This morning I was getting started on the day, fired up Twitter and immediately saw that Chris Brogan had a new post. One that hits home to an issue I’ve been having as a consultant or freelance professional. The post is a great resource for those starting out freelancing, or re-launching their personal brand.
The biggest thing I took away from his post was the importance of blogging. That is the piece that I’ve struggled with for several months. Most of the other parts, I’ve been working on for some time. But the most important part is blogging.
Without sharing your ideas, or expertise, or passion on a topic, people can’t gauge how interested or engaged you are in your profession. When you write about your profession or interest, you are sharing your knowledge – your expertise on the subject and providing content that attracts the attention of others.
That is the point I wanted to reinforce in Chris’ post earlier today. While all the points are very important, providing the content and networking with peers are the top two things that you can do to help show who you are and why potential clients should choose you over another freelancer.
I’ve been thinking about the content I publish on my blog of late. Personally, I think I’ve let it get a bit messy, and have been working on cleaning it up a bit and thinking of new layouts and such. Currently, I’ve not planned an overhaul of the entire site, but that may happen in 2008 – we’ll see.
Recently though, I’ve started to dislike my “links” post that I try to keep updated every day. It’s hard to keep up, and be selective, sharing quality links in these posts. They’re partially automated, coming directly from my del.icio.us bookmarks. However, del.icio.us is fed by ClipMarks, after careful screening through my Google Reader’s Shared Items.
For the past year, I’ve maintained a Google Reader Shared Items blog. In early autumn 2007 I created a Lifestream that aggregated all my online postings of multiple types of media into one place. Two weeks ago, I discovered FriendFeed which does the same thing, but also brings social interaction to the shared content as well.
With these aggregated or interactive shared streams, I wonder if there is any real point of posting a “links” post every day (or trying to anyway). I’d love to have your thoughts. While it does take a bit of extra effort on my part, it may be of greater value to you… I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.
Just a quick post to mention the updated “post footer” changes that I came up with. Since adding a few additional services here on my blog, I’ve disliked how messy and unorganized the bottom of each post had become. So today, I set out to tidy it up a bit and make it a bit more pleasant to look at.
I’ve simply defined a specific section for the “footer” of each post that draws a border, added light background shading, consistent font size, and a simple table to hold the “ShareThis” feature on the right-side of the column. I think it helps define the end of one post and lets the header text of the next post stand out a bit better. Previously it seemed like it rambled from header, to post content, to some tagging, to sharing options, to related posts, and finally to the post meta data at the end.
The base theme is Misty Look by Sadish Bala, currently in version 3.5 supporting WordPress 2.3.x. I’ve made several customizations over the past year and have found the code fairly easy to modify if you’ve got a reasonable understanding of HTML and PHP. Let me know if you have a question on what I’ve done, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned.
I hope you agree that this makes each post a bit more readable, and isolates the post meta data that can be skipped if you want. If you don’t agree… well I sure would like to hear your opinions! My goal is to have things readable, fairly organized, and hopefully, easy to read for you when you come to visit. Just leave a comment if you have an idea or feedback – I’d love to hear your thoughts!
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
