Archive for the 'Beginner's Guide' Category

For those of you just starting off blogging, whether for your business or just for fun, here are some tips on responding to comments:

• Make sure Comments are enabled on your blog to allow people to comment on your posts (a bit obvious, I know, but worth stating!)

• When someone leaves a comment, do respond - even if it’s just to say “thanks”. It shows you read your visitors’ comments and enjoy engaging with them

• But don’t leap in too soon. Sometimes, allowing room for other readers to add to the discussion and comment on the comments is a great way to create a community around your blog

• It’s very rare, I think, that you’d get a negative, nasty or malicious comment. If you do, you would be entitled to delete it as it’s your blog. Or, you may choose to address the issue publicly - approach it as if you were the store manager approaching a stroppy customer kicking up a stink in your shop or as the host who has to deal with a difficult guest at your party. It also helps to have set up a comments policy somewhere on your blog at the outset so all your readers know what behaviour will and will not be tolerated.

• Sometimes a debate in the comments section between a number of commenters can get more and more heated and one of them starts to lose their civility and common sense (as can often happen in real life, too!). In one case on my other blog, I withheld an over-the-top comment that was likely to spiral everything in to name-calling and childishness and emailed the commenter inviting him to re-phrase the key argument without the name-calling and with a greater spirit of civil disagreement. He did not chose to reply so that comment remains withheld.

• When you respond to comments, the usual form is to do so in a comment under the main post that started the chain of comments.

• You may want to expand on a comment chain in more detail in a post. In that case, refer (and link) to the original post that started off the comment chain, summarising the key points and then go on to discuss the issue in more detail in your post. This helps give new readers the context of this new post and encourages them to go back and read the original one.

Photo: thanks to customersrock.wordpress.com

Continuing my Beginner’s Guide to blogs and blogging - for those of you who’d like to explore blogs but are not sure where to start, blog portals or directories are a good way in. I am fond of the London Bloggers directory that lists blogs around London by the tube line their authors are on or their nearest suburban station. You can check out whose blogging along the Victoria Line, for example.

I found the blog of a usability expert who is a colleague of my cousin’s near my suburban station - yup, it’s a small world. And there are blogs by local people in my area discussing the neighbourhood restaurants and local politics - all very useful info about where I live.

If you know of any other interesting or quirky blog directories or listings, please do share them by adding a comment or emailing me via the Contact form.

My series on Discovering Blogs and my Beginners Guide talked about how to find blogs and navigate your way around the blogosphere, but how do you go about starting to write your own blog?

There are many blog hosts available on the internet which offer free blog publishing tools. I don’t recommend free blogging software for businesses and professionals - I will be discussing my reasons for saying this in a later post - but for now if you want to experiment with blogging or start a personal blog then these free blogging sites are an excellent place to begin.

Of the many free blog hosts, three come to mind - Blogger, Wordpress and Vox. There are many others out there besides the three mentioned and if you’d like to check those others out, the best thing is to type “free blog” into Google and see what comes up.

1. Blogger - www.blogger.com - is probably the easiest blogging tool to use. The set up is very easy and it’s also simple to change their templates and customise or personalise the look of your site if you know a little bit of HTML. However, of all the free bloghosts, Blogger’s range of templates is probably the most limited. Another downside of Blogger is that there is no single button facility to export posts if you decided to change blog hosts. You would need to copy and paste every single thing you had written into your new site.

2. Wordpress - www.wordpress.com - also offers free blog hosting. Like Blogger it is easy to use, but it is more restrictive if you want to be able to change the look and customise the template you have chosen. It is also more limited when it comes to adding multimedia links. You can link to YouTube, but that’s about it. Wordpress has the advantage over Blogger in that in that it does offer the facility to export all your posts to another host through a one-click process. Where Wordpress comes into its own is that you can download their templates, host it on your own server and use Wordpress as a basis for your own unique customised, personalised site. If you were to do this, Wordpress offers the highest functionality with the most accessories and tools that I’m aware of for professional and business blogging and I believe it is used the most widely for professional sites. If blogging for your business or professional career is what you’re interested in, then I will be covering the advantages of a self-hosted, personalised, unique blog in a separate post.

3. Vox - www.vox.com - is a great site if you want to start a personal blog. They offer a large range of ready-made templates. Vox offers password protection so that only friends and family can access your blog which is useful if you don’t want the general public to read your posts. The advantage of having a Vox blog is that it is unlikely to show up in a Google search so you won’t get any unwanted criticism and comments on your personal life from strangers.

One of the disadvantages of using the free software is that you end up with a domain name that reads www.yournamehere.blogspot.com . This is fine for personal sites but for businesses and professionals it can detract from your professional image to have Blogspot or Wordpress prominently and permanently part of your business domain name. In effect, you’re advertising your blog host’s name alongside your own business - it’s like your headed notepaper, business card or company brochures loudly proclaiming the name of your stationery supply company right up there alongside your own logo and brand name. I will be exploring this issue of branding and your online image in a separate post.

Free blog hosts are great for getting started - but if you are thinking of using a blog for professional purposes, use the free blog to get a feel for what blogging is about but don’t get too attached to it just ‘cos it’s free.

Here is a quick tour of how to find your way round a blog. Most of you will be comfortable browsing through a blog but some may not know that there are useful tools in the sidebars to help you explore other parts of the blog beyond the front page and also that can take you to other interesting communities of blogs.

The content of blogs are laid out in reverse date order with the most recent post (or article) at the top of the main page.

Posts - the main posts are set out in the main body of a blog. There’ll be a heading or title and then you will be able to see who wrote them either just under that or at the end of the post. You’ll also usually be able to see the date and time when they were uploaded. You may sometimes see “permalink” at the bottom of the post - clicking on that takes you to the specific page of that particular post.

Comments - you can add your comment or response to a post by clicking on “Comments” at the bottom of that particular post. You’ll be taken to the permalink page ie the page of that particular post and there’ll be a box for you to write your comment. I find that some comments can be as interesting as the post itself, especially if there’s a good discussion going amongst the commenters.

Sidebar(s) - the sidebar is where you will find opportunities to explore other parts of the blog and also links to other websites. Sometimes, there’ll be additional information about what books the author is reading or what music they are listening to. Sometimes, there are interactive “widgets” ie little applications that allow you to leave voice messages or view photographs or see who else is browsing the blog at the same time etc.

Categories - these can be found on the sidebar. They collect together posts on the same theme. Sometimes, they are called labels or tags.

Archives - this section takes you to the archived posts, sorted by date. I like to look back at the very first few posts of a blog to see when the author started and what their hopes and objectives were when they first started out blogging.

Links - this section in the sidebar sets out links to other blogs or websites that the author likes. Sometimes, also called a “blogroll”.

Search - there’s usually a blank box for searching the blog. Just type in a keyword and click on “search” - it’ll bring up all the posts that contain those keywords.

Subscribe - this section tell you how you can subscribe to the blog. (See Keeping Track of the Blogs You Like for more details about subscribing to blogs)

Networks & Communities - this section is usually at the end of the sidebar and shows the communities and networks that the author is linked to. Clicking on the “badges” ie the small icons and pictures in that section can take you to those wider communities where you can find other blogs eg Britblogs is a directory of UK based blogs.

Further reading

Beginners Guide

Photo: thanks to nalilo at flickr.com

You’ve got your favourite blogs that you like to read and as you surf through the net, you may come across new blogs you want to come back to. How do you keep track of them all?

The basic way

Many people I’ve spoken to put the links to their favourite blogs as a Favourite on their toolbar. That works well enough. But there’s no way of knowing if the blog you are following has been updated and you have to move from blog to blog as you read since a click on the Favourite link takes you straight to the actual blog page. You can arrange them in folders by topic but the navigation of the folders and blog lists gets a bit clunky as your favourite blog collection grows.

The streamlined way

This is where blog or news “readers” (aka “aggregators”) come in. You sign up for an online account and it collects all the blogs that you like in one online space. It looks rather like an online email account (eg if you’ve ever had a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, the layout is similar). On the left hand pane, you will find a list of your favourite blogs while the larger right hand pane is the reading pane where you can read the posts.

The advantage is that you have all your favourite blogs in one space and you can read them via the one window without having to jump about in and out of different blogs. You can also sort your blogs into different folders or topics rather like having different folders for your emails. Mine are sorted into “writing”, “malaysia”, “technology” etc. You can also add newspapers to your reader. And some readers will show you clearly which blogs / news sites have been updated since you last read them - again like your email programme that shows unread items in bold.

There are various blog reader/ aggegator services including Yahoo, Bloglines and Google Reader. Yahoo Mail Beta adds a blog reader folder into your online email account if you’re already signed up to their email service. Bloglines has a good folder management system. Google Reader uses “tags” instead of folders and has the function that can show only those blogs that have updated since the last visit.

All you then have to do is add the blog reader to your favourites in your toolbar and click on that to go to the reader to read all the blogs you are following.

Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can “subscribe” to the blogs you like. There is usually a button you can drag onto your tool bar for one-click subscribing - when you are on any page of a blog, just click on that button and it automatically adds that blog to your reader. You can “unsubscribe” by deleting the blog from your reader.

Note that a reader works by detecting a feed from the site (see What is a Feed?). If the site does not have a feed, it won’t be able to add it to the reader. Most public blogs have feeds - those that don’t either have the feed switched off or they are private blogs. “Static” websites that do not update regularly like blogs do not have feeds.

The email notification way

Some blogs offer an email notification service whenever they are updated. This should be free and be sure to check that they won’t use your email address for any other purpose. You should also be able to unsubscribe anytime. Once you’ve signed up, an email will be sent to you whenever the blog is updated, with the full or partial text of the post(s).

The advantage is that you can access your favourite blogs via your email Inbox. The disadvantage is that if you subscribe to many blogs, you could get notification overload. But some blogs give a reward for signing up for email notification - like I do over on my other blog Fusion View (subcribers get a chance to win books from a prize draw) - so it may be worth choosing email subscription for a select few blogs.

Further Reading:

• Discovering Blogs - 1. How to find blogs to read
• Beginner’s Guide
• What is…? (Jargon Buster)

So you want to explore the world of blogs. Where do you start?

Blog Hopping

Well, a good place is to look in the Links section in the sidebar of most blogs. On ZenGuide, I put links there to other blogs that I like or visit frequently - or they may be blogs by friends or people I know. They are not necessarily about blogging or social media.

From one blog, you can blog-hop to a vast array of other blogs of all kinds by going from link to link.

Recommendations

Many newspapers and magazines have a section on blogs with a summary of what they’re about. These are often informative, useful and fun as they tend to pick them for newsworthiness or quirkiness.

The post you are reading on a blog (ie the “article” on the blog) may link to another blog. Links are shown in bold (and often in another colour) and if you hover your mouse of the link, the mouse arrow will change to hand icon. The address of the link will usually appear in the bottom left corner of your screen. Click on it and you’re off to another blog.

On ZenGuide, I have a Category called Blogs to Explore - see the far right sidebar. That will give you a list of posts where I give brief reviews of blogs that I find interesting: whether because of their design or content or style - or for no particular reason other than I like it!

Search for Blogs

You can search for blogs using Google or any other search engine. Type in a keyword or topic that interests you and “blog”. Alternatively, Google Blog Search searches blogs only - just type in a keyword and see what comes up.

Keeping track of the blogs you like

Coming up in the next post in the Discovering Blogs series, I’ll talk about how you keep track of the blogs you’ve found and want to follow.

Further reading

See also:

• What is … A Blog?
• Jargon Buster
• Beginners Guide

Photo: thanks to badattitudes.com

All blogs have feeds (also known as RSS feeds - or Really Simple Syndication feeds). These are, in essence, “signals” sent out to say when the blog has been updated. The signal “pings” (notifies) feed aggregators (sites that collect - or aggregate - feeds) when the blog owner posts something on the blog. As the blog owner, you can turn your feed off eg if you don’t want public sites to be notified of your update. The feed for a given site usually looks something like this: http://www.nameofblogsite.com/feed. The link to a blog’s feed is usually identified by a feed “chicklet” ie a small square-ish button with a stylised radio signal on it.

Subscribe in a reader

As a reader or visitor to a blog, you can grab the feed so that you can receive notifications of future updates on that blog. You can do this by “susbscribing” via a news or blog reader - I will talk about to use these “readers” in more detail in another post. Briefly, it is a site where you can read the blogs that you have subscribed to in one place. It looks similar to your email programme and you can usually arrange your subscriptions into folders under topics of your choice. You can also subscribe to feeds from newspapers or other news providers eg Reuters so you can read the news from the same place. I will be writing more about how to use a blog “reader” in another post.

As a blog owner, you can use your feed to offer email notifications to your visitors. You activate your feed in an email notification programme that generates a subscription form that you can put onto your blog. There are various email notification programmes, the most notable of which are Feedblitz and Feedburner and they offer free services as well as premium services (which have greater user flexibility). Your visitor can enter their email address into the form to receive an update in their Inbox whenever you update your blog. Feedburner also offers other useful tools for blog owners that can help publicise their blog, using the blog feed eg you can incorporate rolling headlines from your blog onto an email or onto other sites you own.

The feed can also be activated in various other ways to give the blog owner information about how many other blogs/ websites are linking to your blog. The more other blogs link to your blog, the greater your blog is deemed to be an authority. The principle grew out of the way that academics identify who among them is a great authority on a subject, reflecting the academic roots of the people who created the internet. The more an academic paper is cited by other academics, the greater it - and its writer - is held in esteem. A key site that helps bloggers identify who is linking to their blog and how many links they have is Technorati. As a blog owner, you should go to Technorati and “claim” your feed there.

Pic: thanks to joenickp.com

A podcast is an audio recording you can listen to on a portable MP3 player or iPod. It is usually in MP3 format and you can either listen to it online through your PC or download it onto your portable device and take it on the road with you.

It is relatively cheap and easy to create a podcast at home and many people are creating their own “radio” shows for podcasting over the internet. The major broadcast corporations such as the BBC and Radio Australia are also producing podcast versions of their usual broadcast programmes. (I will write about how to produce a podcast in a separate post)

I occasionally podcast interviews and discussions with a writing or cross-cultural theme on my blog, Fusion View. You can check them out by going to www.fusionview.co.uk and clicking on the category “Podcasts” in the sidebar. You can listen to them online via the embedded audio players on the relevant posts or you can download the audio file to listen to later.

A great way to explore podcasts is to download some podcast receiving software and then browse through their directories or search by keyword via their user panel. The software is free. The following are some providers:

• Juice
• iTunes
• Doppler

To start you off, the following are some interesting podcasts:

• All in the Mind, Radio National Australia - in depth discussions and interviews about psychology, mental health and consciousness
• Documentary Archive, BBC World Service - a wide range of documentaries about issues around the world.
• Flying Startups Podcast, from Steve Parks, author of How To Be an Entrepreneur - great tips for small businesses, whether you are just starting out or well on your way.
• Coffee Break Spanish - a fun series teaching Spanish in bite-sized chunks.

You can also explore podcast directories like Jellycast, Britcaster and PodcastAlley.

Photo: thanks to hawaii on flickr.com

“Blog” is short for “web-log” and started as a way to write a journal online. It looks like a website but uses a software platform that lets you upload your entries very easily. Publishing what you’ve written online is instantaneous and happens at the push of a button - literally.

Entries are called “posts” and they appear on the blog in reverse date order ie the newest post is at the top.

These days, many people use blogs to engage online with their friends or others who share their interests. Businesses engage with their customers by writing about what’s happening in their company or in their area of expertise. Visitors to the blog can add comments to a particular post or email the person blogging, the “blogger”. Other visitors may see the comments and add what they have to say as well.

The best way to find out what the world of blogging is all about is to visit some.

Here are a few to start you off with.

A Saville Row tailor uses his blog to talk about his passion for bespoke tailoring and to share some unique insights into the world of cuffs and lapels and hems. He also uses his blog to share his travel schedule so that his international clients know when he is visiting their part of the world and can book an appointment. His blog has been featured on the BBC and other traditional media. See http://www.englishcut.com/

A creative writing teacher and writer, Sharon Bakar, based in Malaysia, shares her book addiction and writes about the latest books and book news from Asia, the UK and US. Her readership is primarily Malaysian but she has been featured in the UK’s national paper, The Guardian. See http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/

A photographer has been taking a photo at 11.47am every day since 2000. See http://eleven47.com/. It’s fab!

You can also visit my blog, of course, Fusion View, a cross-cultural view on writing, culture and the arts at http://www.fusionview.co.uk.

I will also be blogging about blogs that strike me as interesting, thought-provoking, fun, unusual, well-designed or has something that makes me want to say to my friends, “Hey, take a look at this!” - go to the category Blogs to Explore in the sidebar on the far right.

Or you can go to Google Blog Search at http://blogsearch.google.com/ - type in any topic or keyword and it will throw up all the blogs you can read on that subject.

Pic: thanks to beth.typepad.com