Category Archives: Blogging

Back to the blog

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Leo Laporte has become disillusioned with social media and has returned to his blog:

“I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville. From now on when I post a picture of a particularly delicious sandwich I’m posting it here. When I complain that Sookie is back with Bill, you’ll hear it here first. And the show notes for my shows will go here, too. Social media, I gave you the best years of my life, but never again. I know where I am wanted. Screw you Google Buzz. You broke my heart.”

This post resonates a bit for me. I like Twitter and Posterous and some of the other tools I use (a little or a lot) but I, too, fear they are a distraction to my first love, this blog. I gave up on Buzz early on and don’t expect to stop using Twitter (it feels like a completely different thing to me). But I understand Mr. Laporte’s frustration and decision.

Attachments

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My pal Keith pinged me this morning to let me know there was a problem with this website. I raised the hood to discover that all content (posts, pages, media, etc) was gone. Eight years of posts. About 5,000. I have a back-up from about 3 weeks ago, but still…

Not so long ago this would have sent me to DEFCON 5. But I’ve been reading about ego and how we become attached to and identify with things and ideas, and I found I was eerily calm. What if all my clever posts and the rest vanished forever?

I spent a few minutes considering this and realized they were/are nothing more than footnotes on a past that no longer exists (except in my head). What’s happening this moment is more important (and real).

What have we learned, grasshopper? That we are not our thoughts, OR our blog posts.

Downtown Rotary rocks Posterous

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Jefferson City has four Rotary Clubs. Learfield Honcho Emeritus Clyde Lear belongs to the “Downtown Rotary Club” and he asked me to meet with a few of the members to explore the idea of a blog. We got together a couple of weeks ago at the Coffee Zone and after asking some questions, I suggested they start with Posterous.

Before I show you their progress, you have to see what they had before.

This really isn’t their fault. They had no way to update the site or improve it’s design. But they felt like they had lots of stuff they’d like to share with their members and the public. For those that haven’t seen my earlier posts on Posterous (as in ‘pre-posterous’), it’s a blogging platform or a “life-streaming” tool or both… but it doesn’t matter. The best part of Posterous is the ability to post by email. Photos, videos, audio, whatever.

In the screenshot below, they have photo and audio of a talk by MU Football Coach Gary Pinkel. Rotarian Jason Jett says he recorded the audio on his iPhone and just mailed it off to the new site. Simple as that.

While the Downtown Rotary Club tends to skew a little older than the other clubs, I’ll be very surprised if any of them one has a cooler, more content-rich site. Posterous is a great solution. Free, simple to use, and getting more features all the time.

ShowMeGaming.com (3 years later)

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Three years ago I helped my friend LeAnn McCarthy set up a blog to help with her communications efforts as Public Information Officer for the Missouri Gaming Commission.

Last week I sat down with LeAnn to see how the blog was working out. She talked about her target audience(s); content; response (internal and external) and other social media tools.

AUDIO: 10 min MP3

YouTube SimpleGallery

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I love WordPress. I won’t bore you with all the reasons. But one very big one is: plug-ins. These are little add-on’s that add extra functionality to your blog/website. Today one of our sites needed a way to display multiple videos on a single page. I found several plug-in’s that looked like good candidates and settled on one called YouTube SimpleGallery. It’s free but I made a small donation to the developer.

I usually test plug-in’s here, to get the hang of them. If you click on the VIDEO tab at the top of the page,you’ll see a bunch of thumbnail images that –when clicked– play the video on YouTube.

You can also configure the plug-in so the video pops up in its own window.