Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

I can now speak from experience about how much work goes into a blog when I speak with my clients and recommend that they have one. This is my first post in 2+ months. We’ve been very busy over here (which is a good thing) and while that’s great for the portfolio and the pocketbook, it’s been deadly to our blog. A blog is a living breathing thing, or at the very least a finicky house plant in need of attention, time and care. From first-hand experience I can now say that blog writing time must be scheduled, it must be a requirement for someone rather than a nice-to-do, and if need be, you need to staff a team to rotate through — whether it be once a week, semi-monthly or monthly.

I’m committing to writing at least two posts each month for the rest of the spring and summer. Notice the heinous gap in my blog, and learn from my mistakes.

Woops.

I’ve written in the past about how much I love Posterous. I still love it, but had an interesting learning experience, that I’d like to share.

I ran a 10K on 7 February. I wanted to write up a race report for a Posterous site that I started for some friends with whom I’m training for a race in April. I usually just post via email but I wanted to include some links to maps etc. and wanted to see how they looked so I  posted via the web interface. I didn’t like what I’d done so I edited and posted again. And again. And again. And again.

Each post went out to the world and landed in my twitter stream, my FaceBook page and on another blog that I’ve connected to Posterous. Posterous didn’t send the same link, or even overwrite the old post, but rather created a separate entry for each post, on the site, and the various other channels I’ve attached to the Posterous account. So, the lesson I’ve learned, if posting to Posterous, via the web interface, is to turn off your announcements (this would have been complicated because this is a team blog and lots of folks get it via email… each time I post, sorry team! Not reporting it to the world would have been nice, and once I had one that I liked I could have made one more small tweak, turned on share everywhere, and shared that, and I also could have deleted the posts I didn’t want.

This is an OK solve, I think, for a blog amongst friends. But it got me thinking how I’d approach it for a client, to help them avoid such a fiasco. My thought on this is to create two versions of a Postersous site under the account (which is what I have, my personal Posterous and my team Posterous) but make the second one private, and password protected, and invite no one to it, and add no subscribers, unless it’s a couple of test emails to see how things look as they go out (make sure only the editor’s eyes see the tests). Post things to the test site, tweak it and adapt it and when it’s ready for prime-time, copy the content and post it to your main site and share it with the world. I believe that this is good solve for email as well, if you are trying something that you’re not sure how it will come out you can test it on this test setup, then resend the email to the public site.

One of the nice things about Posterous is the immediacy of the posting, and typically I do only do email posts, but there are, and will be times, like February, 7, when I want to use Posterous a bit more robustly. I’d recommend learning from my minor gaffe and set yourself up with a test site where you can experiment in private. A nice possible future feature (are you listening Posterous folks?) would be a preview feature to avoid this sort of thing, but in the absence of that feature users will have to experiment.

In this WordPress video tutorial I show users how to paste content from a text document. Some folks feel more comfortable writing content outside of the WordPress editor, and that’s fine. If using a word processing document like Word, I recommend saving the file as a straight text document with no formatting. This will make it easier to format and control styles in your posts. Working in word processing programs, and copying data from them, in their native format, often leads to messy transitions, and weird styles that then take time to sort out and clean up. This video will help save users much time and frustration if they do work in an editor outside of WordPress.

This video is intended for the WordPress novice.

View the video in a nifty popup (use the expand button to see it larger).

Please, as always, send me your comments, so that I can make future videos, better.

Often, the first thing people ask about when they take control of their new WordPress site is “how do I add an image?” In this primer video I show to insert and edit images in WordPress posts (it’s the same for pages).

I demonstrate how to upload an image from my desktop, float it left, resize it via the edit image button, and then resize it via the WYSIWYG editor, center it and then move it back to the left. I also briefly explain “title” and “caption.”

This video is intended for the WordPress novice.

View the video in a nifty popup (use the expand button to see it larger).

Please, as always, send me your comments, so that I can make future videos, better.

Another video in the how-to-use-WordPress series in which I cover some of the basics of editing, and changing content in a post. I’m focusing on posts right now because they are the most basic content in the WordPress universe, and all of the things I show in these post videos also applies to creating pages — the interface and the tools are almost identical. I’ll cover the differences between posts and pages — which have to do with tags, categories and page order — in a subsequent video.

This video is intended for the WordPress novice.

Thanks for watching, and as always, send me your comments so I can try and improve these videos.

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Here’s the second installment in our WordPress tutorial series. This video covers creating a post with a brief overview of the editing tool bar. Another topic covered in this video is the Publish/Preview/Save a Draft module as well as permalinks (slugs) and how to edit them. This is intended as a primer for the WordPress newcomer.

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Just to reiterate, these videos are being created in conjunction with a project in which the end users will have varying levels of knowledge and comfort with WordPress. As always, I welcome your feedback.

Image via CrunchBase

Posterous is my new favorite social media tool. While it will never replace Twitter as my platform of choice for communicating and networking,  it has made it super simple to post content to various social media outposts. To do so, I send an email to a Posterous email address, and, to paraphrase the site, they “take care of the rest.” Typically, I tend not to post the same thing to the same places — my Twitter updates are different from my FaceBook updates and my blog posts are typically unrelated to either of those things. However, when I’m out and about I do like to snap mobile shots and send them to my blog, or to Flickr, or occasionally to TwitPic.

When we took our road trip through the American South in April, I posted frequently to Twitter and Flickr and my fun blog. It was a fairly laborious process as I would have to access three different apps from my hand held to place my content on these various outlets. Needless to say, I didn’t post as much as I could have to multiple sites, opting instead for one, usually Twitter. Had I had Posterous, I could have posted all of my shots, and observations from the road to three, or more places, all at once. When I talk to my clients about social media strategies and tactics I always mention Posterous when I notice them calculating the time it will take to update their various outposts.

To get started, set up a Posterous account at posterous.com. Associate your various social media accounts with this account. Start emailing Posterous and watch your content magically appear across your social media outposts. It is truly that easy. The hardest part about set-up is remembering your log-ins for your various social sites. If you don’t want to take the blanket approach, then you can email one specific community (facebook at posterous dot com, say) and your post will appear only there — because, let’s face it not everything you post needs to go on each site, and in some cases should not, depending on your audience.

Your Posterous site is fully RSS enabled, and you can subscribe to others sites and see who subscribes to yours. There are analytics included so you can see views, visits and favorites, and all posts are comment-able. The layout is clean. Multiple image attachments on an email appear neatly above the image and permit easy navigation through the photo string. The Posterous API is open so there is no telling where the user base will take it.

Posterous is clean and nimble, simple to use and a great tool in any organization’s social media toolkit. It’s a great way to extend a client’s footprint online and increase links to their site as well as their social media sites. Posterous’s use of email, the grand-daddy of Internet communication technologies, makes it an ideal tool for the social media skeptic, and it can help to maximize the time a client, or their staff spends on day-to-day social media efforts.

Please check out my Postersous site, if you have a moment, and open your own while you’re there.*

*I’m not paid by Posterous, just a big, big fan who really does recommend it to my clients.