Blogging Sueblimely

I am all for making life easier by making  tedious tasks  as least time consuming as possible. I find tedium hard to cope with. I have always thought ironing outmoded and, despite liking cotton and natural fibres, now buy clothes that do not need the iron. Hopefully my carbon footprint remains steady; cost of manufacture of synthetic fibres versus electricity for the iron. I class posting numerous links to Twitter and Facebook a tedious task: copy title, copy link or open another site and minimize the link, paste link, comment, post, repeat. Here is how I make this easier:

Make posting to Facebook and Twitter automatic:

Using bit.ly, when I am on a site I want to link to, I just press the bit.ly toolbar button , and then press “share” on the bitly site. The url is automatically shortened and title and text are automatically added, with the option to edit and add tags. My selected Twitter and my personal Facebook pages are automatically posted to without me having to go there.

To post to my Facebook community pages, I use the Facebook add-in Smart Tweet for Pages. Anything I have posted to my chosen Twitter accounts, which I have usually automatically posted to via bit.ly, are then also automatically posted to my chosen Facebook Pages.

Reading Updates

NutshellMail sends me twice daily emails containing all my Facebook and Twitter updates. (I have set up all the individual notification emails that come from FB to automatically go to trash because there are so many of them). This service also supports updates from Linked In, YouTube, MySpace, Yelp, FourSquare and CitySearch.

I have recently discovered that my Windows Live Messenger main screen can include updates from Facebook. What’s more, none of the application requests are included here – only messages from friends. I can post messages to FB from here too. If it were not for using FB apps and joining in group discussions I would not need to go to the Facebook site at all.

Using paper.li I have created two “daily papers” one for Twitter and one for Facebook. These show posts that include my chosen Twitter @tags and Facebook phrases. I use them for keeping up with mentions of #fragilex and “Fragile X” so that I do not have to trawl the increasing number of FB and Twitter pages that talk about Fragile X Syndrome. I can then post any links that turn up here to my own Fragile X page by which I am attempting to centralize all relevant references. This way others do not have to crawl numerous sites themselves. I subscribe by email to these two daily papers, again saving me time. Others can subscribe too.

Although I use the paper.li service for references posted anywhere on FB and Twitter you can use it to create papers that apply to only your own personal or community pages. This is a useful tool for bloggers who want an additional resource, apart from just RSS feeds, to share their posts with their readers.

As I have not had time to post about what is happening in the world of blogging and social networking or report on my own web building research and activities, I have not blogged at all. Facebook and Twitter have become my way of communicating in my online world.

As I miss the social networking that blogging brings I have decided to keep on blogging but on matters that do not take me hours and hours to research.  It was always my aim to be original and to offer something to my readers that they could not find elsewhere. As “how to blog” blogs have become  so commonplace now, I do not want to merely talk about issues that have already been covered. I can use my twitter account for posting links to articles I think are useful. I will continue posting about tools and resources that I use, those I think will be useful to you too, but not spend time trying out everything new that comes out just so that I can report on them.

It took me a year or so after it came out to see through the spammy applications and their endless updates to accept Facebook for the communication tools it offers. I have connected with family I have not seen for 30 years (who live across the world) and joined in an active international online support community for Fragile X Syndrome, a condition my son suffers from.

Creating Facebook pages has given me the opportunity to work on raising awareness of Fragile X and linking to resources for parents, carers and therapists so they can find their way through the maze to find the most useful information. This is not only part of my role as a Fragile X Association of Australia committee member but a passion of mine. It took me nearly 4 years to get a diagnosis for my son as even the medical profession had not heard of the condition so I had to set out and find out myself. The situation has improved but many remain undiagnosed, leading to problems for them in regards to getting the correct therapy, medication and funding at school. Did you know Fragile X is the leading known proved cause of Autism? Did you know that 1 in 126 women are carriers and carriers have problems with conceiving, early menopause, anxiety and depression. Male carriers develop a condition called FXTAS and are most often incorrectly misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and not given the right treatment.

Facebook personal and community pages are also good for promoting blogs of course. I do not recommend merely posting links to your blog posts but to develop a substantial list of “friends”, including other bloggers, and interact with them. Send them messages, share some of their links and respond and press the like button on their messages.

Coming up:

• Tools for posting to Twitter and Facebook,making it less time consuming, and how to create a daily user subscribe email message of your posts.
• A rave about versatility of the default Facebook Theme “TwentyTen” and making child themes.

The impetus to blog gradually disapppeared and I posted less frequently. I stopped keeping up with current happenings in the blogging world, which would normally have fuelled me with ideas for topics to write about.  The longer I left it the harder it became to start up again.  The blog came to a halt.

It seems now that it is tentatively raising up from its sick bed to say a weak hello. Why now? I just had an email from CMF Ads who informed me that apart from not blogging since last June I had masses of spam comments.  On checking I was horrified to see how many there were.  Something I had spent much time and effort on was being slowly destroyed through my neglect.

I know this happens to many bloggers and I probably kept going at a reasonable pace for longer than many.  Why the lack of enthusiasm?  There were a number of reasons.  My health was suffering from sitting on my behind on the computer chair for so many hours.  The days when many new social networking sites were starting up are over and it is now a while since I have seen anything new to interest me.  When I started blogging Facebook was for the college crowd, Twitter had not yet uttered its first tweet and Stumbleupon had not yet tripped over anything.  I revelled in trying out new and different appplications and reporting on them.

To begin with it was  exciting being able to connect with so many new people and I  established a small network of bloggers who I now consider close friends and a wider network of blogging acquaintances.  It was the rest that wore me down; those who would take advantage of my public profile on sites to badger me for diggs and  stumbles; the sort of thing I would do gladly for friends whose work I respected but not for all and sundry.

Many of the bloggers who started out at the same time as me have given up and my comments began to come from strangers who strangely enough often had names associated with whatever they were trying to sell. Are we going back to the old days I wonder, when people  were named after their trades; as in Cooper, Gardner, Ward.  Will Usedtires or Seo  become commonplace surnames? Judging by my comments they already are. Will all the sons of the many Real Estates that comment  become MacReals or, given the times, PcReals?  Apologies, I digress.

What have I been doing instead of blogging? The many hours that were freed up have not been as productive as I would have liked mainly because I got sucked in to Facebook and its games – plowing harvesting and seeding my fields, building towns, cooking up a storm in my virtual cafe.  I had avoided these for years, knowing my propensity to get hooked on such things.  My health is back on track though and I proudly purchased a size 8 pair of jeans  last week, for myself. I have continued to build web sites for small businesses and non profits and have  got behind the hood of the Thesis theme and created a CMS site from that. I decided life was too short to keep putting things off and my long planned overseas trip is happening this year – a whole 12 weeks in Asia and Europe, staying in 13 countries.

I will be back here, although not as often as I once was.  I will again be sharing what I have learned about blogs and their building and design.

Comments are switched off for now but only until I remove the spam that got through the net. I would love to hear from  those of you who were regular followers and you can always drop me a line via my contact form.

Collections are a newly introduced Firefox site feature that allow you to save lists of your favorite add-ons (extensions, toolbars, Greasemonkey scripts) to your Firefox profile.

A subscribe option allows you to add the collections of others to your favorites and track when these are updated. These user created collections are ranked by the amount of subscribers they have attracted.

The Firefox Collections page allows you to view lists of Editor’s Picks (so far only Firefox Created Collections), Popular Collections, your own and your favorite Collections. The lists are searchable by most popular all time, most popular this week or month and newest. A keyword search box is also provided.

Social networking aspects are involved here.

• You are able to keep up to date with new extensions added by those whose knowledge you respect. I first heard of collections via the blog post Best Of Breed Firefox Collection For SEO, Bloggers & Internet Marketers, by Andy Beard, whose collection I subscribed to immediately.
• You can subscribe to the collections of current friends and develop more contacts.
• By publicizing and gaining subscribers for your own collections, the higher your own profile will reach in the collection rankings.
• For bloggers this could lead to more visitors and regular readers.

It has taken me a while to get back into the swing of blogging after being away on holiday but life is now back to it’s normal routine. As usual I have tried out the tools I review so here are my own Firefox Collections: These are based on those I use and those I have found useful but have had to delete from my default Firefox profile to keep the number of add-ins down. The more you have the slower the browser.

• Social Networking Firefox extensions and toolbars that help you interact with your social networks and communicate with your contacts. I keep my most used in my default profile but have a social networking profile for times when I wish to do nothing else but catch up with my network contacts.
• Blogging- blog writers, web design and image tools for blogging.
• Sueblimely Using Add-ons- the add-ins I use with my default Firefox profile.

For an explanation of why and how to use different profiles please checkout my post Speed Up Your Firefox Browsing

Work with WordPress MU (multi user) is the reason from my recent absence from blogging. The East Coast area of a UK charity, the National Coastwatch Institution, needed a rebuild of one its website to go along with an extension of it’s activities.

Although you may not have the same needs as this organization you may consider using WordPress MU if you want to develop more than one blog.

I had originally created the coastwatch site using the Joomla CMS system but, as the interface was complicated for them, WordPress was my obvious choice. After working with WordPress on various sites for a year or so, I know how flexible it can be. I was pleased to see that immediately after the new site was up and running Keef, who will be a co-author, had written a post and just needed me to tell him to hit the media button to add images. So much simpler.

As NCI East Coast now comprises of two coastwatch stations, managed by two separate committes, each needed their own unique identity, I decided on using WordPress MU to make administration simpler. Both stations now have their own unique pages and blogs on their own virtual subdomains.

The blog and some pages on the main East Coast site are being used as a private member only area for both of the coastwatch volunteer teams. Plugins turn this section into a true community site.

The other East Coast pages are public and contain information common to both stations. By using WordPress MU, the three blogs and three sets of static pages (NCI Eastcoast, NCI Skegness and NCI Mablethorpe) can all be managed from one admin dashboard.

I am hoping to see lots of posts written on the site to gain it speedy search engine page ranking and to raise awareness, more volunteer watchers and, hopefully more funds, for this worthy charity organization. Their volunteers man the coastwatch stations daily, making sure beach and sea goers are safe.

You may like to go along and leave a comment, joining me in congratulating them on their hard work and efforts in getting their second station up and running.

I will expand upon the advantages of and uses for MU in an upcoming post. For those of you interested in setting up an MU site I will also be talking of how to I set the East Coast site up, the plugins I used and where to find futher information.

I will also be discussing how you can use WordPress, including an existing installation, or WordPress MU to create a community site. As with the NCI Eastcoast example, you do not have to run your whole site as a community site – you can just have it as an add-on to a normal WP site.