I'm pretty sure that this blogger t-shirt for kids is not what we were all dreaming of a decade ago in the early days of blogging.Still, goes some way to showing just how powerful fashion bloggers have become over the last few years...
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I'm pretty sure that this blogger t-shirt for kids is not what we were all dreaming of a decade ago in the early days of blogging.
For a long time the iPad blogging landscape has been a horrible, barren mess, with barely any decent blogging apps to be seen. Most blog platforms' editors didn't function in mobile Safari in any useful way. Blogging using the iPad was, at best, a challenge and, at worst, an impossibility.
Hopefully, this has just changed. I saw on the Everything Typepad blog that the Blogsy app now supported that service and, as an optimistic soul, I napped a copy, downloaded it to my iPad, and was pleased to see that it supports Movable Type as well. So, this is a first test run to see how well it works.
This far into the post it's been a pretty impressive experience - but I'm getting the impression that I need to watch some of the videos to get a good handle on how some of the dragging and dropping works, especially around links.
Time to publish and see if I'm still impressed...
Wow. This will make life so much easier for those whose sites get hacked...
Oh, hello built-in Tweet embedding:
Since Twitter retired its Blackbird Pie embedding function, I've been looking for an easy way to embed tweets in blog posts. And now it's build right into Twitter. Happy happy joy joy. :-)
Excellent post from Stephanie Booth about being realistic about what blogging can bring you:
- blogging is a long-term strategy: it will take many months or even years for you to see what benefits it's actually bringing you
- don't obsess on visitors and comments; instead, focus on what is said about your blog, and the opportunities it brings, in terms of contacts, open doors, favorable dispositions (qualitative measurement rather than quantitative)
I've nicked the handy summary above, but it's worth reading the whole thing.
A decade ago, almost exactly, I pressed publish on my very first ever blog post, entitled "Falling Towards 30", and sat in quiet amazement in my study in Lewisham. I'd pressed "publish", and the post was live. Just like that. No HTML editing. No teams of editors to approve it. No waiting for the twice-a-day "publish". My words were there, on the web, as easily as that. It wasn't the first time I'd published to the web; indeed, I'd had websites of various forms for probably 5 years at that point. But this was something different. The sheer ease of the Livejournal interface, the comments that opened up at the bottom of the page, the speed of publication. These were all new to me. All of a sudden, web publishing had moved from a techie pursuit to anyone with access to a service like Livejournal, or Blogger, or the brand new Movable Type. I pressed publish. I looked at the post. And then I got up and spent the afternoon tidying up the flat, ready for the arrival of my girlfriend. We were off to see the fireworks on Blackheath, which you can see above. And I had no clue that my life had just changed forever.
Within five years of that day, I'd be working full-time in blogging. I'd have attended one of the earliest political blogging events in the UK, and chronicled the day terrorists hit London. I've got engaged and married. I nursed my mother through cancer and death. And a hundred other ideas and discussions and conferences and events, and vast blog controversies. It has been one hell of a decade.
And yet, it's easy to forget in these days of Twitter and Facebook and all the other services that make some form of personal online publishing so trivial to do just how revolutionary this all felt back at the beginning of the century. While certain forms of social software had been around for a while even in the late 90s - Usenet, bulletin boards, forums - blogging opened up a new form of "owned" site and the combination of the permalink and the comments beneath brought a new form of distributed conversation to the web. This sang to me back then. I was chafing under the bondage of traditional forms of journalism, the impersonal language, the inherent distance from the audience, the lack of control a minor section editor had over what appeared in print each day. On the blog, my work lived and died purely on my own choices, my own merits and that of the work I created. And that was addictive. Was? Is. The launch of this blog was still a good 18 months away, but I stand by the name of it. There's something pure and visceral about one man writing one blog, determining the content through his own preferences and choices, and expressing it in his own voice. All the most successful blogs I've been involved with in the latter half of the decade have followed that model - one person expressing their passion through their personal means of expression - even if they've evolved into more of a group format later.
Many people will never need a blog now. The idea of one man, one blog has been superseded by Twitter (I'll hit five years on that next month...) and Facebook and other forms of more accessible social media. Compared to them, blogging is hard work. But for those of us who like to express ourselves in long form content and annotated quotes and links, there's nothing quite like a blog. One man, one blog, my blog.
And now I'm sat writing this, nearly a decade later (I'm cheating by writing this the night before...) in my front room in Shoreham. The computer and the software I'm typing into would be a revelation to my younger self. But I'm still here, still blogging, even as I fall towards my 40th birthday. I'm better at it (I hope...), and certainly less tentative. But I'm still as enthusiastic about it as ever. There's still a buzz, a certain magic, in pressing that publish button and in letting your thoughts and ideas join in that vast global conversation. It might be a bigger conversation now, and noisier, and harder to make yourself heard in. But it's there, and it's happening and it sure ain't going away.
I may be falling towards 40, but I sincerely hope - and believe - that I'll still be blogging in some form or another as I'm falling towards 50.
Thanks for reading, especially that tiny handful of you out there from the Livejournal days who read that very first post of my when it hit the web.
So, what did I learn at this year's Like Minds, other than lying around doing absolutely nothing on a Sunday (other than a trip to the tip. Oh, and to Waitrose...) is a good and necessary thing sometimes?
Well, this was, as previously noted, the first time I've liveblogged a three day conference and the first time I've done that blogging on the conference organiser's site. Here's what I learned about that experience:
Doing three days of liveblogging and seeing your own site's traffic drop slightly is an odd experience- Being isolated from the traffic stats of the blog you're writing for feels like blundering around in the dark. I had no idea if my work was having any resonance with the audience whatsoever. This makes me even more determined to make sure our journalists have easy access to blog stats as soon as we can.
- Being an "official" liveblogger as opposed to a guest one changes your mindset. I felt obligated to blog every speaker session that came up, when normally I'd pick and choose to give myself a break. Instead, I ended up skipping an immersive one day and a lunch the next for a little RnR and a battery charge.
- Not having power to the seat for liveblogging is a major handicap
- I was pretty much dead to the world each evening, hiding in the hotel and hitting the sack early to prepare myself for the next day.
- This was my longest continuous period working with WordPress, and I'd nearly convinced myself to switch this blog over when database errors started cropping up intermittently. That scared me off...
- It's interesting to not the differences between what live tweeters pick up, and what my liveblogging tends to emphasise.
Still, three days of continuous liveblogging is possible, and I'm reasonably pleased with the results, which you can find on the Like Minds site. There's also a compilation of links to other bloggers' coverage, too. Onwards to Le Web...
It's Tuesday night, it's late and I'm catching up on admin in a hotel room. I'm here for the Like Minds conference, which runs for the next three days. And, predictably enough, I'll be live-blogging it. But this live-blogging will be a little bit different. I'm here as a guest of the Live Minds team, and I am the live-blogger for the conference - and that means that I'll be liveblogging on the Like Minds blog, not here. It's not something I've done before, so it should be an interesting experiment.
And that's not the only reason it'll be different. It's also the first time I've attempted to liveblog for three days straight. I'm normally absolutely whacked after two days, so goodness only knows what state I'll be in by Friday PM. But that's a long time away. The pre-conference dinner (which was particularly lovely, and at a hotel with special memories for me) is over, my liveblogging kit packed, and I'm ready to hit the sack. See you tomorrow, both here and there...
Movable Type, the software that runs this blog, hits its 10th birthday today. Blimey.
Makes me feel a little guilty for having spent the day futzing around with WordPress...
Image via CrunchBase
A brief diversion into administrivia. People with no interest in self-hosted blog platforms can move right along. There's nothing for the like of you here. :-)
In the meantime, and in the quest for faster loading of the blog, I've activated a service called CloudFlare:
It's acting a combined content distribution network, security service and all-round site speeder-upper (a technical term, you understand...). I've had it running for around four hours now, and all seems fine. Load times are noticeably down on what they were before, and I'll be interested to see if that has any influence on site traffic.
