Lunching and Learning and Wishing and Hoping

Today is Monday, a day that normally finds me in PJs and bunny slippers working in the home office.  But I made the trek into the main office today, because it’s a Lunch and Learn (!) day. 

What, you may ask, is a Lunch and Learn?  It’s an opportunity for our marketers to get together and talk about new technologies and how they impact our jobs.  Today is the blogging L&L, and I’ve been asked to talk about how to set up a blog. 

Against my personal preferences, I will be using Bloggerto do this demo.  I much prefer WordPress, but have to admit that it’s not always that intuitive at times (must be why WordPress For Dummies has been the #1 on the most popular blogging books list on Amazon).  I’ve heard TypePad is a breeze, but it’s a paid service, and not everyone will want to fork over their hard-earned moola to set up one of these puppies.  It’s in my best interests and everyone else’s for that matter, to go lowest common denominator here.

Wish me luck!

 

I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish

I volunteered some time ago to start a blog for Little IT’s brownie troop.  It’s a new thing for the parents, to use a blog for info on upcoming meetings and events, and to see pictures of the aforementioned post event.  So, as you can imagine, our page views are minuscule, especially since it’s locked to all but the parents, but I feel it’s an important activity and will eventually help drag people kicking and screaming into the world of the web.

Recently, the troop participated in a Halloween party.  We had a bunch of pictures, and I said, sure, ok, wonderful, let’s post them to the blog.  Well, on any service, easier said than done.  Usually, I put them up in SmugMugand then put up a hotlink to the SmugMug album. I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to have them all listed in the post for people to review right then and there. No time for linking.

Easier said than done, and I was quickly overwhelmed with single and bulk loading of 100 pictures. There has to be a better way.  Looking for an alternative, I tried Flickr, but it too failed me. I didn’t want to pay for an account (even though I gladly do that with SmugMug) so I was limited to the amount of file size that could be uploaded.

Then, I found Slide. I already use it in Facebook, but I didn’t realize until I saw it on another site that you can upload a slideshow to display in a blog post through them. It took no time at all to upload. You can change the captions to not be the file name (I didn’t). There are a myriad of choices for display options (I picked Album) and gimmicky add-ons (I selected none). With one click, they give you the code to upload to Blogger (where the Brownie blog is) and I was on my way! Mission accomplished! The display is pretty decent for little effort, as you can see below. I put my Police show pictures into an album below to demonstrate it’s functionality. I recommend Slide for a quick show that looks decent with very little effort. I’m not really cheating on SmugMug, as I will still use them for most everything else, as the final product is pretty cool, but Slide is good for a quickie.

 

Advice from bloggers, for a blogger-to-be

A good friend of mine recently started a web site promoting her design services.  In case you check out her site, yes, these works of art are even more wonderful in person.  She’s a fellow soccer mom, which gives you the wrong impressions, because she shows up at the practices and games looking amazing, plus she’s super nice. Anyhow, she’s been blogged about, and has been convinced about the value of blogging, and now wants to start her own.  She’s going in the right direction, as she already has an idea of what she wants her blog mission to be:

“(I want it to) be a source of inspiration for other artists and designers.  I have several interviews already to do profiles on other artists and I also have some other design items to speak to, ie, my favorite pen…”

I need a favor from her, so I thought setting up her blog would be an excellent in-kind act. She wants to know how to blog, and I can show her that. Anyone who knows me knows that I have no sense of color or design, so her skills would be of immense benefit to me.  I have no problem with how to go about setting up a blog for her, but I’m not sure what the right platform is.  I’m a huge fan of WordPress, but I don’t know that it is that intuitive for the beginning user.  Blogger is supposed to be, and I already set up a friend on that site, but I don’t see it as very scalable -that is, it’s easy to get up and running on it, but once you want to do more advanced stuff, it’s not easy to figure out how to do it.  I tried starting a blog on TypePad, but I wasn’t that impressed. I also see that Joe Wikert has a tag on his blog labeled “TypePad sucks”, validating my initial impressions. Need I look any further than WordPress or Blogger? Are there other platforms I should consider?  Comment away, and defend your platform of choice.