Jun 28, 2008 | blog
As it happens to me a few times a year, work & life take precedence over blogging. It’s a frustrating experience as it usually happens when I am in the middle of pulling a lot of ideas together.
At any rate, I have realized something this time around. I spend more time blogging when I don’t have much exciting things going on. Or looked at another way, I blog a lot less when I’m spending more quality time with family, friends, and making social media things happen in the real world.
Right now, I’ve been so involved with the transition from one client to another that I haven’t made a priority to talk about things here. There’s enough happening out in the real world, that I’m struggling to get back and talk about things here. To me, that’s doubly bad because I have a lot to talk about with you, and had just redesigned the blog to accommodate a lot more of these topics.
I’ve found there are a couple page to finish up here as well, to finish the refocus of things I learned at SOBCon08. Speaking of SOBCon, there were so many new learning’s for so many people coming out of that one event that it amazes me still, two months later. Start planning to attend next year folks, that’s all I can say.
Well, I’ve got a number of posts and post ideas in the works, and will be working on those and many other things. Hopefully I’ll have a few interesting pieces to share soon. Thanks your for patience – we’ll see you around the ‘net.
Photo credit: kevinzim
Jun 4, 2008 | blog
Wow, what a wild ride the last few months have been. I’ve been planning to refine the direction of my blog and revamp the appearance for some time and it’s finally completed!
Well, it’s almost completed – I’ve got a replacement for the About page almost ready to publish, and I’ve got one last page that I’ll add a little later. Seems I just can’t get it to come out quite right in the past week while working on other things – so I’ll get to that real soon.
Direction
The great part is that I’m refining my direction. Since I’ve come out of corporate, with a strong background in information technology, I’m going to focus on helping those organizations with social media. I’ve changed the description of the blog to "social web & the enterprise". I believe that to better describe the direction that I’m going.
Friends
First, I really respect a number of bloggers for their work & influence on me. So, instead of the old blogroll, or a list of links, I created a new Friends page. This page is people I have come to know, respect, learn from, work with, and I wanted to do more than just link to them. You’ll find a description of each blog and a thumbnail of their landing page.
Resume
Also page that can now be found in the top navigation area is the Resume page. I’ve had a variant of this Social Media Resume up for about 9 months, but never advertised it on the blog. I’ve revamped a number of pieces of the page as it used to be a completely custom HTML page forced into a WordPress theme template. Now it fully fits the theme, with a special resume.php template that allows different sidebars and such. Much better. I’ve pulled the video that I had on it, but will replace it with another one to fit the direction of the blog shortly.
Advertisement
You’ll also notice that all advertising save two things have been removed from the blog. While I make enough to pay for hosting, I believe that the ads detracted from what I’m here to accomplish, so they’re gone. The two items I mentioned that remain are badges for Personal Branding Magazine, and for Avatar Consultants. Their of personal interest to me, I’m involved in writing for one, and the other is my consulting firm.
Nowhere But Up
So if the picture in this post didn’t give a hint, my motto as I revise my direction and enter a new phase, is that there is nowhere to go but up. Join me as we bring the benefits of the social web to organizations of all sizes. Come along and help individuals realize the power and strength of their brand. Let’s make each day the best it can be!
I want to give a special thank you to Mykl Roventine for patience, ideas, and a great design – I wouldn’t have gotten this completed without his work. Thank you.
Got feedback? I bet! Don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts in a comment below.
Photo credit: Leo Reynolds
May 25, 2008 | blog
Hi folks, hope everyone is having a good weekend everywhere! I’ve been quietly busing working on some improvements for the blog here and getting ready for my wife’s birthday today. So, I’m a little thin in the post department this weekend, and I apologize for that. Have been finding a lot of organizational work on the back end, thinking, coding, and a little writing.
It’s been three weeks since SOBCon08 and a lot of what I learned there and talking with folks has started to coalesce and become clearer. So that thought process and the results are taking up quite a bit of time to organize and plan around. Thanks to all the folks who I’ve talked with and learned from this past month, it’s been really fun.
Now, make sure you get out and do something this weekend – have fun!
Jun 19, 2006 | blog
Ugh… There has been a bit of discussion on blog design lately, and I’ll admit that its not easy. I’ve been working on getting two new blogs ready for launch and the layout, design scheme, etc… is the hardest part.
Yes I will eventually hire a professional to give them an overhaul sometime in the future, but the sites will have to pay for that themselves, right now I need to create a compelling design on my own. Now keep in mind that I’m at heart a computer geek – a Windows computer geek – and you get the idea of how easy a time I’m having. 🙂
So in addition to learning a little about Linux, some about MySQL, a bit more on PHP, and quite a bit on WordPress. I now need to really get to understand color combinations, graphic elements and the like. Of course the technical aspects of all this makes complete sense, but the technical part is only one of many aspects of blog (and web) design.
For this site, I’ve stuck with a freeware template that I found out on the ‘net, and I’m fairly happy with it. I’ll update the design on this site sometime in the near future, and it’ll probably be my main experimental site for design experimentation and learning.
I must say thank-you to Chris Pearson for a recent post on the topic of web design pricing – it was a real eye opener. I understand completely because every job has its complexities, and that is why we hire professionals – so things come out looking right!
