Jun 9, 2006 | blog
Easton Ellsworth talks about how his passion and interest in reading sometimes keeps him from blogging and asks what is the biggest time-waster for everyone else. I know what he means, I’ve got around 120 feeds that I follow daily, and would not be able to do that if it were not for RSS Readers! It takes up a lot of time.
But even aside from reading, simply needing to do the work necessary for the day job takes up most of my time. While I love blogging, it currently doesn’t pay the bills, and I’m making a little progress in ‘climbing the corporate ladder’, so I might as well stick it out awhile longer.
Hmm, other than that I guess I’d have to add that simply taking time to relax and spend some ‘down time’ is another thing that takes time away from blogging for me. This is kind of frustrating in a way because I have a few ‘special project blogs’ that I’m trying to make progress on, and simply can’t find more time to get them to that magical point yet.
Anyway, I’m curious as well – what keeps you from, or interrupts you from blogging?
Jun 3, 2006 | blog
I was just reading Kent Newsome’s post ‘The Swift Way to Blog Stardom‘, and then read Seth Godin’s ‘How to get traffic for your blog‘. The point Kent is making is that there is no sure and easy way to ‘make’ a successful blog.
People will find you – there is no doubt about that, but for you to be successful as a blogger is another thing entirely. If you’re starting a blog for personal reasons, to have a platform of you own for ranting, raving, complaining, praising, then do it for those reasons alone. If you want to start a blog for making money – then plan it that way from the outset in design, content and tone.
Blogs are unique because of the uniqueness of each individual that contributes to them. Since we all have different views of the same kinds of experiences, our writing and discussions reflect that.
The point being that if your blogging to be popular, than you may be disappointed. Be prepared to work hard at your content, style and topics if you want to draw crowds.
And if you really interested, check out Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog – he has a huge amount of information on being a professional blogger.
May 30, 2006 | blog
It seems that Performancing has been having some difficulty the past few days. The details are a bit fuzzy, though it seems that their systems are receiving data, but are unable to keep up on processing it.
On Saturday, May 27th, Nick Wilson mentioned that they were working on the issue:
Just to let you know that we’re aware of the reported metrics problem and are on the case Please give us a little time to work out whats going on and how to sort it and I’ll post back here when we have any news.
It looks like the problem started around mid-day on Saturday, and has continued on for the past four days. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to view your metrics while the system is having issues.
I’ve been using the metrics for a few months now and view them as very accurate and have been helpful to me in understanding my traffic patterns. The loss of Performancing right now is only slight – I am mostly using it for my own curiosity, though I’m anxious to view my traffic for the last few days.
May 26, 2006 | blog
Last time I used w.bloggar was a few months ago, probably in January. I have been looking for a really good offline blogging tool. Something that allows me to create, save and store posts offline prior to publishing them on my blog. Of course, I don’t really want to spend any money on a tool so I’ve been searching and trying most of the freeware blogging tools.
I understand that there are several commercial tools that may fit the bill, but I’ve not researched all those yet. So I have gone back and taken another look at w.bloggar, a feature packed freeware blogging tool. To my surprise, it has been updated since I visted the site last. Some new features and support for MSN Spaces has been added. Anyway, this post is my first one written in the latest version of w.bloggar.
Since MS Word 2007 is supposed getting an injection of blog posting tools, we’ll see how the two stack up as Word matures from beta code to RTM. The one thing I think both of these tools are never going to support is a WordPress plugin I have installed on my blog that automatically inserts a Technorati tag into each post – all I have to do on the post editing page is to enter a few keywords. This means that I’ll have to visit my site after posting to add the Technorati tags. I’ll keep you posted as I discover the pros and cons of w.bloggar.
May 26, 2006 | blog
So I’ve been thinking about mobility for a little bit today – I’ve been trying a few neat things to connect up and get online. Nothing radical or new really, just using my MDA, some free WiFi hotspots and my laptop.
I really don’t get a chance to go mobile too often with my job. Since my job is rally contained within one building, I seldom travel for work. Yeah, the occasional conference, maybe visit a remote site from time to time, but nothing in my day to day routine. But that’s ok, the work is really rewarding and challenging. I can’t say that I don’t get my share of opportunities.
But to be mobile and have other external influences while blogging I think could be beneficial. Today I’m sitting on a lake near Turtle Lake, WI – a very beautiful spot at my wife’s grandmother’s place. The setting sun is shining in my eyes creating quite a glare, and I need to move back inside for now. You don’t get that problem in the office!
The range of technologies that are available to us is amazing. The fact that a vast majority of them are reasonably priced for our consumption makes finding viable connectivity options fairly – even in rural areas. Can you remember back even just 3 years ago – yes GPRS was in deployment, and CDMA2000 had decent speeds, WiFi was in the process of its fantastic growth, and laptops were already widespread. But it was a real novelty to get connected on the road, I remember connecting up while my wife was driving and managed to perform a speed test at 70mph – the connection speed was about 42kbps.
In comparison, today, we have vast stretches of the country covered by some kind of wireless carrier. The options abound and the solutions are fairly easy to use. There are two of each GPRS/EDGE and 1XRTT/EVDO networks in the U.S., and each of the carriers have a wide variety of unlimited data plans. Some even include extensive WiFi networks in addition to their high-speed cell networks.
And mobile access devices – you can buy a PCMCIA card for a laptop, you can tether a mobile phone to a laptop, or you could get some version of a smartphone. With devices like BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile (Pocket PC or Smartphone), Symbian, and Linux based solutions, there is likely something there for everyone.
So get out there everyone and blog, write, work, or simply converse when mobile. It’s a lot of fun, and is a great way to get yourself a fresh perspective. After all, there are thousands of great coffee shops with free WiFi and a great cup of coffee waiting for you.
