Daily Archives: September 24, 2012

Blogging for the Newb in 20 Parts (Well So Far … That Could Change Too)

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Blog Tips – Introduction

Hi There:

Disclaimer, this is the blind leading the blind here. I may repeat, say things incorrectly or sometimes be off-base. I am but a humble woman trying to wade my way through the land of blog. Any questions, criticisms, comments, advice, etc. are greatly appreciated. Be advised, I will post all comments, even the mean ones so think before you write. Is it:

True
Helpful
Inspiring
Necessary
Kind

This is written specifically for people who don’t know anything about blogging, or perhaps even computers. I’m always astounded when people start talking about subjects and seem to assume that you know a lot about computers, even if you don’t know about blogging per se, sista please! I’m still trying to figure stuff out. Hopefully my entries will improve technologically as I gain more knowledge.

I am impulsive, brash, I write off the cuff. I’m not trying to win an award for syntax, my grammar will often suck balls. I’m usually pretty good about the spelling (spell check helps too – for the love of gawd people, spell check BEFORE you post, it’s not that hard, when you’re writing your post, save it to draft, preview it, whatever).

As well, I am awesome and I am Canadian!

“A secret that only Canadians really know is that Canada is a darn sexy country!” It’s true, it’s true! Read their blog if you’d like to know more about how truly spectacular we are.

To that end, the most successful blogging site worldwide for us Canadians is the Huffington Post.

The U.K. Guardian gave a great synopsis of some of the most successful blogs.

Now yes, this article is somewhat outdated, but it still seems to be fairly up-to-date in terms of the ratings, she says cautiously. (I will have an in-depth look into it at some point down the road, but for now it’s a good basis to go on and not one of the most pertinent things I want to address at this time.) As I said, this blog is in 20 segments that I have already written.

I will be posting them daily for the next few weeks (excluding weekends of course) after we’ve got our blog up and running like a dream, perhaps I can tackle some of your questions.

Now we’re ready to begin!

The Occupy Movement One Year Later

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I think the Occupy movement, like many well intended ideologies just comes to nothing in the long run. Did it cause any great government change? No. Did it ruin our park, yes. What was the purpose of camping out anyway? What it started to look like to me was a great excuse for the (many homeless people) and others to come together as a group, build fires and hang out. Yeah, it sucks that we have to work but then here are most of us slugging away anyway, living in homes, paying rents or mortgages. I didn’t even bother trying to argue with friends about this issue, I considered it moot.

What I did find was I went by the park every day on my way both to and from work and it made me uncomfortable. I felt it encroached on my sense of peace and safety and doesn’t that kind of defeat the whole “peaceful protest” notion? How would you like it if 200 or more people (most of whom are likely homeless, disenfranchised or marginalized people in our society) set up camp across the street from you and hung out for six weeks or so?

Now if people could organize and rally for a cause in the way these folks organized and rallied together to refurbish our lovely park, they might be onto something. As far as I’m concerned the Occupy Movement was, for the most part, about a lot of bored people occupying their time and having somewhere to hang out. Granted there were a core group of people who felt passionately about the cause and worked really hard in the hopes of accomplishing something great and I think it’s lovely that people still have the ideology that perhaps there is some other way to bring about change and yes, fundamentally I think our system sucks and changes should be made. However, I don’t think those changes can be effected by camping. You want to go camping, go the national parks like the rest of us are obliged to do by law. You want to bring about change, get an education, become a lawyer, become a judge and help rewrite the laws.

Wading through the Quagmire that is Trying to Set Up, Maintain and Manipulate a Blog

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Holy crap dudes, I cannot believe how much work needs to go into this! I haven’t even started posting yet and already I feel like I’m in the weeds. I thought, okay, I’ll set up my blog, learn a few things, start writing and work my way through it … apparently not if you want any chance at success whatsoever. You need to know PHP in order to manipulate your page with any type of success. You need to know how to use widgets, plug-ins, optimize your keyword strings, etc. etc. Jeebus what a lot of work. Oh and according to all sources, I’m destined to fail because my blog is not on one particular subject and my domain name has no keywords in it – yeah well fuck you rules I say (I say that a lot actually). I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff ready to roll out but I’m not going officially “live” until (I’m hoping) October 1. Thank goodness I signed up for a WordPress conference that’s going on this weekend. I’m not sure what I’d do without that. As to writing PHP code, man it’s HTML all over again *bashes head on desk*. It’s like one step forward, two steps back if you ask me. Why wouldn’t they have ways that people could customize at least the basics without having to resort to coding? Anyway, I have to get back to studying, no time for writing really. Kind of ironic when you think about it actually. Toodles for now.

Of note:

“While you don’t want large blocks of duplicate content on your site, you want the timely information that your news feeds deliver. Build fresh new content on the foundation of other information whenever possible. It takes more effort to assimilate and summarize a news story or to use it as a link within an original article, but doing so will cast your site in a more positive light. If you add sufficient value with sharp writing and relevant links, you’ll find yourself in the search engine stratosphere.”

http://www.webconfs.com/seo-tutorial/seo-and-content.php (Lemme guess, I’ve done this wrong … lessee shall we?)

Yes, yes I have … (goes back to Google for more answers and sighs heavily). Nope, didn’t work using the little links sidebar …

Ah here we go! … Nope not so fast *exasperation seeping in again*, P.S. If I see or hear one more person telling me how it so easy … really people? We’ve come here for help, we’re frustrated, often tired do not friggin’ condescend to us on top of that (okay granted, most of the time you guys have no idea how to talk to newbs to begin with but honey please).

Aha, I finally got it. Oh how cool, it just underlines it in a different colour and then you can click. I higlighted the text, clicked on the link function in the Toolbar (thing at top *points* where you can bold your text, etc.) and it made it “linked”. Now if you hover anywhere in that paragraph and click, it’ll take you to the link.

Okay great but what about embedding a link … goes back to drawing board. (Oh btw. embedding is just what it sounds like so you can embed a picture, another file, or in this case a link within your document.

Well if you want to add pictures or other media, that’s simple enough.

http://www.webconfs.com/seo-tutorial/seo-and-content.php

Okay so according to the page, if I put the hyperlink on a line of its own it will automatically embed. Let’s see if I finally got it. Wrong! That was right from WordPress and noooooooooooooo this isn’t frustrating much.

The WordPress page says:

“All you need to do to embed something into a post or page is to post the URL to it into your content area. Make sure that the URL is on its own line and not hyperlinked (clickable when viewing the post).”

But then it goes on to say you can’t just embed any ol’ link it has to be from an approved site.

Hmm how about this:

For more information, click here.

Aha! Okay, that’ll work for now.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again (and so will a billion other people, remember – You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17), practice makes perfect. The best thing you can do is play around with WordPress, practice on it, make mistakes, learn.

Every time I come here, I feel slightly more comfortable about working with it. Yes, the whole widgets, PHP lmnop stuff is intimidating but I remember when I was first learning Word and wordprocessing and it was hard. The coding thing blows chunks, I gotta admit but I’m sure there’s some rationale around it and in the long run I’ll thank my lucky stars that most people don’t know what the hell they are doing lol.

Oh and one last thing, remember if you have people who are subscribed to you (apologies to you all) and you are editing and reposting again and again, all your subscribers are getting those (in this case 12 eeep!!!) postings. So the way I should have done this was to keep viewing the post until it was tweaked properly and then post … Ah well, live and learn. Hasta la vista babies until next time!