Posts tagged ‘Blogger’
Day 23: Plan out your week
This isn’t exactly the ideal time for this post, but I just realized that we’re one week away from the end of our 30 day challenge! So let me say a quick ‘hurrah!’ to everyone that is keeping up. Maybe you aren’t doing every challenge every day, but if you’re still tuned in and intent on improving your blogging ‘chops’, then major kudos to you! As I was saying, this isn’t the best time to be doing this, mostly because Thanksgiving is coming up this week, but since we’re running out of time we’ll step up anyway.
Today’s Challenge has to do with basic planning. I have to admit, I do most of my blogging spur of the moment. I’m not so good at planning in advance, but I do think many great bloggers do. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say even if the great ones don’t plan each post in advance, they at least HAVE a plan for making sure that their have frequent postings on their blog and ensure that things don’t go stale.
It’s a constant challenge for every blogger, especially when you feel like nobody is reading. When you don’t have a big community responding often, it’s easy to think nobody is reading, and when you feel like nobody is reading, you may not feel like writing. But if your blog isn’t showing regular signs of life, with posts coming at least once or twice a week minimum, then when people do visit they often just come and go. Not only that, but until you get into a routine, it’s hard to make the time in the day needed to blog. It takes a commitment for it to become habit and creating a posting plan can be a big part of that.
When everybody first starts blogging, they overestimate their blog-stamina. EVERYONE thinks they’ll be the one to blog every single day, or at least every other day. Some people even keep it up for a week or more. But for most people. especially with those who have a job, family or life, blogging day in and day out is simply unrealistic. So let’s step back for just a omment and think things through.
How often will you realistically be able to blog? Don’t think about how often you’ll post in an ideal world, be realistic and try to think what’s the minimum number of posts that you’ll do in a given week. I say week because if you really intend to be a better blogger, you should be posting at least once a week. And perhaps that’s all you want to commit to! There’s nothing wrong with that. If you feel up to two times or three times a week, even better, but don’t fool yourself into setting an unrealistic goal.
Once you’ve figured out your magic number, plan out how you’re going to hit that number for the week. What days do you want to make sure you’ve got your posts up by? Don’t let them build up so you cram them all in at the end of the week. Pick dates and stick to it.
In fact, if you want to take it a next step, you can even get them started right now. Create drafts with potential titles and save them. That way you can come back to them throughout the week and already have some of the work done. Instead of just flagging items in your aggregator to write about, or keeping browser tabs/windows open, grab the link and create a new blog post for it, even if you don’t have time to finish it just yet. Then save it and plan out in your own head when you’ll be posting it. That way when you realize that it’s the day you promised yourself you’d get a post up, you’ll already have your inspirations right there in front of you, ready to be fleshed out.
So even though it’s Thanksgiving week, plan out your blog schedule for the week and some ideas for what you’ll be posting. Obviously with the holiday and all, it’s a great time to look around and share what you’re thankful for, whether it be online or offline.
Are any of you ‘planners’ already? If so, share a few tips for how you organize your blogging schedule. It’s something that I’ve never been very good about but really want to improve myself!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2
Well, you knew this was coming. Part one of the challenge was zooming in on the blogroll, assuming that your blogroll was even IN your sidebar of course. Part 2, today’s challenge, is to go through the rest of sidebar with a fine toothed comb and de-clutter it. This is one of the ideas based on ProBlogger’s tips that I knew was going to be included the moment I saw it. One thing to remember here is that de-cluttering does not necessarily mean removing things. It’s a matter of looking at each item you have there, considering whether it belongs in your sidebar or not, whether it is taking up more space than it deserves, whether it’s function is being duplicated elsewhere or could be consolidated, and whether there may be another way to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way.
If you’ve been following this challenge, then you’ve already added a few things to your sidebar. I think having a translate option is important and is going to stay. The Clustrmap is more of a vanity item than anything else, but it does an effective job of demonstrating the reach of your community geographically and I’m choosing to keep. Obviously, that’s a personal choice. I’m not going to preach that you should have a short sidebar or a long one, or what belongs there and what doesn’t. However, I do believe that what’s there should be deliberate and efficient in terms of space and form, especially considering how many options are out there.
For example, in my sidebar right now I have a Facebook badge, I have a ShowYourself badge, a Twitter widget, and a FriendFeed widget. The ShowYourself badge has a link to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed widget displays my Twitter status updates, which seems kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. I’m going to eliminate them all. No, I’m not going to stop linking to those things and displaying my status, but I’m going to take advantage of a tool that Sue Waters (who is the spiritual co-author of this challenge!) recommended to me called Retaggr. It provides a nice clean badge that will give me almost all the functionality that those four items provided, but in one nice and neat package. It’ll have links to all my social sites, like the ShowYourself badge. It includes my headshot, company, and link to Facebook like the Facebook badge did. It will also display my most recent tweet, which is plenty. If people want to see my last 10 tweets, they can visit Twitter. The only thing I’m losing out on is that the FriendFeed badge displayed when I’ve uploaded photos or videos as well, which is pretty sporadic to be honest. Ideally, I’d love it if Retaggr would display my most recent post on Twitter OR Plurk, but that’s ok. I think the benefit far outweighs the few things it lacks.
There are a few widgets that I have that just don’t make the cut. I have a Now Reading plugin that shows what my ‘reading’ status is. However, it only works as well as my maintenance habits, which are poor when it comes to that. I never remember to update it so I have a choice: Change my habits, or just get rid of it. I don’t feel it’s that important, so it’s going bye-bye.
For the widgets that you’ll be keeping, bear in mind that there may be new versions of them available, or third party options that you could swap them out for. For example, check out all of these different Twitter widgets that are available. And that blog post is from a year ago! Many sites also offer you the opportunity to modify the color schemes for a widget, enabling you to try to blend it in a little closer to your chosen theme. You may find it worthwhile to give a few ‘keeper’ widgets a makeover as part of this challenge.
While we’re at it, let’s talk Archives. Typically there are only three ways somebody visiting your blog can find your posts once they’ve scrolled off the front page: 1) Search 2) Categories 3) Archives. I do think they’re important to keep around, but once you’ve been blogging for a few months, they start to take up a HUGE amount of space. However, that’s an easy one to do something about. Most blogging engines now have an option to shrink your archives down to a drop down list. So instead of it taking half the page, it’ll only take up a line or two. Unfortunately, that option is usually relatively hidden. In WordPress (and EduBlogs), you have to find the archive Widget and click Edit and the option will pop right up. In Blogger, it’s pretty similar. Go to Layout -> Page Elements and choose to edit the Blog Archive gadget. Lots of options there, including changing it to a drop down box. Very very easy thing to do in order to save a lot of real estate in your sidebar.
Finally, there are three things that I think you need to make sure are somewhat obvious in your sidebar: A search bar, a way to contact you and a way to subscribe to your blog. I never understand why some bloggers don’t have a search bar on their blog. It makes me leave their blog and jump through some Google hoops just to find information they’ve written that I know is there! As I mentioned above, there are precious few ways to find your content once it has scrolled off the front page. Don’t make it more difficult for your readers.
Contact information seems like a no-brainer, but I’m always stunned by how many blogs I visit don’t provide any way to make direct contact besides leaving a comment and hoping they see it. Some of you put your contact information in your About Me page. That’s fine, but if you did so, you should also have SOMETHING in your sidebar that clearly states, “This is where you can go to contact me” and then points to the About page. Once again, if somebody reads your blog and wants to communicate with you, you want it to be easy for them to do so.
Same thing goes for subscribing. Now, if you did the Feedburner challenge, then this should be a non-issue. But step back and verify that in your sidebar there is an obvious way for people to subscribe to your blog. Your RSS or Feedburner icon should not be so subtle that people can’t find it. I recently visited a very prominent blogger and was flabbergasted that there was no RSS link available. I had to view his source code in order to find out what his RSS feed. That’s inexcusable on a blog. So double, triple check to make sure that your RSS feed is represented in your sidebar and that it points to the right one if you signed up for Feedburner.
Just for the sake of an example, I’m going to leave my blog’s sidebar as-is for the rest of the day, and then will fix it up as I’ve outlined here tonight. Enjoy the mess for now, it’ll be a leaner, meaner sidebar soon 
I have to admit, the comments on these posts have been phenomenal. So don’t be shy here, did I miss anything? Is there anything you consider a ‘must-have’ for your sidebar, or that you think is a faux pas that bloggers often commit? Got a great widget that you think would add value or make people’s sidebar content more efficient? Share some of your favorites as well as the ones you hope to never see again! Also, if you’d like to get some feedback on your sidebar, share a link to your blog and I”m sure people would be willing to take a look.
Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit
Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.
The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.
There are several ways to do a blogroll. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.
Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.
If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!
Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!
And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!
Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
One of the more confusing aspects of blogging is RSS, but that’s truly the heart and soul of a blog. Without the RSS feed, you just have a web page. Your RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your content via aggregator or email, or allows you to take your content and republish it in a variety of ways. For example, it’s what allows you to announce your blog posts on Facebook or on FriendFeed and so on. Your feed is an absolutely critical piece of your blog and you always want to make sure it’s functioning, happy and standards compliant.
While just about every blog engine out there supports RSS, most are fairly basic feeds. They do the job, but not much more than that. Of course, that begs the question, what else would you like your RSS feed to do? Wel, for one thing you might want to engage in podcasting. Most people don’t know it, but it’s your RSS feed that takes a link to an MP3 file and turns it into an actual podcast. It realizes that you’ve linked to an MP3 file and then adds in some special code that let’s podcatchers like iTunes know how to get access to the audio file. Interestingly, it doesn’t just do it for audio files. PDF’s, Video files, and documents of all sorts caqn be sent out via a podcast. That is, if your RSS feed handles the data right. And that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.
While most RSS feeds are just adequate, Feedburner is a free service that can take an adequate feed and make it superior. I’ve been using Feedburner to remix my feed for about 4 years now and can’t recommend it more highly. There’s a few reasons that I suggest using Feedburner to upgrade your feed, but the biggest is a very simple practical one. Bloggers move around sometimes. You may start on Blogger, then move to EduBlogs.org and then wind up hosting your own someday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start off on your own and then move to a school server. You never know what the future is going to bring. Typically, every time you move your blog you’d need to alert all of your readers that your RSS feed is changing. They need to unsubscribe from your old feed, and then subscribe to your new feed. While some people will do so, more than likely you’ll lose readers that way. If you have people subscribing to a Feedburner feed instead, you just change were Feedburner gets it’s information from and your readers are unaffected.
Let me step back just a little bit and ensure you understand what I mean on this one. Typically your blog engine (Blogger, EduBlogs, WordPress, Blogmeister) creates your RSS feed. When you sign up for Feedburner, you supply them the link to your RSS feed and then they give you a shiny new Feedburner feed. Then you hide all instances of the original feed and make sure that everybody is subscribing to your Feedburner feed. The feedburner feed passes along the EXACT same information, but it mixes it and mashes it up to make it more standards compliant, enables all sorts of additional features, allows you to keep a closer eye on your subscriber data and more. So it’s just a shiny new version of your original feed, but with a new address.
I’m not going to take you step by step how you sign up for feedburner, because they already have some great walk thru’s for it, depending on your blog engine. This page has quick start guides for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and MySpace. Sue Waters has a phenomenal write up of how to add Feedburner to your EduBlogs blog. And for the record, most of her steps will work just fine on other WordPress blogs.
Once you’ve signed up for Feedburner and have your shiny new Feedburner link, there’s two things that you need to do in order to make sure that people find that instead of your old feed. The first is add a Feedburner chicklet to your sidebar. Log into your Feedburner account and go to the Publicize tab. One of your choices is the Chicklet Chooser. Follow the steps there to create a chicklet that appeals to you. Grab the code and paste it somewhere in your sidebar so that people can find it. Then glance through your sidebar to make sure that you don’t see any other references to your old RSS feed. At this point, I would also suggest that you alert your current subscribers to switch over to your new and improved feed. If they don’t, no worries for now. They’ll still receive content via your old feed. It isn’t turned off or anything. But you do want to encourage them to move over to the new one.
The second thing you need to do is fix your auto-discovery options. If you use Firefox 
, Flock, Opera, IE7 or Safari 
, you may notice certain notifications when you’re visiting web pages that have RSS feeds. When that icon appears, that means that there’s subscribable content on that page. Clicking on the RSS icon takes you to a page that gives you a variety of ways to subscribe. However, we want to make sure that it’s providing ways to subscribe to the NEW Feedburner feed. If you use an official redirection service like a WordPress Plugin (same goes for Edublogs) or Blogger’s Feedburner redirection service, then no worries, it should handle it for you. In Typepad, you can connect your Typepad blog to Feedburner and then it’ll handle it for you. If you use anything else, you may need to edit your template yourself to do this part. While it may seem intimidating to do so, it’s not that complicated. Just a matter of tweaking a few lines of code. This blog post will show you how.
So today’s challenge is to upgrade your RSS feed to Feedburner today. It’s one of those things that may seem like a pain the first time you do it, but trust me when I say that you will never regret it. It’s well worth the effort in the long haul. If you’ve already upgraded your blog to Feedburner, then use this as an excuse to browse through the site and see what options have popped up since the last time you visited. Most people set up Feedburner and then promptly forget all about it. Did you know that you can mix in events from your Google Calendar? Or add icons allowing people to forward on your articles, promote them on Digg, or GeoTag them for you? Is your Creative Commons license in your feed on and up to date (not everyone actually VISITS your blog)? Are you allowing readers to subscribe via email? Feedburner is adding features all the time, take a few minutes to flip through the features you may not have seen recently.
If you have any problems with this challenge, let us know via comments below. I’ll do my best to try to point you in the right direction. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the 30D2BBB Wiki, so people know who you are and where your blog is. That way we can all try to support each other!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 7: Invite Somebody to Be a Guest Blogger
A few people who are participating in the 30D2BBB Challenge have volunteered to create and organize a wiki to support everyone’s efforts! John, Jenny, and Jason have done a great job of putting it together, and I strongly encourage you to add yourself to it. That way we can all support each other in our efforts to become better bloggers! Huge thanks for putting this together!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
I have created over 750 blog posts on Teach42.com. I’ve quoted people, linked to people, interviewed people, but the one thing that I’ve never done is invited somebody else to be a guest blogger and share their thoughts here. With this challenge I’m going to rectify that.
I’ve seen other bloggers make fantastic use of the idea of inviting people to be guest bloggers. Miguel Guhlin has had Melinda McCormick write some excellent blog posts for him on Second Life. Wes Fryer has had people like Bob Sprankle, Clay Burell, and even his mother share as guest bloggers! It’s always been something that I’ve admired, but never quite gotten around to doing.
Hrrrmm… That’s not quite honest. It’s not just procrastination. I gotta admit it’s also a question of self-confidence. There’s still the scared little boy inside of me who’s afraid to ask the girl out on a date out of fear that she’ll say no. While I know it shouldn’t, it’d be a blow to the ego to ask someone to be a guest blogger on Teach42 and have them shoot me down or just blow me off. Funny thing is I feel ridiculous even admitting that. But that little voice in the back of my head is there. Well, it’s long past time I moved past that.
So why would you even want to invite a guest blogger to share on your blog? There’s a few reasons. The first is that you admire them and want to share their ideas with your audience. By inviting someone who inspires you to share on your blog, you are able to share that inspiration with people first hand. It also exposes that person to a new audience, even if there are some members of your audience who may already be aware of that blogger. More than likely, not everybody does.
A second reason to do so is to ask an expert to address a specific topic for you and your audience. Perhaps you don’t know much about virtual worlds in a specific setting, like for students with disabilities, and you want to ask an expert to share their thoughts on the matter.
A third reason to invite a guest blogger is… well, let’s just be honest with each other here, guest bloggers can be great to increase traffic. That may sound a little self-serving, but we all want to raise awareness of our own blogs. So long as we’re doing this, we want people to know about it! By inviting someone to guest blog on your site, you ensure that the blogger is aware of your blog, you increase interest amongst other people in your blog (like having an interesting guest on a talk show), and since most guest bloggers alert their audiences that they’ll be writing a post elsewhere, you stand a good chance of having them bring along many first time visitors to your site. Ain’t nothing wrong with that!
A fourth reason to invite a guest blogger is to fill in a gap. Wes Fryer has done that a few times. When he’s known that he was going to be away for a few days or a week, he has invited other people to share on the blog in order to keep the frequency of posts up. While I don’t think it’s a necessary thing (nothing wrong with taking a few days/weeks off), it’s certainly good practice for building and maintaining an audience.
One last reason to invite a guest blogger… to demonstrate that you feel other voices are valuable as well. To show that it’s not ‘all about you’. Frankly, it’s your blog, and if you don’t want to have anybody else post there, that’s your choice and I’ll defend it to the death. But I’ve always been impressed when people have brought in guests and it’s one way that I’ve learned about some fantastic voices in education.
So today’s challenge is to invite someone to be a guest blogger on your site. It could be somebody famous, or someone completely ‘unknown’. Perhaps you want to invite someone who has never visited a blog before in their life, but you respect and want to share with others. You could honor a blogger that is relatively new and do your part to raise awareness of them, or invite somebody who has interesting ideas but has nothing to do with education. The details are totally up to you, but give it some thought before you extend an invitation. Try not to pick the easy fruit, reach for the choice stuff that’s just at the edge of your reach.
Obviously this isn’t a challenge you can complete today. But get that invitation sent out. When you know who is going to be doing the guest blogging, share it here and on the wiki. Then come back and share a link once their post is actually live on your blog.
Oh, and don’t forget to join the wiki!
Day 5: Globalize Your Blog
One of the most popular widgets out there is the Clustrmaps. It tracks your visitors and adds dots to the map corresponding where they hail from. It’s always fascinating to see where your visitors are coming from, and I don’t think I’m alone when I say it’s kind of a thrill when you see that you had a visitor from a land on the other side of the globe. If you haven’t installed a Clustrmap on your blog yet, you can consider that to be a sub-challenge for the day. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s another one of those little gifts to yourself that keeps on giving. If you do have a Clustrmap already, consider this a reminder to check it periodically and see where your visitors are coming from.
So why do I mention Clustrmaps if that isn’t specifically today’s challenge? Quite simply, to remind you that it isn’t just the people in your state, country, or even continent that are going to find your content. When you publish your thoughts and ideas on your blog, you are publishing for a global audience. It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that you are getting visitors from around the world without you even realizing it. So shouldn’t we be making our content as accessible as possible?
Of course, even without considering visitors from around the globe, if you live in a culturally diverse community, you may have parents who aren’t native English speakers. There’s one district nearby me that has a school where over thirty different languages are spoken by the different students. Publishing the great things that your students have been doing on your blog doesn’t do you much good if your parents are unable to read it.
That’s why today’s challenge is to provide visitors a means to translate your blog into their native language, no matter what it is. Google Translate, while not perfect, does a very adequate job of translating web pages into other languages. However, we can save visitors more than a few steps by putting the Google Translate widget directly into our sidebars. Once it’s in there, with a single click, people can translate your content into their native tongue. All you need to do is visit this page, copy the code and paste it into your sidebar wherever you want to display it. If you are targeting a specific language (for example, if many of your parents speak a specific language) you may want to call attention to the widget in both English and that language.
Just in case you don’t know how to embed HTML into your blog, here are a few resources for you. If you’re using Edublogs.org, click here to see how to embed code into your sidebar. If you’re blog is hosted by Blogger, visit this article to see how to do your embedding. If you’re using WordPress.com to host your blog, unfortunately you’re going to need to do a workaround. They don’t allow you to embed in the Google script (for security reasons), but if you visit this thread, you can see how to make a small widget full of text links for translations, or if you scroll about midway down the page it’ll show you how to display a series of flags that will provide one click translation.
That’s it for today’s challenge! Leave a comment when you have done so and let us know where some of your visitors happen to be coming from! What’s the farthest away location or the most interesting? Or will you just be starting to track that today? Good luck!
Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
Recently I began to feel that my blogging has been slipping. By that, I mean that I haven’t been giving it much attention, and have been more prone to letting little things slide. For example, I know that the images in my Twitter badge aren’t showing up right and I haven’t done anything about it. Nor have I added a Plurk badge, which is way overdue. My Blogroll is stale, I’ve gotten lazy about linking to other sites, and so on… SO, it’s time to do a full makeover, top to bottom. With that in mind, I pulled up a link that I had bookmarked about a year ago that I had always intended to try out for myself. It was Pro-Blogger’s, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. Some of the tips fit me, some of them didn’t. However, I always thought about spinning my own version of it, specifically for teacher/educator bloggers. After mentioning it on both Twitter and Plurk and getting some very positive responses, I decided to move forward with the idea.
I’ve sketched out 30 ideas for Being a Better Blogger. These are not tips like “Make it personal” or “Focus on quality”, these are ideas for doing things to improve your blog and address all the little details people generally forget about, ignore, or never knew to do in the first place. Every day I will post a new tip/challenge for you to try. Whether you’re a new blogger or tenured, I encourage you to join along with me and use the month of November to be a better blogger.
This is a personal challenge, so whether you follow one tip or all thirty is entirely up to you. I’ve created a badge (as seen above) to let people know that you’re participating in the challenge and will provide you a means to embed it in and link it up soon.
If you’d like to join in, leave a comment below so we can follow you back and help support you in your endeavors!
The challenge begins on Saturday November 1st!