine to the bottommost section). Copy the link location for the Atom Feed where the widget says “Enter the RSS feed URL here.” Name the widget if you want (mine is titled simply My Google Reader), change whatever settings you want, and click Save. If that doesn’t work, mash you head against the keyboard until you successfully spell out Head hit keyboard sequentially, and then contact me, and I’ll do my best to help.

Subscribe links

After a little research on this crazy web of ours, you’ll find that WordPress.com recommends Google’s FeedBurner for all your subscription uses. Though a little tinkering is required, I now recommend it, too.

After signing in with your Google account, a basic page will load that says Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here. So do it and follow the rest of the instructions.

Go to the Publicize tab once you’re set up with FeedBurner.

Click on the BuzzBoost tab on the left, change the settings as you see fit, and then click Activate at the bottom of the page. When the page reloads with the service activated, there will be a box with javascript that FeedBurner tells you to put on your site. Except you know that you can’t use javascript on a WordPress.com blog. Therefore, check on your own to make sure that your RSS feed is activated by pasting http://feeds.feedburner.com/XXXXX?format=xml where XXXXX is set as your FeedBurner profile name.

Next, go to the Email Subscriptions tab. Simply click Activate.

Now go to My Dashboard->Appearance->Widgets and drag the Text widget to where you would like it to appear. Input the following code:

Subscribe to this blog via <a href=”http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=XXXXX”>email</a>!<br>Subscribe via <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/XXXXX?format=xml”><img src=”http://feedburner.google.com/fb/lib/images/icons/feed-icon-12×12-orange.gif”></a><a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/XXXXX?format=xml”>RSS</a>!

Replace the XXXXXs with your FeedBurner profile ID, and the code should be ready to go! I coded the RSS image and the hypertext seperately so that the image would not share an underline with the hypertext.

If, like me, you would like to invite people to join your Facebook group, simply create a group and then use the following code:

<br>Also, join this blog’s <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=XXXXX”>Facebook group</a>!

Replace the XXXXX with your group id and it should be good to go!

“Share This!” links

As I said before, WordPress.com does not support javascript, so there’s no way to have automatically updated buttons. However, these buttons are so useful in publicizing a blog that it just seems a horrible waste to not have them. Therefore, I developped a workable work-around, though it does take some effort to pull off for each blog.

After some research I discovered the basic submission links for some of the syndication sites I felt my blog might likely get plugged on: Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. I also discovered, though I can’t remember to link from where, AddThis, which on one page covers all sites that anyone anywhere might ever possibly want to link your blog to. While AddThis has such powerful capabilities, I opted to keep the specific website buttons because the less you ask of your audience, the more likely they are to follow through.

A little HTML trick I picked up: in order to have the icons contain links without being underlined, you have to link them seperately from text. Because of this, the HTML looks redundant, but it’s not; it’s simply a little extra code to reflect a design choice. The code I use for the buttons is below, and instructions on how to use the code follows it.

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”><img title=”del_icio_us” src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/del_icio_us.png” alt=”del_icio_us” width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”>Save to del.icio.us</a><a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”>
<img title=”digg” src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/digg.png” alt=”digg” width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”>Digg it
</a><a href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”><img title=”reddit” src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/reddit.png” alt=”reddit” width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://reddit.com/submit?url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”>Save to Reddit
</a><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=XXXXX” target=”_blank”><img title=”n20531316728_2397″ src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/n20531316728_23971.jpg” alt=”n20531316728_2397″ width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=XXXXX” target=”_blank”>Share on Facebook
</a><a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Check+out+XXXXX”><img title=”twitter” src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/twitter.gif” alt=”twitter” width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=Check+out+XXXXX” target=”_blank”>Share on Twitter
</a><a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?pub=dvd&amp;url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”><img title=”aolfav” src=”http://gregfreed.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/aolfav.gif” alt=”aolfav” width=”16″ height=”16″ /></a><a href=”http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?pub=dvd&amp;url=XXXXX;title=YYYYY” target=”_blank”>Even more ways to bookmark</a>

Copy this code into a text editor with a replace function, such as Microsoft Word. Using the Replace All function, replace all XXXXXs with the exact web address of your post as you can copy it out of your browser’s address bar. Replace all YYYYYs with the title of your post. Select all of the updated code, put your WordPress post creator into the HTML tab, go to the part of the post you want the links to appear in, and paste the code. Click either Publish or Update Post and then check your links. If there are any errors, it’s probably user-generated, so look over your own HTML code before you come crying to me about how it’s broken. If it is legitimately broken, however, I would like to know and will help you resolve any issues. If you want submission links that are not included here, AddThis is a much better research tool than I am: I will not do your research for you.

Good Luck!

And with that, I’m outta here. I have that faint yet numb buzzing in my head that’s generated solely by technical writing, so it’s definitely time for a break!

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Save to del.icio.us
Digg it
Save to Reddit
Even more ways to bookmark

Author: Greg Freed

So I could write this long mess about why I switched blogs, but it comes down to a couple of things.  Basically the concept of having an anonymous blog came off as stupid and pretentious for me.  For some it really works; some of whom are good friends.  For me, really, there’s no need.  It always felt fake and dumb.

Second, Squarespace costs money that I do not feel like paying every month.  Same goes for the domain.  I’ve spent this year reevaluating priorities, and while blogging and connecting is one of them, paying for it is not, heh.

That’s that, I suppose. Hooray. Now onto other things.

I have nothing against squarespace; they have a great hosting service, beautiful designs and extremely easy-to-use tools for web site building. Financially it made more sense to move my blog here because I really only need a few extra features to host this blog. Moving here saves me a monthly hosting fee (for now). I wasn’t making any advertising money through AdWords, and the Amazon.com Associates program stopped paying people in North Carolina due to the tax issues; I was also a bit uncomfortable with advertising anyway. So this move made financial sense.

Right now none of my pictures have moved with me. I may fix that, I may not. Hope you enjoy my new site.

~Hi there~

Ok, so I’m trying to keep up with what the industry is doing with their blogs and my iWeb blog was just not customizable enough for my tastes so, here I am, at Squarespace! So far I am loving it! Check it out and let me know what you think! Looks pretty good huh? Like my main website right? Sweet!