Category Archives: Blogging

New Journalism in Action – Using Twitter as a Photoblog with the Iphone

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The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages.  I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment.  The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize.  You can check out the full tweet stream here.

Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.

Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations.  Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment.  Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.

When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum. Continue reading →

Drinking From the Fire Hose #2 – the China Syndrome

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One of the big complaints that the anti-Wordpress chorus croons is that the vaunted blogging platform doesn’t scale.  Certainly we’ve all seen sites brought low by the “Slashdot Effect” or the “Digg Effect” but my experience tells me that WordPress is getting a bad rap for poor server setup, poor plugin choice, etc.

How do I know?  Well, one of the sites I work with last week experienced the “China Syndrome” or potentially “The Great Fire Hose”.  The site, TheTruthAboutCars.com posted a story that the Chinese might buy GM, and that opened the flood gates for traffic.  The problem is, while we watch for excess traffic from Digg, or Slashdot, we don’t watch the Chinese sites that offer similar service.  In a matter of a couple hours, the traffic surged to 10 or 15 times its normal levels(and that’s conservative, once we max out server connections, we have no way of knowing how much is actually refused).  Our system administrator alerted me and I quickly through the SuperCache plugin into lockdown mode, ensuring that the site rendered virtually all its content as flat html, rather than going to the database every time.   Continue reading →

My WordPress Plugins

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Over the past couple weeks, I’ve seen a lot more people making the switch to WordPress.  Why not?  The system is utterly configurable, with a plugin (or 5) for virtually every need.  The problem is that not all plugins are of the same caliber.  In fact, some are downright site killers.  Since I’ve had a close look at a lot of them, I thought you all might benefit from a look at the plugins that I use on my personal blog.

  • Akismet – this one comes standard with WordPress and it’s a decent anti-spam program.  Although this morning for the first time in recent memory 8 spam comments found their way through…
  • All In One SEO Pack - I’ve done a bunch of rewrites on this package for other sites, but the out of the box SEO functionality is great.  Take the time to configure it.  Perhaps this plugin is worth a post of it’s very own at a later date.
  • Feedburner Feedsmith – this reroutes my RSS through Feedburner so I can get some meaningful stats on the black hole that is RSS usage.  I love metrics…
  • FlickRSS – I’m using this to pull in photos from my Flickr account.  I’m not a huge fan of this…
  • Google XML Sitemaps - a great plugin for SEO – BUT you have to limit it to 5000 posts if you have a large volume in your system. I have seen this plugin bring two sites to their knees.  Limiting to 5000 fixed that issue for both.
  • MobilePress - I just installed this, because my new wider format wasn’t mobile compatible.  Hence, I can’t render a true opinion here. (Note: after this post, I found this plugin was rendering the mobile version to everyone, and I turned it off.  I am fairly certain it is a wrong setting, but I can’t recommend the plugin until I see it work properly)
  • ShareThis – a great plugin to add links to the social networking sites.
  • Simple Recent Comments – There should be a simple hook to grab recent comments in WordPress, but there isn’t.  This adds one.
  • Subscribe2 – This allows you to have users sign up for email digests.  I’ve been using it for 4 months and I’m the only person signed up.
  • Twitter Tools – A plugin that will post all your blog entries to Twitter and all your Tweets to the blog.  I only use it to post my most recent tweets to the sidebar.  If you were to actually use it, you’d look like a Twitiot…
  • Vipers Video Quick Tags - a great video plugin.
  • WordPress Automatic Upgrade – the need for this goes away in the next release so don’t even bother.
  • WP Super Cache - this program utterly rules – it creates a cache that cuts down on bandwidth usage and makes your server much better able to handle high loads.  I will probably have some stats to share on this one in a week or so as I am testing it on a site at work.

Absolutely avoid plugins such as:

  • Anything offering “live” statistics or user tracking -  These plugins will create ginormous tables as they track every single hit to your site.  They also add a hit to your database which negates the benefit of having caching.
  • Anything that offers “easy database access” - It may be possible to hack your admin console, don’t use a plugin that would allow anyone to run queries from your console.
  • Anything that hasn’t been updated in over a year – that would mean that it wasn’t vetted for the watershed WordPress 2.5 release.  I guess it’d be okay if the plugin was very simple…

Write to Done: Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do

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A great post I had to share from Leo Babauta at Write to Done.

One of the reasons I was able to draw so many readers to Zen Habits within the first year was that I treated the promotion of Zen Habits as you would any other product — I branded it.

Of course, there are other reasons as well — I really focused on creating as useful content as possible, for example — but branding is what really helped Zen Habits take off so quickly.

When you think of your blog as you would a brand, you have to create a consistent message and have everything you do — on and off the blog — send the same message. And you have to repeat the message as often as possible to your target audience until it’s stuck in their head.

Leo’s right, of course, if you want to build a real readership, stay on message.  Not a skill I have been demonstrating here of late (oh look, a butterfly….), but one that you should be considering in your writing.

Along with his action list, I’ll add a couple of my own:

  • If you can’t reasonably stick to your topic, then provide decent “silos” in which you categorize content, and stick with them.  
  • Spend time optimizing landing pages for categories, if you’ve got more than one.
  • Live it and love it – if you’re just covering a topic because it’s a potential money maker, you’ll sound hollow.  
  • You might want to consider multiple blogs, if you can’t handle the previous three items.

WordPress 2.7 Coming Soon

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I’ve been doing some testing with beta versions of the new WordPress 2.7, which has a very extensive redesign of the Admin console. Yeah, you read that right, the admin console is being redesigned again, even though it was just redone in 2.5 which came out very recently.

The good news is that they’ve really done a wonderful job on the admin console.  As much as I have been saying that WordPress is trully a content management system, they are really delivering on that promise.  A few of the updates to the system I really like:

 

  • Autoupdate moves from a plugin to core functionality – the biggest problem I see is blogs that are way out of date.  Hopefully they will also give those of us that run in controlled environments (ie, the sites I engineer) a way to turn if off as well to avoid accidental updates before our QA process is complete.
  • Threaded comments – I’ve been waiting for this for years.  Threaded comments will allow us to respond directly to commenters, instead of having our reply appear serially as just another comment.
  • Reply/Edit Comments in Admin – another good one that’s well overdue.
  • Ajax Expand/Contract in Admin – there are windows in the manage/write windows that I never use, yet they are always open and always, essentially, in my way.  Now I can easily close them and have them stay closed.
  • Drag and drop in Dashboard and Post Screen – finally I get it my admin pages the way I want them, not the way WordPress says I should have them.
  • Sticky posts – another “why the heck wasn’t that in there three years ago” feature.  We can now force the system to keep a certain post at the top of the list.  This is great for announcements, etc.
So set aside a little time next week for your upgrade.  It’s supposed to be ready on Monday, so assume it’s released by mid-week.  You’re gonna love this.

WordPress 2.6.3 Released, and Issues with Auto Upgrade

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The folks at Automattic today released WordPress 2.6.3 which is a minor security patch to the Snoopy script they use for displaying rss feeds in the admin area.  Not an utterly crucial upgrade, but one you might want to take just to be sure your secure.  The upgrade took me 5 minutes using the auto upgrade plugin.

One issue that I noticed while using the auto upgrade plugin, which was also upgraded, was that the script failed repeatedly on the database backup step.  I was forced to skip that step (I used the database backup plugin to grab one).  If you find you have the same issue, you may want to skip that step as well.  Just be sure to get a db backup (and you should be getting those weekly!).

Now’s probably a good time to mention that we’ve got another major WordPress Upgrade on the way, 2.7, which should be here in November.  Again, there will be major changes in the Admin area as they clean it up even more and make it more useful for us.  For an overview of the new Admin UI, have a look here.

So what’s the 2.7 upgrade mean to you?  Basically it’s going to provide a more logically oriented admin area, and one in which we’ll better be able to build upon into the future.  As I’ve said before, WordPress is not longer just blog software, it has become a full fledged open source content management package, and this is yet another move in that direction.

On another front, Automattic will also be releasing the 1.0 level version of BBPress, their forum package which provides tight integration with WordPress. I’m particularly interested in this package, as I work with BBPress on almost a daily basis, but honestly, the feature list doesn’t even approach that of vBulletin or even Simple Machines.  Still, I’m hopeful for a vast improvement over the 0.9 code stream.

New Post on Dad-o-Matic – “Ward Cleaver Did Us Wrong”

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I’ve joined Chris Brogan’s group Dad blog at Dadomatic.com and my first post is up.  

Dadomatic itself is an interesting effort, as Chris has brought together a very intersting group of dads to cover a range of topics.  Personally, I’m looking forward to bringing the voice of the regular down to earth dad.  Anyone can tell you that while I may try my hardest, I’m no Super Dad.  

This post actually starts off by attacking the myth of the Super Dad:

As much as I’d love to think I’m Ward Cleaver, dressed ever so nattily in a wool suit, pipe clenched lightly in my lips as I prepare to pass judgement on the Beaver’s latest antics, I’m not.  Unfortunately, in my heart, I suspect I bear a closer resemblance to a certain donut loving animated character, and I’m betting a lot of you are do as well.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Geek.com Relaunched

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For the past couple months I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to the re-release of http://www.geek.com – the online technology resource and community for technology enthusiasts and professionals.  We’ve added a lot of social networking tools, and also done a general wordpress/bbpress upgrade which will allow us to easily take the latest releases in the future.  

This is important on a couple of levels, first off, this is a site that has over 10 million unique users a month. That ought to put to rest the “WordPress doesn’t scale” talk I hear around the net.  Wordpress scales just fine for large sites if you set your server up properly:

Continue reading →

Old Media Lessons for New Media

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Just because you’re new media doesn’t mean you can’t learn a few lessons from old media.  As we’re so fond of saying, new media is all about changing delivery channels of old media, hence I think it’s implied that the old school journalism rules have a place in our lives going forward.

First off, we need to think about what type of journalism we’re doing.  In almost all cases for bloggers we’ll fall into one of the following three categories: Continue reading →

5 WordPress Features You Should be Using

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Since I work with WordPress at a code level virtually everyday, I’ve got a pretty good handle on how the system works.  The thing that never ceases to amaze me is the number of feature requests I get from users for things that already exist in their system.

I’ve seen it in other systems, but honestly, I’m still shocked at the number of great features that most people don’t know exist.  As a blogger, your blogging platform is the prime tool of your trade: you should know how it functions and be able to make it do whatever you want.

Schedule Posts – As of version 2.5 the feature is much easier to find.  Even with that, most people don’t seem to know it exists.  All you have to do is find the Publish Status window in the right panel of your Write or Manage Post window and click the “Edit” link beside “Publish Immediately”.  Now change the day or time, or both to whatever time, past or present you want it to be and you’re set.  Magically your post will appear when you want it to.

Using that you can schedule your posts to appear while your on vacation, on a business trip, etc.  I’ve used if to do regular features like my Friday Music Video installments for several weeks in advance. Continue reading →