Temecula Tech

Red Sweater software bought MarsEdit in February of this year. They came out with some minor updates right away, which was nice because MarsEdit hadn’t been updated much since the original release. Those minor updates were helpful, but today’s release of version 2.0 of MarsEdit is a nice jump. Better integration with media through a Media browser looks very good, as does the connection to Flickr (which I haven’t gotten working yet). It seems faster, from the Preview mode to sending to your weblog. I had lots of problems with previous versions giving me the spinning beachball for very long periods. None of that so far.

It would have been nice to see some kind of integration with screen capture, but maybe next update.

CNet tries to map out the early days of blogging in an article today.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

They trace the idea of a blog back to .plan files on UNIX accounts. I had one of those, and it wasn’t anything like a blog, but maybe it was the idea of making something personal visible to others that counts. It probably doesn’t matter much who was the first blogger except that someone will get the credit in any histories which are written and it’s probably worth the effort to figure out who did what and when. CNet’s timeline is a useful addition to the history of blogging. I also like the big picture map, but I’d like to be able to add other stories to that and not have it limited to CNet stories. Maybe it should be called the Big CNet picture?

Technorati Tags:
blogging, history of blogging

The Sunday LA Times (print only) has a review of “Realty Blogging” which is a book about how realtors can use blogging to improve their business. One of the authors is a “blogging coach,” a term I haven’t see before but which might be something to consider. The book is a guide for anyone getting started with blogging in real estate. The book is recommended by the Times reviewer and also has two five star reviews on Amazon.com.

The blogging class has only one student enrolled, so it’s probably not going to happen for February. I’ve stopped working on the course materials but will resume at some point since the class that meets in April has a better chance to get enough students. That one meets at the main UCR Extension building and is held during the week, so it should get enough enrollment. We’ll see.

I’m scheduled to teach a one day, 3 hour class on blogging for UCR Extension on February 24th. That one meets in Palm Desert. Another version of the class will meet on April 17th in Riverside. It’s going to be part demonstration and part hands on with discussion and questions throughout. I’m working on the materials and have gotten a few bloggers to respond to some questions about their blogging.

I borrowed a copy of Blog Design Solutions at the new Temecula Public Library today. It goes into quite a bit of technical detail on blogs. In particular, they cover 4 blogging platforms — Moveable Type, Expression Engine, WordPress, and Textpattern — in depth, showing you how they work and how to modify them. There is also a section on creating your own blog with PHP and MySQL. The whole book has a bit of a Mac tilt to it, which is surprising since most books like this would emphasize Windows. Actually, maybe they wouldn’t since these blogging platforms work on any OS and many of the designers are Mac users.

I know that some of the search engines don’t promise any quick action on indexing your website when you submit a URL to them, but why would it take so long? This site isn’t showing up anywhere, even after I submitted it last month to about 12 different places. There must be a faster way to do this. I need a little more research.

I had unchecked all the ping sites when I set up this blog, so it was not indexed by any search engines. I’ve fixed that and added a few more ping sites. In a few days, things should be working better. I also installed the sitemap plugin and set that up, and I added the Add Meta Tags plugin. I haven’t quite figured out the Related Posts set up, but I will get that working at some point.

There must be a way to incorporate better technology into the staff orientation I attended today. It boiled down to almost 9 hours of PowerPoint presentations, with some exceptions. I think some of the material could be captured via video and updated as needed. Some of the things just don’t change that quickly while other stuff does. Some topics are less important also and don’t need to be presented to everyone. I would prefer that the campus tour be done as a walking tour at least part of the way rather than a bus ride. I don’t think that would work for everyone but sitting down for an entire day was challenging. I think I need to think more about this but I’m sure the day could be shortened and/or made more hands on and interactive.

I am using the PressRow theme. It makes the site look like the New York Times, I think, but it is much more readable than other themes I’ve used. There are some quirks though. I don’t like the default image handling settings which run the text right into the image. You can’t use vspace and hspace settings either. I think I need to spend more time learning CSS to modify the theme. All in all, it’s much nicer than the alternatives.

I’m trying to figure out what happened to my archives. All my posts are here but I changed to the Pressrow theme and can’t find any archives.

Jay Mathews at the Washington Post is looking for the best education blogs. He’s going to run a contest to find the best blogs about education. Walt Gardner, retired teacher and prolific writer of letters to the editor, is going to help him as a judge. It sounds like it will be interesting. Based on Gardner’s statements about writing, I look forward to seeing what he has to say about the writing on some of the blogs.

The guy who posted the emails from Mark Foley to a high school student which led to Foley’s resignation from Congress and was just one in a string of Republican mess ups leading up to this week’s election is the subject of a story in the LA Times today. Lane Hudson kept his identity hidden on the blog, but ended up losing his job when someone figured out who he was and his employer found out that he was using his work computer to post to his blog. He doesn’t reveal how he got the Foley emails, but he does say that the FBI, LA Times and a number of politicians had them before he did and no one did anything about it. He posted them online, got linked to by Wonkette, and things snowballed from there. Another example of the individual routing around bigger media.

Just after 11 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 24, Hudson put up the Foley e-mails.

“This is absolutely amazing … ,” he wrote that morning. “There must be even more out there. E-mail me … and let me know what we should do!!!!”

By that Wednesday, Wonkette, a popular Washington gossip site, had linked to Hudson’s blog. On Thursday, ABC News posted an article on its website.

And Friday, after the network confronted Foley with a series of sexually explicit instant messages between the lawmaker and a different former page, Foley resigned.

“Wow!” Hudson titled a posting that night. In it, he said: “This is a good start…. Maybe we can keep stopping them!!!!!”

Putting a series of web pages on a CD ROM to provide training is a good idea. Michael Calhoun covers the basics of doing this in TechLearning. Unfortunately, he recommends Claris HomePage for Mac users, which is an application that hasn’t been updated in more than five years, at least. It was a nice program at one point, but the last update was in 1998, so it’s actually 8 years old!

Another Robin Good article — he points to Robert Scoble’s presentation, 10 Ways to a Killer Blog, but his headline says 15 points to a Killer Blog. Which is it? Actually, both are right as the title says 10 and there are actually 15 points. I think this is supposed to be an example of over-delivering. The Scoble presentation is on Slideshare, which is a kind of YouTube for presentations. Unfortunately it is very slow to access, but once you are there it’s fine.

Setting up a site with Adsense and RSS feeds sounds like a no effort money maker. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Robin Good explains in his entry today, AdSense Money Machine? The Problem With PLR Articles And Automatic Content Generators.

The time for littering the web with fake automated content is over. Use your money and intelligence to build automated systems that do things that can be of real value to your potential customers.

For those like me, who are not after the “American-money-making-dream”, but are looking to give greater meaning, freedom and value to their lives as independent publishers, what really counts is not how much money you can gather in the shortest time possible, but rather how much “good” you are creating for yourself and others while making a living at it.

Good points to an article by Gordon Goodfellow (who almost sounds like an alter ego), where he outlines the shortcomings of the RSS and Adsense combo but then launches into a sales pitch for a keyword system which he says will overcome all the problems he has just explained.

One of the real ironies of the article is that Robin Good’s site uses AdSense and in between his title and his article are ads for “Beat the AdWords system” and “The Adwords Miracle Guide”.

I like some of the stuff I’ve read on Paul O’Brien’s blog, SEO’Brien. He covers online marketing and search engine optimization and has experience doing that kind of stuff for HP and Yahoo. I wonder how he has time to share his expertise or why he does it. He did two items on Seach Engine Optimization which I liked. Part I dealt with Accessibility and Part II covered Page Rank. Both are informative and give some good ideas on how to maximize traffic to your site.

I keep my work blog on Blogger.com and I have a couple of others on there too. It’s a nice service and has reasonably good tools and it’s free. Since Google manages Blogger, I figure it’s pretty reliable, but over the past three days it has been anything but reliable. Either very slow or just not working at all most of the time, it has been a time waster trying to update my Blogger sites. I hope this problem will go away when they update the site to the new version of Blogger and I hope the problems are somehow related to that. Let’s hope they go away soon.

Blogger Tips and Tricks is a site devoted to things related to using Blogger. The most recent post deals with the switchover to the new version of Blogger, currently in beta. I think I will hold off on using the beta because you never know what kind of changes will be made and it’s not worth putting in all the effort only to have to re-do things later.

How to add a scrollable box to your blog is a useful tip. It’s not so great to put a huge amount of text in one entry and have it take up several screens. A scrollable box saves you some screen real estate.

I ordered the Rough Guide to blogging and look forward to getting it and reading it. I’ll post a review once I have it. If it’s anything like the Rough Guide to the Internet, I’m sure it will be a good book. There’s always something to be learned.

ScreenCastsOnline is a unique video podcast done by Don McAllister. Each week, he creates a 15-20 minute tutorial about a Mac or web-based application. These screencasts are excellent in terms of production quality and they are nicely done as far as emphasizing the right points. In fact, watching a couple of them convinced me to purchase RapidWeaver, a web site creation application. Most of Don’s content is available free, but he also does his shows in hi definition versions which you can get for a $25 for 6 months subscription. With that, you also get access to the previous 6 months worth of shows. If you want access to all the previous shows, you can pay $35 for your first six months subscription. It’s a nice deal whatever way you do it.

The elearningpost blog is one of my favorites. It’s not updated multiple times per day or even every day, but the stuff on there is good. I lost track of it for a while, but now I’ve got it in my Google Reader list and check it weekly. It’s a little more wide ranging than just elearning, but that’s good.

Those screen videos, also known as screencasts, have become popular ways to learn to use software. The two big names that I’m familiar with are Lynda.com and Atomic Learning. Atomic Learning seems targeted towards teachers while Lynda.com is more for creative professionals. The prices and quality of each service is reflected in the cost. Atomic Learning is $79.99 a year for access to their entire library while Lynda.com is $250. Lynda.com also makes their tutorials available on CD/DVD starting at $49.95 although there may be some cheaper titles. Overall, the production quality of Lynda.com is much higher, particularly the audio. Atomic Learning has an overly compressed sound to the narration while Lynda.com is very clear and doesn’t sound compressed at all. Both run fine over the Internet if you have a high speed connection.

Open Culture points out that Stanford is moving beyond posting lectures to iTunes U and have now made a full course available to the public. The course is The Literature of Crisis which is a once week lecture you can download.

I’m not really convinced that people who aren’t enrolled in these free courses actually benefit from them. It seems to me that they are useful for others who are teaching similar courses for poaching ideas or using the podcasts as resources. It’s too much work and there is no context for someone to just listen to the lectures and do the reading on their own. Some people will do it, and some lectures might be worth listening to, but in general, I think most of this stuff is a big deal about nothing. Putting your course materials online isn’t the same as making the course available to anyone. It’s not the same and it’s not enough.

I really like those Rough Guide books — the travel books, the ones about musical genres, and I also enjoyed the Rough Guide to the Internet. They have recently published the Rough Guide to Blogging by Jonathan Yang. Positive customer reviews at Amazon.

The Rough Guide site has more info on the book, which costs US$12.99.

Jon Yang also has a blog, with some interesting stuff about blogging, including the top 250 blogs. None of my blogs made the list. Shocking.