Category: blogging

WordPress upgrade complete

I’ve upgraded WordPress to version 2.5, and the Barthelme theme to version 4.5 (which is only compatible with WP2.5+). Let me know if you see any problems with the site.

One problem that I had with upgrading: I use widgets in my sidebar, including three text widgets for my feed block, my Google ads, and a hidden one at the end that includes my statistics counter. After upgrading, I went into the Widgets section, set a few parameters (there are some new options, such as being allowed to set a custom title on the Search widget) and saved the changes; this caused all the text widgets to become blank. They were still there, just empty. Luckily, I had seen this when upgrading another site earlier today, and had saved the contents of the widgets to paste back in. I deleted each of the text widgets and recreated them with the saved text that I had, and they seem to work fine now when I make edits to other widgets and re-save.

I’m having a bit of a problem posting from Windows Live Writer; I reset my credentials and tried a couple of times before I could publish this post successfully. Hopefully that’s a temporary glitch.

Column 2 turns 3

Zoli Erdos and Seth Godin have it right: when it comes to getting hired, you don’t need a resume, you need a blog. A blog that you’ve been writing for a while contains a much more complete picture of you, and forms more than just an online portfolio, it broadcasts your personal brand.

How appropriate to read those posts just as I hit my 3rd anniversary of writing Column 2. From a branding and informational perspective, it works for me: more than half of my new prospects and customers mention that they found me through my blog, or at least read it before contacting me as part of their due diligence. Furthermore, it’s considerably broadened my networking community, allowing me to have interesting conversations with — and sometimes even meet face-to-face — other bloggers who I read and respect.

I’ve done some form of online journaling since around 2000, and Column 2 started as my personal soapbox to talk about business process management and other business/technology subjects, gradually shifting to include Enterprise 2.0 topics. A few logistics and statistics:

  • I use WordPress as my blogging platform, and have also converted my minimalist corporate site to WordPress since it’s so easy to use to maintain a website.
  • I use Windows Live Writer for writing almost all of my posts, since I can write offline when there’s no connectivity, and can also easily cross-post to multiple blogs such as I did to the FASTforward blog a few weeks ago.
  • On average, I have more than 200 unique visitors per day visit my site (300+ page views), plus over 750 reading it via RSS feed.
  • I’ve written over 1200 posts, which have generated over 1000 comments: a low comment-to-post ratio, likely due to the large number of enterprise-type readers who may not be as comfortable publishing their opinions in response to my posts. In fact, sometimes someone will email me with a comment on a post and I have to encourage them to use the comments so that others can read their opinion.
  • My most-visited posts (which counts page views, therefore doesn’t include RSS readers) include a link to the Gartner 2007 BPM Magic Quadrant report, a short report on layoffs at Savvion and other vendors, a discussion on policies, procedures, processes and rules, and my link to the Forrester report on human-centric BPM for Microsoft platforms, in which I also listed the vendors in each of their four categories.
  • The posts for which I receive the most praise are my live-blogging at conferences. I started out by taking notes (on my laptop) at conferences for my own reference, then realized that others might benefit from what I see and hear, and started posting them to my blog. I finish each post during the presentation and post it immediately (wifi permitting), since I realize that there is no way I would ever go back later and finish up all those posts after a day of conference-going. That means that those certainly aren’t my best writing and don’t contain a great deal of analysis, but they’re timely and fairly detailed, providing a view of the conference presentations for those unable to attend.

I started out with Column 2 on my own website, then ebizQ invited me to post on their site, where I stayed for over a year. However, as an independent analyst/consultant, my own brand is critical, and when I found out that many people thought that I worked for ebizQ, I moved back to my own domain. That taught me a valuable lesson about blogging on someone else’s site and the impact on my personal brand, and I’ve turned down a number of offers since that time in favour of some very selective syndication (Intelligent Enterprise republishes a couple of my posts each month, and I cross-posted to the FASTforward blog while at their conference).

Blogging isn’t always easy, and it takes time, making it hard to stick at sometimes. However, the rewards — both professional and personal — have made it all worthwhile. Thanks for reading.

Blogging conferences

It seems that some conferences still aren’t plugged into the blogosphere as a PR engine, including some from surprising quarters. I applied for a press pass to next week’s O’Reilly’s ETech back in January via the press link on their site, and after a couple of weeks received the following reply from a Maureen Jennings, their conference publicist:

Press credentials for our conferences are limited and intended for journalists from established technical publications with significant readership. Therefore, I’m unable to issue you media credentials for the conference. Thanks for your interest in ETech.

Ouch! I understand that they have a limited number of press passes, but I’ve been writing this technical blog (that would be a “publication”, Maureen) for three years, and see a readership of around 1,200 unique visitors per day on my own site, plus I’m syndicated on Intelligent Enterprise and the FASTforward blog. I know, hardly Scoble numbers, but it’s not insignificant.

Regular readers also know that I have a long track record of prolific live-blogging coverage of more than 20 technology conferences dating back to 2005; at the recent FASTforward conference, I wrote over 10,000 words about the conference in two days.

I responded to Maureen:

Just to clarify, do you mean that you don’t consider a technically-focused blog about of 3 years to be an “established technical publication”?

After a pause of several days, she came back with:

As I’m sure you understand, we have a limited number of passes that we can issue for each conference. So we sometimes have to make hard calls, based on getting the news the widest possible readership. Sorry about that, and thanks for your understanding.

Yes, I understand that there are limited press passes, and that I might not get one. What I don’t understand is why your initial email to me would suggest that my blog is not an established technical publication, and doesn’t have significant readership. Someone needs to attend a remedial class in blogger relations.

WordPress fact o’ the day: fun with feeds

I’m browsing through the new WordPress For Dummies book, with the assumption that even though I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years and am reasonably comfortable hacking small bits of the code, there’s always some tidbit to be learned. It took me until page 147, but here it is: you can get a feed for a specific post (that is, all comments added to that post) or to a category by adding feed/ to the end of the URL.

For example:

These aren’t fancy conditioned feeds like those that I publish for all posts and all comments via Feedburner, but you can copy and paste the URL directly to your feed reader if your feed reader isn’t auto-detected.

By the way, I didn’t have to do anything to my WordPress blog to make this happen, so it should work for any WordPress-based blog that uses pretty permalinks.

Fun with feeds

For those of you who subscribe to my feed instead of reading this directly, you’ll notice the new copyright notice and link to the post that’s included at the top of each post in the feed. Although I haven’t had a full-on feed theft of the scale that I experienced back in March, I do see occasional unauthorized reposts of my material on various ad sites. If they’re automatically farming from my feed, this way I’ll at least get a link back.

If you’re using WordPress and interested in doing the same, you can find the FeedEntryHeader plugin here.

Trouble with tracking

Why is that most of the time these days when I try to track a comment with co.mments, it doesn’t work at least 50% of the time? I just see the endless “Loading…” message as the script tries to load, and the same when I visit the website. With no access to the website, it’s also impossible to report the problem.

I’ve had to revert to using cocomment, which I don’t like as much, and now seems to be timing out occasionally as well.

I like the idea of being able to track comments on any post on someone else’s blog, whether I’ve commented on it or not, and have them feed to my reader so that I can see if anyone else has contributed to the conversation.

Meeting the bloggers at BRF

Last week at the Business Rules Forum gave me a chance to meet many people who I’ve never met face-to-face, but feel that I know from our exchanges of blog comments and emails: at one point, I was standing around talking to James Taylor, Rolando Hernandez and Scott Sehlhorst.

James was certainly the most prolific in blogging about the conference: he live-blogged the sessions that he attended (even mine), so you can compare with the posts on those sessions that I wrote. He has a wrap-up post with pointers to all of the blogs that he found with coverage of the event.

Testing wp-cache again

Last time that I tried the wp-cache plugin for WordPress, it caused errors when retrieving cached pages; after some investigation, it appears that my hosting provider is likely the cause, but I found a mod to wp-cache that makes it work (and no, I’m not a regular reader of that site, I found it linked from the WordPress forums).

If you experience any problems, let me know. Of course, if you do experience problems, you probably won’t be able to read this post…