Jonesieblog

Hope you all had a great xmas.  I did!

So….John tagged me, and I’m supposed to tell you 5 things….

I’m very tempted to follow Tom Hoffman’s lead and make up 5 bits of nonsense.  You decide if these are true or not

1. I have passed exams in French, German, Latin and Spanish
2. I used to play in a band called The Catburgers
3. I have travelled in a car with Nico (she sang with The Velvet Underground).
4. I have led an E1 rock climb (Captain Birdseye at Cummingston)
5. I am a Buddhist, and have attended a number of week-long silent meditation retreats.

I tag Tess, Paul, David, Brian and Don.

Stumble it!

In this instalment of “Blogging for Beginners” I’d like to answer a few questions, and explain the simple things you can do to make it easier for potential readers to find your posts. Subscribers (people who have put the RSS feed from your blog into something like Bloglines) won’t need these, but how is anyone going to become a subscriber unless they read one of your posts?

Write something worth reading!

I don’t claim to have any clear idea of what constitutes a good post, but there’s clearly no point drawing huge crowds to your blog if they find mince when the get there! ProBlogger (a blog that covers every aspect of blogging in much more detail than I have in this series) has a category full of great advice on writing worthwhile content.

Liz asked me how long a blog post should be. ProBlogger has an answer of sorts here.

Actually, ProBlogger has the answer to just about everything! You should definitely stick it in your RSS reader because it’s full of useful advice.

Tag your posts.

Now that you’ve got something worth reading in your blog, you want people to be able to find it. Help them by adding tags (or categories) to you posts. All blogging software allows you to put posts into multiple categories, and many also allow you to add Technorati tags. These categories and tags make it much easier for readers to find relevant material.

Track conversations with CoComment.

As I said in the last post, commenting on other people’s blogs is what keeps the blogosphere going. It becomes very time consuming to keep track of all these conversations once you’ve written comments on more than a handful of blogs. This is where CoComment comes to the rescue. Once you’ve registered (free again!) and installed the Firefox add-on the comments you make are automatically tracked. You can subscribe to a feed of all comments made subsequent to yours. Very cool! I gather it even works with other browsers

Stumble it!

I’m a relative newcomer to the blogging game. It’s not rocket science, but there are a few things that I wish I had been told when I started. I’m aware that there are a lot of new bloggers in East Lothian - this post is for you guys! I’ll explain how you can help your blog to get connected to the bigger world of blogs.

The blogosphere (a hideous term used to describe all the blogs out there) is held together by the connections between blogs. These connections do not form by themselves - you have to get out there and make them yourself. It’s like going to a party - if you stand in a corner and don’t speak to anyone then you are unlikely to have a good time!

Technorati is your friend

Technorati sits at the centre of the blogging universe. Register with Technorati (it’s free) and claim you blog. You will then get to something like this:

Not particularly impressive stats, but the number of links is an important measure of how widely your blog has been noticed. It’s nice, as time goes by, to see the numbers go up

Write some posts

Before you launch yourself onto the world of blogging, try to have several posts on your blog already. When bloggers become aware of a new blog, they are very likely to have a look at it. If they find an empty blog, or one where the last post was written 2 weeks ago, they may never come back! There’s good advice on launching your blog here.

Learn about RSS

RSS feeds are tiny files that each blog produces. They list all the recent posts on a blog, and can be used with an RSS reader to keep an eye on lots of blogs without having to go visit them all every day. Register with Bloglines (free) and add feeds from your favorite blogs. If you’re in Scottish Education, you might like to use this OPML file as a starting point. You can import this into Bloglines and you’ll get feeds from a whole bunch of education related blogs. More on the importance of RSS on edu.blogs.com.

If you want to get comments, make them

The most important way to get noticed is to start commenting on other people’s blogs. Be sure to enter the address of your blog in the relevant field, so that readers can easily get to your blog. Commenting on each other’s blogs is the central means of communication in the blogosphere. It’s good to talk

Learn about Trackbacks

The exact workings of trackbacks depend on what blogging software your are using, but basically a trackback is a message from one blog to another, saying “I mentioned this post on your blog.” If you look at the comments on some blog posts, you will see these trackbacks at the bottom. If you read an interesting blog post, and feel inspired to write about it, be sure to put a link to the post, and enter the address into the trackback field in your post editor if such a thing exists. That way the author of the original post and other readers of the post will become aware that you have joined the conversation.

Use you Blogroll

All blogs have some form of blogroll - a list of blogs that the author recommends. Use yours! Every blogger you list will notice that you’ve done so (via Technorati or a similar tool) and may potentially become one of your readers.

Have fun

Blogging is fun. Don’t let it become a chore

Stumble it!

Aaaargh… I finished typing a beautifully crafted email to all maths teachers in East Lothian this afternoon, and clicked on “send.” I was working in Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Can you guess? Timed out! No auto-saving, whole email lost, I had to start from scratch. How silly of me to spend more than 10 minutes writing an email! Jeeeez

So anyway, I’ve just about finished rewriting it, but I decided to save and take a break before sending it. I checked my gmail and got a link to this:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/929433.mspx

I love this bit:

As a best practice, users should always exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments from both known and unknown sources.

In other words, opening any Word document that you didn’t create yourself is a very risky business. Wow! I think I’ll be sending back any Word attachments with a link to this announcement until a patch is issued and school applies the patch to the machines I use. At home I’m mostly on Linux and OpenOffice. I sleep soundly at night

Stumble it!

Do you see Glow as the ground in this picture:

or as the walls in this one?

I guess I’m not alone in hoping that the first metaphor is better suited to what Glow will become.

If so, then we need not worry too much about what Glow itself can and can’t do internally.  What Glow does well will happen within Glow, and what it doesn’t do so well will be done elsewhere. Glow will provide a ground of functionality out of which the interesting stuff can develop. In order for Glow to be successful, based on the first metaphor, we need it to allow the seamless flow of information to and fro between it and the wider Web:  RSS feeds in other words!

Provided we get these facilities, I don’t share the concerns of others about Sharepoint as a platform.  Sharepoint can do the boring stuff, which I hope it is fit to do, and the rest can happen wherever works best.

Stumble it!