This was very well-spent $10 admission, but with an unconference style only some of the talks appealed to me.

The first talk I attended was The Importance of Proper Branding for Small Businesses by Kevin Simcock from 1000Watts. This really hit home with me as it seems every freelance client I design logos or business cards for needs to be taught about proper business branding. Kevin reminded us that every interaction speaks about your brand. With all of your products (logo, business card, website) you need to convey the same brand positioning statement.

Kevin posed some questions to ask ourselves about our branding: what is your key business statement? what does your logo say/reflect? does your company name reflect what you do? does your website go well with your logo/colours/etc.? does any social media add to your message, not detract? One really important message Kevin said was that people buy outcomes, not a brand/person/product.

The next session I attended was Business Card Science with Sam Zipursky from Advice Tap. This was a little more like business card etiquette and things to do and not to do with your physical business card. He had some good points about business meetings and when/how to hand out your business card, such as waiting until the end of a conversation.

I decided to excuse myself and go check out Email Marketing with Corwin Hiebert of Red Wagon Management which was running at the same time. I almost wish I’d been in this session the whole time! The whiteboard was covered in points and columns of “Hate”, “Love”, “Best Practice”, and “Tools”.

Users hate too many emails, when they are generic or impersonal, with they are too sales/pitchy, and when they are irrelevant. Do not send an email blast just for the sake of sending an email blast. Make sure you have a message. Also, make sure your subject line is not to sales/pitchy.

People Love when they are targeted, less disruptive, selective, and media rich. Best practices for sending email blasts are Tuesday at 9:30am, sending content rich messages. Corwin said that reviewing your open rate and click rate is important. He said if there is less than 50% open rate and 15% click rate, he would review the marketing strategy because something isn’t working.

I stuck around in that room to listen to the next session, Networking & CoWorking with Raul Pacheco-Vega (aka Hummingbird604) and Jay Catalan of The Network Hub. Unfortunately it felt a little pitchy about The Network Hub and (I hate to say) but it didn’t grab my attention. I wandered out to check out some other sessions (three session run simultaneously during each block).

I ended up at How to Manage a Creative Project with Corwin Hiebert again. This was extremely relevant to the work I do at my regular job. Corwin talked about giving the team updates, having a meeting agenda, not just having notes in email and more. He mentioned that it is important to make sure the scope of work is clearly outlined, that there is one point person, and you reassess often. Some tools mentioned for group management were SmartSheet, ActionMethod, Basecamp, and a book called Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky.

Then we had a lunch break and there were some featured speakers and sponsored lunch. I decided to pop down to Waves Coffee shop and grab an panini instead.

Next, I attended Pricing For Freelance Services with Tom Varjan from Dynamic Innovation Squad. This was more of a Q&A session which seemed to work well. The one take-away point is that fixed rates generate 87% more income than hourly rates and clients prefer to know up-front what they’ll pay.

The next session I attended was Promote Yourself Using Free Tools with Bonnie Sainsbury from Duet Media. After the first couple points about making sure you’re visible online, it turned into more of “Twitter 101″. I decided to pop upstairs and check out another session.

At the Freelance Is Not Free session by Raul Pacheco-Vegas, he spoke from personal experience of working for free or for pay. He said he has stopped working for free for things that doesn’t have value. If it is a project that he believes in or finds value in, he’ll help out for free.

The second-to-last session I attended was Apps & Gadgets for Freelancers with Shan Shan Fu. This was a really neat session to sit in on. While it wasn’t exactly apps specifically for freelancers, they were all apps for productivity. In a room of 20 people, there were 8 iPhones, 3 Android phones, 3 Blackberries, 2 Palms and 1 windows mobile phone. The apps suggested for all these different devices also had Apple dominating the market. But something that Shan Shan noted was that while Apple may have 100,000 apps and Android only 10,000, there are probably 100 farting apps on Apple and maybe 10 farting apps for Android.

We talked about cloud techonology, Evernote, DropBox, HoursTracker, Tripcase, Jotnote, wifi apps, and more. Shan Shan also showed us slidetype which is called “Swype” by Verizon and “SlideIT” in Canada. It’s going to replace touch-typing for phones and is currently available on just a handful of phones. Watch this YouTube video demoing slide-typing to see the difference. Shan Shan also told us about all the new features coming in Windows Office 2010 (she works for Windows but wasn’t representing them at the conference, just spreading news about new features she thought were cool).

The final talk I attended was about Intellectual Property with Kemp Edmonds. He had battled with his intellectual property (read: something he’d written/created) stolen and re-purposed by another company. First of all, he told us his tale. Then, he suggested a bunch of tools and a bunch of possible forms of action when dealing with intellectual property infringement. One suggestion was setting up GoogleAlerts with “AND” and “OR” statements to find where your name is mentioned. Some other suggestions included: setting up Creative Commons, CopyScape to track your stuff on the ‘net, TinEye for reverse image searches. There were a number of other methods mentioned and it was reiterated to just make sure you are protecting your work and make others aware that you are the owner.

Overall it was a very informative day and I hope that there are more 604 FreelanceCamps in the future. Thanks to all the organizers, sponsors, volunteers and attendees for making this unconference a great day.

Uploaded Images and Photos on Flickr

I have gone back in all my uploaded photos (here on the blog) till October of last year and altered the titles and alt text. I’ve been naughty and haven’t been keeping that up to date. But as suggested by Alexandre in the SEO session at Northern Voice: start using good practices immediately and they will start to come naturally.

I’ve been adding photos to my Flickr and have removed almost all photos from my Facebook. I bought Flickr Pro in February and I am loving it. I’ll still be posting photos on the blog but now, I’ll try to link to the appropriate Flickr album for more photos when it isn’t necessary in a blog post.

Speaking of Facebook, I also deleted all my videos and will make sure to keep my YouTube channel up-to-date. However, most of the videos I upload to YouTube get embedded here. Which leads us to our next topic…. plugins.

WordPress Plugins

I am using Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin right now, but I just downloaded the Apture plugin to make these cute little icons in front of my links. But Apture also has an embed function, so do I need to keep Viper? Also, if I uninstall Viper, will it break my current embeds (mostly YouTube).

I already love how AddThis Social Bookmarking plugin works. I also recently activated the All in One SEO plugin and I’m exploring that more too. I’ve also been making sure to add tags to all my posts. This how-to video from WordPressTV that was suggested by kmore on Twitter has been a big help for doing all this tag updating.

Do you have any plugin suggestions that are vital to your blog well-being?

Improving my Workflow

I am interested in exploring Evernote to keep track of things. I already really like my “To Do” list on my iTouch and I use my iCal religiously. I’m interested in how Evernote can be integrated into my workflow. (And maybe it will make me less dorky at conferences when I whip out my pad of paper and favourite pen).

My friend Marina found me and we chatted about the sessions we wanted to check out. We both wanted to see a lot of the same sessions, so we headed off to “Blogs Are Dead / Not Dead Yet” with Alan Levine, Chris Lott and Brian Lamb. It was a collaboration, a discussion, and venting about some of the major frustrations over blogging and social media. Nothing was ‘decided’ per-say but one of the best analogies was a Bilbo Baggins quote and how he feels like butter spread over too much bread. There is a poll up: Are Blogs Dead? I have a lot to say on this topic so I’ll save it for another day.

Probably my top (work related) session was next: Coping with Social Media. I found that Alexandra Samuel had some great points about organizing yourself and how to manage social media. But I would have called it “Managing Social Media” because it was mostly organizational tips for using all these devices. However, Alexandra did have some good advice on saying no and being able to say “Sorry, I didn’t have a chance to read your blog post” and never assuming that anyone ever sees your tweets.

The next panel was Fibre Arts Online with crochet author Kim Werker, Felicia of Sweet Georgia Yarns, and writer/author Mandy Moore. I was there as a fan of Fibre Arts and didn’t ‘learn’ much but it was great to hear the fibre arts world discussed and hear some questions from non-crafters. One of the funniest questions was (for Mandy regarding yarnbombing): “So are you like an arsonist, where you stand back and watch how people interact with your stuff?”

Straight into the next session was for Art and Social Media — a great panel including Rebecca Coleman, Rachel Chatoor, Sara Genn, and Deb Pickman moderated by Darren Barefoot. They talked about using social media to promote art in its traditional forms. One of the major discussions was about documenting/sharing/blogging the creative process or the pre-process. With plays and movies a number of suggestions included interviews, set tours, and sharing such things that traditional media used to hold monopoly over airing. One of the closing statements was: “Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, newsletters… wherever your audience is, go to them”.

By the end of the day, I decided to just enjoy the coffee break, check out the Non-Profit Expo in the atrium (which was okay but not particularly stimulating) and then call it a weekend. I think I’ll watch the videolog of a couple sessions I didn’t see, but all-in-all I’m pretty satisfied with my session choices. I can’t wait to see how the conference changes and adapts for next year.

Northern Voice

I arrived at UBC Life Sciences Centre at 8:45 am and proceeded to registration. I got a nifty name badge which had my blog URL and Twitter username. Then I sat down as the atrium filled up and they set up for the Keynote address. Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen came over to say hello — we had met recently when she was the guest speaker for an SFU class I took. Then Lisa Manfield, the teacher of said class (Writing and Editing for the Web) came over to say hello too. And suddenly Sean Cranbury stopped by to say hello to Lisa and I introduced myself. Sean and I had recently emailed about Books on the Radio, so it was great to say hello in person.

That first 10 minutes right there really demonstrates the strength and worth of conferences like this. Not only are they a great place to put a face to the name, but to make new aquaintances and network. Then we all settled in for the keynote speech by Bryan Alexander. He spoke of mystery and the unknown. It was a very interesting, reflective, and thought-invoking speech and so different from Keynotes that I’m familiar with.

Afterward, the first set of sessions didn’t really entice me, so I started wandering around the Life Sciences building. I ended up seeing Kim Werker and Kimli Welsh chatting and went up to say hello. I met Kim several weeks ago at the Forensic Workshops at the Vancouver Police Museum and I know of Kimli from craft shows (she is behind the hilariously brilliant NSFW Smuttons).

I hung out with Kim and Kimli while they tagged Mighty Ugly creations for swag bags. These little critters were created ugly on purpose which is the whole point of Mighty Ugly. Kimli was giving a talk later called “Overcoming Social Anxiety, or How to Win Friends and Influence People (in 140 characters or less)” and was giving away swag bags. The Mighty Ugly dolls were going into the swag bags and so they were tagged with a business card in explanation. I snapped a few photos of the process so Kim could post on the Mighty Ugly blog and about these guys going off into the world.

Then, I decided to go to a session called Online Publishing and the Law by Dan Burnett. Dan is a defamation and media lawyer in Canada and gave a very interesting talk. It reinforced some things I already knew about libel and defamation, but was pretty shocking (and frightening) about some of the things you can be sued for. Did you know, that retweeting or reposting a libelous comment means you can be sued for libel even if you weren’t the original offender? Scary stuff.

The lunch break was delicious. It appears to have been provided by UBC AMS Catering but don’t quote me on that one. As a vegetarian, I was very pleased with the spread, and they brought out treats and coffee immediately after. Perfect way to start the afternoon! Over lunch I chatted with my friend Dale, who is one of the video-organizers for Northern Voice, his friend (and author) kc dyer. I also sat near someone who looked very familiar and introduced herself as Carol, later we figured out we knew each other from a Tea Meetup Group. Small world!

After lunch I headed over to one of the smaller classrooms for Copyright and Copywrong: Intro to Creative Commons with Martha Rans and Duncan McHugh. I was a little worried that I was already past the “beginner” level as I’ve already set up Creative Commons (CC) for my writing here and my creative endeavours at Monnibo Designs. However, it was an interesting talk to listen to, and learn more about what “commerical use” constitues. Also, I learned about two new programs: FairShare to track your CC works, and CompFight to search Flickr for CC-licensed photos. The talk ran a bit long as there were a lot of questions at the beginning. Duncan tried to quickly address music, video, and photos as well as writing.

I stayed in the same room for Finding Your Voice with Monica Hamburg and Dave Olsen. I thought Monica Hamburg was fantastic and her talk was extremely engaging, yet stayed on topic. It didn’t stray off into tangents or get distracted by questions that could wait till the end. She talked about setting a focus, how to write well, and what creates a “good voice”. She had lots of ideas and suggestions and really stressed being honest to yourself and being real. Monica Hamburg also included some quotes from bloggers. It was great that she blogged about her talk (in five parts!) pre-conference. Dave Olsen couldn’t make the conference and instead submitted a video. I didn’t find this very engaging, but other people in the room seemed amused. I stayed simply because the next talk I wanted to see was in the same room.

The Nuts and Bolts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was presented by Alexandre Brabant. After having a lot of SEO information covered by Lisa Manfield in the recent SFU web writing course I mentioned, it was interesting to attend another talk on the topic. The best piece of advice (besides all the basic SEO information) was to train yourself to use good SEO practices and it will become automatic. Some suggested resources were SEOMoz for detailed SEO information, Google Webmaster Tools, and resources to submit your RSS feed to.

Following the afternoon coffee break, I headed to PhotoCamp for the rest of the afternoon. This was a mini-conference session in itself which covered cameras, time lapse, fashion photography, retouching, and a range of other topics. Moderated by Kris Krüg and including local photog John Biehler, I was really glad I attended this session. It was so inspiring and really informative. It was great that it covered such a wide range of topics.

All in all a very busy but enjoyable day. I am looking forward to tomorrow as there are three sessions I definitely want to attend.

Either way, this weekend is SUPER busy. I have a work event in Victoria (1.5 hr ferry ride away) all day Saturday and then I have to rush back to Vancouver on Sunday to make it to my choir’s Spring Concert!

BookCamp Vancouver was an incredible experience! It took place on Friday October 16, 2009 and there was so much to absorb! I wasn’t able to make it to every event that I wanted to because there were four events going on at a time. The great thing about BookCamp is it was organized as an “unconference”; instead of having a speaker or a lecture, the person was more of a moderator or host.

Grab a cup of something warm and get comfy, this post is a long one!

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After the opening remarks, I went to listen to author Tris Hussey talk about Tech Tools For Editing Workflow. First Tris spoke a little about writer’s workflow and ranted that Microsoft Word was not built for writers. He suggested several applications designed for writers to organize their thoughts: Scrivener or Ulysses for Mac or Page Four or Rough Draft for PC. The best thing about all these programs is you can usually export to Word so you can send to your editor(s).

When you have large files, Tris mentioned using a free service called DropBox to send the files back and forth. It’s better than email, FTP, or YouSendIt because it acts like a shared folder. You can open and edit a file while it’s in the DropBox and it as an “oops” feature if you messed up.

Tris stressed the need for version control — not overwriting old files and keeping track of what you send and receive. I’ve already got this under control when I export PDFs, but I really need to work on this with InDesign documents too. And the other thing that Tris couldn’t stress enough was backing up. He really wanted everyone to set up an automatic backup on their system. Some suggested tools or programs that people had were Time Machine from Apple, CrashPlan for Mac, Carbonite, Mozy, SugarSync, and SuperDuper! (which I use).

Some other community tools that the group discussed included: GoogleDocs, Google Wave, OpenOffice (instead of Microsoft Office), EndNote for bibliographies (costs money), ShortCovers through Indigo, BaseCamp for project collaboration, Writeboards for collaborative writing, and InCopy for CS4. All these programs have their own uses and strengths. I am very jealous I don’t have InCopy on my CS3 because it’s all about collaboration during editing workflow.

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The next session I went to was about Digital Rights Management vs. Free Content moderated by Sean Cranbury from Books on the Radio. Sean started out by defining the terms for everyone (so we were all on the same page): Digital Rights Management (DRM) is any lock on a file that contains creative content which prevents the buyer from modifying it. Lack of DRM results in piracy or file-sharing. “Free” Content is content that you’ve paid for but are free to share.

The main concern and reason for DRM seems to be that the creators think that people are going to pirate and share the file/program/item illegally. We also discussed how a lot of people think that just because something (like a book) is digital, it doesn’t cost as much. But in terms of the prices, 40% of the profits go to the retailer, 30% to the publisher, 20% to the printer, and 10% to the writer. Just because it’s not sent to the printer, doesn’t mean that it didn’t still get edited, designed, written, etc.

Another issue we discussed was licensing issues: users want clearcut info abou what you can do with a digital file you purchase. With books, you buy the object and it’s clear that this object is now yours to do what you want with it. But with digital books, can you use it on multiple devices? How do you lend it to a friend? What if you get a new device? Can you transfer it?

The music industry was used as an example for what could happen in the DRM debate: first they rejected that it had an effect, then they got angry, then they began to sue people. We discussed how the publishing industry can learn from these mistakes, especially with the development of ebooks. We also discussed the recent uproar about George Orwell’s 1984 being yanked from e-readers. People joked that the Book Police aren’t going to come into your home and pull a book off your shelf. We also discussed how the terms “licensing” and “buying” confuse people; you can buy a book, but you only buy a license for an ebook.

Sean mentioned a survey done by O’Reilly Media and RandomHouse USA called “The Impact of P2P and Free Distribution and Book Sales”. This survey measured the impact of file sharing on book sales. Many thought people pirated/torrented immediately, but they found out that it wasn’t really until 5 months later after release that people started trying to download it. The most surprising data is that once something was leaked, the legitimate sales spiked again. Many publishers think that free distribution negatively affects book sales.

Then we had a break for lunch, sponsored by BookNet Canada and provided by Out To Lunch Catering. It was very good! Everyone milled about and chatted with each other.

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After lunch I went to listen to Brendon Wilson moderate a session on The State of the Electronic Book. I already knew a lot about the technology and products available, but they had some e-readers to pass around the room which was great. There were also some statistics and views I hadn’t even considered regarding e-readers. The ebook revolution was even likened to Gutenberg and his printing press: he destroyed the role of the scribe but progressed us further than ever imagined.

Brendon gave a bit of background about e-readers: in 2007 e-ink and e-paper got cheaper and that’s when the Amazon Kindle really took off. The main difference between e-readers and laptops is that e-readers use reflective light and laptops are backlit. Even though Sony came out with the first e-reader, Amazon now controls 60% of the market. One surprising stat is that 21% of e-reader purchasers are aged 50-59. We discussed that this could be the cost of yet another device: the Sony Pocket Reader averages $200.

We then got onto the question: In a world of ebooks, are publisher still relevant?”to which there were many answers. The thought was mainly YES, but that the role and purpose of a publisher in a traditional sense was changing. We still need editors, designers, and distribution (all roles of the traditional publisher) but the “gatekeeper” role is dead. Going through a publisher is no longer the only way to get your work out there. We discussed that the role of the publisher will probably develop into more of a facilitator or curator for the written word.

How do ebooks affect the publishers? Some of the challenges discussed included piracy, broader competition, multiple devices, but the opportunities include access to out-of-print titles, new revenue models, and new avenues of exploration.

How do ebooks affect the authors? The author can now sell books through Amazon, the booksellers are becoming publishers, you have self-published authors too. Some of the challenges are lack of support (via a publisher) and more competition in a world where anyone else could do the same things. However, there are greater opportunities to access the audience, get more than just 10% of the proceeds, and explore new formats and revenue models.

How do ebooks affect the readers? Challenges are mainly the expense: not only are you paying for a $200+ device, but then you’re paying at least $10 per book. Ebooks are also difficult to share (DRM licensing debate), and the product can be yanked away (see above Orwell discussion). But the opportunities to access new materials are nearly unlimited.

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After another quick break, I went to listen to Morgan Cowie of BookNet Canada talk about New Business Models in Publishing and Bookselling. While this wasn’t my favourite session, I still learned a lot about an area of publishing which I’m unfamiliar with. Morgan discussed that the new business models are based around what your purpose is.

If your purpose is faster delivery, Morgan mentioned that the current time frame for producing a book is a year to year and a half (after the manuscript has been written). Now there are other options including print on demand, which opens new doors for backlist revitalization and out-of-print titles.

There are opportunities for convergence — one type of genre all together from different publishers (vertical) or all titles from one publisher (horizontal). Convergence with movies, video games, and other leisure activities was also mentioned.

There was also talk about Revenue: HarperStudio now has a 50/50 split between publisher and author, but there are no returns. During the revenue discussion, the price of electronic items was debated; it’s hard to price these items because we don’t know what they will garner. We also discussed monetizing through textbook rentals, Bookriff (trade titles), Syntext (fragments) and OpenRoad (backlist).

If your purpose is collaboration, there are many different ways to have content collaboration before printing. But some of the current models out there include BookOven, Whole Art Books, and Bookriff.

If you want to mix your mediums, there are digital books, webisodes for books, vooks (book movie), online interviews, book trailers. One of the main problems people had with medium aggregation was when does a book stop being a book?

If your purpose is for a pre-release or a production cycle, you can allow people to buy the manuscript and comment and help form the book. This was the part that I had the most trouble with. Sure, you may get experts having some input, but what about something creative where a group of individuals just don’t care for the ending? Sometimes these commentators can get a credit in the book too.

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During our final break, everyone gathered in the auditorium to determine the final sessions. These were left open so that any unanswered questions could be addressed in another 45 minute session. I chose to attend What the FAQ? with Monique Trottier from Boxcar Marketing, Darren Barefoot, and Deanna McFadden from HarperCollins Canada. This was by far my favourite session. Not only did I learn things that are valuable in a professional setting for me, but also in a personal setting (on this blog and my other domains).

Basically Monique, Darren, and Deanna fielded questions from the audience. We started on the topic of keywords and positioning yourself (or your product) in the marketplace. GoogleKeywords was suggested to generate synonyms — if someone doesn’t know the title or author, what terms would they use to try and find it? Then you can use GoogleTrends to measure the success of specific keywords.

Someone then asked about author publicity. In terms of twitter and blogging, it was important to keep everything in the author’s authentic voice. You can also encourage the author to explore these things: You can lead a person to Twitter, but oyu can’t make them tweet. Also in terms of Twitter, pure publicity language (ie: Buy my book now!) does not work well. You need something personal behind it.

Then the purpose of websites was discussed and the need to easy navigation. The purpose for your website should drive your online marketing, for example, Firefox wants you to download their browser, so there is a Big Ass Button on the homepage. “Everyone needs a Big Ass Button” said Deanna. You need structure: a specific strategy of what you want your web marketing to do. One useful tool was P.O.S.T. — People, Objective Strategy, Tool.

We then spoke about the budgets for social media campaign, which our moderators felt you could spend as much or as little as you could afford. They suggested we try different free tools and it really depends on what you want to get out of it. If you can drum up enough publicity simply through your free online activities, maybe you don’t need print advertising or traditional marketing models.

I then asked about social media sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and other lesser-known ones. Monique basically explained that individuals submit links and other people vote on the links. They described any traffic you get from these links to be a ‘low quality’ traffic — they click just that one link and leave the site quickly. You want a higher quality of a visitor who will stick around and click other things.

This led to a discussion of Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Delicious, and Twitter. Flickr is good for sharing slideshows and ‘back stage pass’ photos. YouTube is great to host the content for you to embed. Delicious is a higher quality link-sharing tool. Facebook and Twitter are used more as talking avenues and promote a high quality of association.

The final question was about blogger outreach — how to reach your bloggers (from a publisher’s standpoint). They really stressed for less marketing and more publicity, not sending unsolicted books, not blasting out press releases, and not to mass mail your contacts. Deanna fielded this question and mentioned that she often finds a blog, reads their posts, and sends a personal note. She stressed that a pitch should be personal and have a link to the title. All these little things will demonstrate that the publisher values the relationship with the blogger.

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WOW! That’s all folks! It took me forever to finish this blog post, and I am so glad I took tons of notes during BookCamp. I am so excited to participate in another unconference and hope that BookCamp Vancouver happens again next year! Now to go add this blog post to the Unconference Wiki (where the schedule and news was posted).

But over the weekend I forgot my laptop and left it at home not plugged in. It obviously had trouble keeping the harddrive alive because booting up yesterday I kept getting a “kernal panic” message which basically says you need to reboot for whatever reason. Booting up just now took about 20 minutes and I had to keep turning it off and on, off and on, until it booted up. Sometimes it would just sit there making the boot up noise a bunch of times, doing nothing.

So I’m looking at a 13-inch MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM (which I was considering updating on this computer anyway). It’s $1,749.00, with free shipping… but we also now have an Apple Store here in Vancouver, so I might go down and play with some of the new computers. Is 3 years too short of a lifespan for a laptop that I use every day, sometimes non-stop for several hours at a time? Have I got my money’s worth when I spent $1,600 on this machine?

But I have decided to talk about the Social Media outlet that everyone is taking for granted: your blog. Because it is so easy to set up a free blog and run it, many people are unfamiliar with simple practices and habits that make blog surfing, reading, and commenting so much more enjoyable. Your blog is an aspect of social networking and you should not take for granted the small steps you can take to make it more connected.

Buttons:

• Buttons should link to the blog/project/website it is about. When you put a button on your sidebar, or in a post such as here with the Blog Improvement Project button, if you click it, the button should link to the specific website about it. It is completely useless to have your image link to itself (so when you click, it just reloads the image in a new page).
• Not having a button link at all frustrates your visitors if they want to join in the challenge / along / carnival / blog. With most blog interfaces, all you need to do is click on the image so it is selected, and then click the link button on your blog template. Here are some great instructions to make a Button into a Link.

Links:

• Where possible, include a link. If you are talking about another blogger, or a website, or some group that has a website. Link to it.
• The second best thing to know with links is targeting. This means where the link opens to. If you don’t specify anything, the link will open on the page the user is currently on (ie. your blog site) So when you insert a link, be sure to target it to “open in a new window or tab” because this way no one is automatically/accidentally removed from your website. You want them to stay there as long as they want and opening any external links in a new window or tab is the best way to ensure this.
• Another thing to remember is to include the full URL from the http:// to the .com. This is important so that your blog doesn’t think you’re trying to link to another page within your blog.

Content:

• Be honest with yourself. Your blog is for personal use, creative expression, and public viewing. Be aware that anyone, anywhere in the world, can and may see your blog. Do not put heavily personal stuff on your blog if you don’t want the whole world to see it. An especially touchy situation is when you write about something from your real life (versus online life) and someone IRL sees it. Remember what you say is public and cannot be taken back.
• Hooking your RSS feed up to your content is pretty important. On most free blogs (WordPress.com, Blogspot, etc.) this is done automatically. But if you would like to learn more about optomizing your RSS feed, check out this awesome tutorial.
• Having an easy way for people to find content on your blog is key. There are 3 main ways to address this, and if you look on my blog, you can find all three: 1. Have a search bar (see my top right hand corner); 2. Have your archives linked somewhere (see bottom of my left sidebar); 3. Tag or categorize your blog posts and have a tag cloud or category list (see drop down menu in left sidebar).

Design:

• Your blog layout is best clean and simple so as not to detract from the content. Build your blog on what you like, then your design and layout will have a personal slant. If you don’t know how to do design, you can either teach yourself through online tutorials (try Blogging Basics 101) or you can hire someone to do it for you (hint hint nudge nudge)
• One of the most common questions I encounter is “How do I add stuff to my sidebar(s)”. Click here for a very detailed answer with different blogging hosts covered.

Images:

• People love visuals. The way we read on the web is drastically different from how we read on paper. On the web people tend to skim and view things in a Z-shape — across the top, down the page, across the bottom.
• Here is a fantastic tutorial on how to add photos to your blog.

I have an issue with my sidebars: what should go “above the fold” … or to use a non-newspaper term, “above the scroll”. What fits in the sidebar before you have to scroll? Should my Knitting Widget be so high on the right side? I think my feed is important to have on the left. I have participated in so many things (Swaps & Challenges in particular) that I moved all older buttons onto the pages. But what’s different from Weeklies and Participating? And do you (as users) prefer Categories or Archives better? I don’t like WordPress.com Tags since it doesn’t show me everything on the blog I’m viewing that has been tagged, so I was also more into categories.

I’ve also been working on my blogroll. If you have added me to your blogroll and I have forgotten to add you (not intentionally), please let me know so I can add you! I tend to forget that adding people to my Feed Reader does not equate to my Blogroll.