The Detail Department

You are here: Home / Archives for blogging

2011 in review

by

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Since I have not blogged much lately I thought it would be nice to have some new content on my site. These stats show that I was not really active in posting in 2011, I would like to improve on that this year.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

2010 – My Blog in review

by

I really like what WordPress.com produced automatically and sent in an email. It included a handy link to quickly make a post, so I did :).

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 22 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 117 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 64kb.

The busiest day of the year was November 16th with 119 views. The most popular post that day was Samsung Galaxy Tab Review.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, confluence.atlassian.com, google.com, blog.seibert-media.net, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for word vs excel, selenium locator, excel vs word, selenium measure website, and sharepoint vs confluence.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Samsung Galaxy Tab Review November 2010
2 comments

2

Selenium Locator Tips March 2010
5 comments

3

Swtiching to Android – Gmail Contacts January 2010
6 comments

4

Confluence and SharePoint Wikis May 2009
4 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Automated Website Testing with Selenium October 2009
3 comments

SBTUG WordPress Extravaganza

by

At SBTUG this week we are having a WordPress Extravaganza – everything you need to know about running WordPress as the CMS of choice for your business. My talk will showcase a few of the WordPress sites that I have done without having fantastic skills in CSS and PHP – see my Portfolio Page – and the great features available in WordPress.com, including how this very site was created for a total cost of US$12 / year (+ domain) – see WordPress.com for your domain. I will also talk about WordPress Themes, CSS, and the benefits of choosing a Premium Theme over a Free Theme.

CSS

Firstly, to create any website, you need to understand some CSS. It is well worth taking the time to learn the basics. After months of being too scared to touch the CSS in some of my sites, I decided the take the plunge and got Russ Weakly from Max Design to give me a day long crash course in CSS. For me it was well worth paying the money for a one on one course, but Russ is starting a series of CSS, Javascript and Accessibility courses soon, and I would highly recommend his courses to learn CSS. If you don’t want to do a course, there are some good web resources available and I would start with the W3Schools.com CSS Basics course. There is also CSSTutorial.net which also covers the basics. This is a good resource for showing how just changing the CSS affects the layout and structure of the site. No amount of CSS knowledge is going to benefit more than just playing. So start with Firebug in Firefox (or the IE Developer Toolbar if you have to use IE – it is Built into IE8 Developer Tools), or the Inspect Element command in Chrome. The great thing that Firebug (or the other tools) does is show you that CSS is just a series of boxes. And once you can understand that, then understanding CSS is a lot easier. These tools also allow you to test out changes, before committing your changes to your CSS file. Must Know CSS These are just a few of the CSS topics that I would recommend you need to know about.

And for some more advanced topics

And if you want to go the whole hog, the W3C CSS reference is not that difficult to understand once you know some of the terminology. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cover.html#minitoc

WordPress Themes

There are thousands of Themes for WordPress. They can be free or you can pay hundreds of dollars for Premium themes or even have one built especially for yourself (eg 99 Designs). The options are endless – and the choice is overwhelming. My suggestion is to just start somewhere, with a theme that you like the look of, but are just wanting to tweak a bit. That way there is less PHP tweaking and more just modifying the CSS. Also, using Firebug allows you to “steal” (sorry, borrow) ideas from other sites you like. I would also go down the path of buying a premium theme – one that costs up to say US$150 as the support will be worth it at some stage. One thing that you need to be aware of is that the CSS in these themes is usually based on a CSS framework (see below) or has a lot of extra CSS in there to cover the multiple theme options, or they have CSS elements applied via PHP, or worse still, they have 3 or 4 CSS files and you are not exactly sure where to change the CSS. This can be very confusing, and make a beautiful theme that you love, be very difficult to work with.

Some of the terminology around themes can also be confusing, such as Child Themes, Magazine Themes, Portfolio Themes,  Theme Options, etc etc.  Also themes can have built in options such as LightBox, Thumbnail creation, built in SEO features, multiple sidebars or zones etc etc. The only real way to work all this out is to try one and see how it works for you.

CSS Frameworks

Many Themes use CSS Frameworks. There are a heap of different Frameworks, but mostly what they do is set up a grid for you to work with (usually 950 or 960 pixels wide). You can usually tell if your theme is based on one of these frameworks if it has a Div named Container, as this is the very common layout of the white box on a darker background. One of the widely used CSS Frameworks is Blueprint, and you can see how the BluePrint grid works with this example http://www.blueprintcss.org/tests/parts/grid.html. There is also a basic video about Blueprint which is helpful to get your head around any type of grid based framework. Most of the Frameworks make use of the CSS construct of applying multiple classes to the one element. This is what happens with the “span-24 last” type syntax. The Span-24 class is applying the width of the box, and the “last” class is setting the right margin of the right hand column – usually to be zero pixels. Frameworks can be good, and easy enough to work with, and they give you a way of structuring your site that is at least going to look consistent with elements aligned to this invisible grid. However, if you want to control your site to the nearest pixel, you may not want to use a constrictive grid. Usually when you mess around with a grid, you will stuff it up and make it look ugly.

Base Themes

WordPress themes have become big businesses and there are a number of large Themes that are now base themes for many others. The biggest of the lot is of course, Thesis and another is Thematic.

Favourite Themes

The free theme that I used that is based on the grid framework is from Graph Paper Press and it’s called Modularity Lite. It was quite a good free theme, and there is the premium Modularity Theme also.

WordPress has an extensive gallery of Free Themes, but the choice there is quite overwhelming.

The Magazine Theme I used is Arthemia Premium from Colorlabs Project (also see JobSeekr by Michael Specht – his blog is Cutline Theme). Colourlabs have some great themes and the support is good also.

Other notable theme sites are Woo Themes (Craig Bailey’s Xen SEO site) , Elegant Themes (eg TechRepeater also by Craig Bailey) and Themeforest.

And last but not least, this site is the Vigilance Theme by ThemeFoundry, which just happens to be included in the themes offered in WordPress.com.

Update October 2011

Deleted some broken links.

WordPress.com for your domain

by

I have just completed a bit of a revamp of my online presence. This was prompted by the repeated emails from Google about the closure of Google Web Pages (which I love as a simple web platform) – I had to do something to move my web site content. I have also had much more exposure to WordPress over the past few months and absolutely love it as a CMS platform. Finally, an excellent post from Kate Carruthers about your online presence finally prompted me to act.

My Website requirements are pretty simple. It is mainly a blog, a bit about me, how to contact me, and my Resume. I also had previously set up Google Apps for your domain (GAFYD) with my email and website. I never used any of the other GAFYD tools such as Calendar and docs as I use them already from my main gmail account.

I could have gone to a self hosted WordPress.org site but for my personal site I don’t really see the point in spending around $100 per year for hosting. That’s why WordPress.com is so great. And now they have made it even better!

You can now have your full domain linked to your wordpress.com site (for US$12 per year), so rather than http://blog.jodiem.com.au I can now map http://jodiem.com.au to my wordpress.com site. To do that you need to remove your current DNS hosting and let wordpress.com handle it. That is great, except for the email.

But WordPress.com now has email covered too! You can now use your wordpress.com hosting to link to your GAFYD email account! Brilliant! Now this is a full domain solution from worpress.com for US$12 per year. I would highly recommend this solution for any personal account or very small business. (See updated link below).

There are a few downsides to this approach, but they are not a big deal for me:

  • I can no longer have subdomains for my other GAFYD services such as calendar.jodiem.com.au, but that is fine as I never used them anyway (and I can still access them through the google.com/a/yourdomain/ link).  
  • WordPress.com is still a bit limited in what you can do with it. I wanted to embed a google calendar on another wordpress.com site and they won’t allow embeds of anything other than the few specific things they will allow, like You Tube and Google Maps.
  • You can chose to customise the CSS but that’s an extra US$15 per year and I found a great theme (Viligance, which has some customisation options) as part of the standard Themes gallery.

One small tip when setting this up is how to find your unique google verification string in GAFYD to re-verify the site ownership with wordpress.com. Twitter came to the rescue for this one, so here is how to find it:

  • Log into GAFYD dashboard and click on Email
  • Click on “Instructions on how to activate Email”
  • Click on Change MX Records
  • Click on Verify Domain Ownership
  • Choose Upload a HTML file and the unique string will be there!

Easy when you know how!

Update October 2011:

Updated the pricing because the Custom Domain is now US$12/year. Updated some broken links.

Update May 2010:

This is great! WordPress.com now lets you edit all DNS records for your domain. So now you can have sub domains like mail.jodiem.com.au etc. See the full details for this new feature here http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/custom-dns/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ada Lovelace Day Post

by

This is a great idea from Suw Charman-Anderson to blog about women in IT that inspire us on Ada Lovelace Day. See http://findingada.com/ and http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay for more information.

So I’m going to write about three women, working in the area of IT / Social Media who inspire me big time. The three are grouped together because I actually met all three of them within 2 months back in October / November 2007 and in that year and a bit they have enriched my life so significantly.

Catherine Eibner – A wonderful inspiration to me, Catherine has the bright, bubbly personality of a natural evangelist but is also very technical and loves to write code occasionally. She has also taught me lots of technical stuff and is a very patient teacher. Catherine’s SSIS blog has actually been a great resource for tips and tricks for me in my work recently.

Kate Carruthers – Kate just knows everyone and everything – she is the most connected person I know, and that is handy sometimes :). Kate is the master at connecting people with other people and people with the right systems and technologies that they need to know about in today’s business world.

Kate has actually written a great blog post about Ada Lovelace today.

Laurel Papworth – Laurel is all about the strategy – what strategies businesses need to adopt to make it in this new world of Social Media. Laurel is also the one I call upon when I need a personal Social Media strategy, and she is always willing to help.

It’s also Laurel’s Birthday today, so Happy Birthday Pixie!

It is interesting that these three wonderful women were also mentioned in another blog post (and comments) a while back when Catherine was working in her own business. All three of them were working in thier own successful businesses – something that I admire so much because I know how hard it is, and how it is something that I know that I can’t do.

I am so very proud to be friends with these fantastic women.

Amazing inspirational women in IT

by

My wonderful friend Catherine Eibner has just written a lovely blog post listing some of the women in IT in Aus that she finds inspirational. I am honoured to be on that list. I met Catherine just one year ago, around the same time as meeting Laurel, Kate, Ali and Linda, and during the year have met Damana, Bronwen Clune and Pia (I have not had the pleasure of meeting Bronwen Zande yet). I too second Catherine’s sentiments about the wonderful women on that list. These women have been part of a huge change in my life in the past year, and they will be there with me into the new year as I find that new role that is the right one for me. But it’s interesting that this last year has been full of changes for most of us on this list, and it has been a privilege to share the past year with you all.  

Thanks Catherine! You Rock!

Update: Now Damana has posted a really wonderful post too… I love Girl Geek Dinners and they are always inspiring and fun. And great to see we get two in December! In fact they are so good, I went to one in London on the first night I was there… (was a bit jetlaged, but it was still great). 

Thanks Damana!

Live Blogging Tools

by

I’m researching how we will be doing Live Blogging for Be2Camp coming up in London in October so I did a bit of hunting around for tools.

This may be a bit ambitious but this is what we want to do:

  • Have people participate live in the room and have a twitter backchannel (hopefully up on the screen)
  • Have people participate virtually via streaming video and live blogging and be able to contribute to the discussions
  • Have people participate virtually via SecondLife and be able to contribute and have discussions
  • Have people present to all audiences from SecondLife
  • Maybe have people present to all audiences from the web (we haven’t had a specific request for this yet, but it would be good to offer it).

So here is some of the products and services I found.

Live Blogging

  • CoverItLive – this one looks really good and really polished – and it can go on our website and it can have multiple people commenting . Not sure if you have to log in to comment however.
  • Tangler is an Aussie Startup from here in Sydney and they have quite a mature product, but it’s a pain that you have to log in. Here is a look at a Tangler discussion embedded in a website

However, one advantage of twitter is that people can join in the discussion via text (CoverItLive has a mobile site), so I think it’s still good to have a twitter back channel and to promote upcoming sessions on twitter (and maybe via CoverItLive also).
For the twitter feed Hashtags is great as you need to opt in, and it tracks private accounts like mine but it doesn’t work at the moment due to issues with the Twitter API, so I’m not sure if it will work for us. Of course you can follow any hashtag or word via Summize (aka search.twitter.com) but for me that is useless as there is no way for me to join in as it does not track private accounts (I would love a twitter escape code that if this character was in the tweet then that tweet will join the main twitter stream).

One simple way would be to just show the @be2camp twitter stream up on a screen with an auto refresh using TwitRefresh and people just reply to @be2camp to join in the discussion – but, Like CoverItLive this requires someone to drive it, so not sure if it’s worth having both, but as this unconference was born from twitter, it would be a shame to not use twitter as part of the event.

Video

  • One of our unorganisers mentioned on twitter a few days ago that she successfully managed to import Veodia video into Second Life – this is great. See it in action here http://www.veodia.com/solutions_sl.html
  • Video updates from Mobile phones or camera’s on laptops can be done via Qik and 12 Seconds and both will autopost a link to twitter.
  • Live streaming can be done via UStream it works quite well and there is Mogulus which is much more polished and can be embedded on your site – but it also looks like it’s much more work than just set and forget.

Ustream is interesting – here is a link to a previous 2 web crew podcast that was recorded live and had a chat in Tangler and Ustream at the same time – it was a bit of a test and it’s a pain to log into either Tangler or Ustream or both, but if people are keen to contribute it works.

Suggestions

So right now my suggestion would be to use CoverItLive for text and hopefully Veodia can be used for both Live Streaming into SecondLife plus onto the website… it would be good if we can get a page with both of them together on one page for people not at the event and a page with just the text for people at the event.

Does anyone else have any ideas for Live Blogging and Live Streaming from our event?

Emerging Influential Blogs of 2008

by

@kcarruthers did a post recently saying she was reading my blog, which is very nice, considering I don’t blog much (need to rectify that situation). It was a post listing a few blogs she was reading at the moment, and was influenced by this post about Emerging Influential Blogs of 2008. None of the blogs I’m reading would probably qualify for this competition because it states they have to be started after 1 July 2007 (I think a blog can be emerging and influential this year even if it has been around for longer than this year).

So here are a few of the blogs that I love to read each day (including the ones that @kcarruthers already mentioned Catherine Eibner and Geek Diva and Aide-Memoire itself)

Laurel Papworth: – Interesting, Funny and some great social networking insights.

Stephen Collins – Great stuff about Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge working.

Nick Hodge – Some really geeky stuff sometimes.

Michael Specht – Some good thoughts on HR stuff and business technology stuff.

Elias Bizannes – His blog banner says “blog of a thinker, writer and smart-arse”. Good thought provoking stuff.

So there are just a few, of the blogs that I am reading and loving at the moment and they are influential to me!

new domain

by

I’ve just purchased my first domain ever – it’s www.jodiem.com.au and it will be up and running soon. There won’t be much on there except a link back to this blog, but it’s a start anyway.