peterliu47 In Real Life
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.” – Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
On Saturday, September 24, Jeff Bennett and I are co-teaching a Blogging Boot Camp at High Tech Maui. We’ve combined elements from our past blogging workshops with some new material to present a real world approach to blogging from soup to nuts. Should be fun. Hope you’ll join us.
Topics include:
This workshop will consist of presentation material as well as hands-on time to assist participants with their existing blogs or setting up a new blog. We’ll also go through some exercises to help students brainstorm practical ideas they can apply to their own blogs.
Laptops are welcome but not mandatory. (This is not a follow-along workshop.)
Date: Saturday, September 24, 2011
Time: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Location: Malcolm Center, 1305 Holopono St., Suite 1, Kihei
Cost: $65
Seating limited to 30
Originally posted at Kaiscapes ->
If you know me, you know that while building blogs is an unavoidable component of my social media consulting practice, I tell everybody that I’m not a web designer. In fact, I’m not.
I picked up HTML on my own around 1993 or so, about the time I discovered the Mosaic browser, the ancestor of Netscape, and there was a time, before WordPress, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, etc. when I used to code by websites by hand, or use things like Adobe GoLive or Dreamweaver to construct my own websites.
I confess, I didn’t keep up. I don’t have the level of CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc. skills my contemporaries (the real web developers) do. I was busy with other things—a job as a technical manager in a Silicon Valley company, then later building a photography business on my own, then a social media practice, and it wasn’t a priority for me. Flash forward to today, and the tools exist to build elegant websites without too much fuss and bother if you have a little grounding in old school web development.
A good social media strategy requires a content home base—something flexible and easy to post updates to, has an RSS feed, easy connections to social networks, and so on. In other words, a blog. As a consultant, I often need to build them for my clients, but their time is precious, as is mine, so I can’t spend a lot of time doing those builds. That’s not what my practice is about. It’s about strategy and positioning my client to be able to execute that through guidance, training and direction.
So it’s imperative that I pick tools that allow me to build elegant blogs without a lot of time and hassle. There’s no arguing that WordPress is the current day blogging platform of choice, but unless you can come up with a good theme, you’ll spend too much time working with the framework and not enough time on the content, which is really the thing you should be working on.
A year ago or so, I discovered Thesis by DIYthemes (affiliate link), and it has served me well in being able to get a blog up quickly. It still does. It does a lot of the heavy lifting, so I don’t have to spend time worrying about sizing columns, changing fonts or color schemes, etc. But different businesses have different needs, and sometimes your blog site needs something more from a marketing standpoint.
A few weeks ago, as I was looking for that solution, my friend Roxanne Darling turned me on to the Genesis Framework from StudioPress (affiliate link). I was intrigued, and used my photography site as the guinea pig to walk it through its paces. I was sold. I proceeded to overhaul my social media site too, and then I decided it was time to merge inacoolhour.com, my personal blog, into this one, and used it here too.
I still believe Thesis is a best of breed solution, and I will continue to use it where applicable, but if you have a more complex solution that goes beyond a blog and you need a flexible framework with child themes tailored to your situation, Genesis is a great way to go.
I’ve been working with Maui Prep on their social media campaign for several months, and we went live with their new website this morning after introducing it at meeting with some of the parents. A proud day for all involved.
I was privileged to be working with a superb team at the school, and am excited that Maui Prep is leading the charge by being one of the few schools around using social media.
Read more about the process at their site ->
Originally published at Kaiscapes Internet Consulting.
In 1990, while working at Amdahl, I transitioned from system programming on mainframes to system administration on Unix machines, primarily those from Sun Microsystems. This is a job where you’re constantly swapping motherboards, disk drives and other peripheral devices around, trying to keep desktop computers on desks and servers in machine rooms.
I remember cringing every time we’d toss a dead hard drive into the trash, and there were no LCD’s to speak of back then, so all the monitors were CRT’s; big heavy ones. They’d end up in the trash too, more often than not. Amdahl was a hardware company, as was Sun (whom I worked for later, at a different stage of my career). Whatever I saw in terms of e-waste on my side of the world was probably nothing compared to the toxics that were being disposed of in other parts of the company.
To this day, I build and maintain my own computers, swapping out motherboards, drives and so on to eek just a little more life out of them. When I do give up a machine, it’s usually because it’s too far gone and it’s more economical to buy parts and build a new one. And these days, whole computers have come down in price so much that it’s almost not economical to build my own anymore, unless I have some serious requirements no one else out there can fulfill.
We’re all deeply dependent on our electronics, like it or not. This is probably more true of geeks like me, but look around your dwelling. Refrigerators, stoves, microwave ovens, TV’s, washing machines, cars… these days they all have chips in them, and some actually are computers of a sort. None of these are designed for non-toxic disposal. When we’re done with them, whether it’s because they’ve given up the ghost or it’s just more economical to get new machines, they’re made to disappear. And when you live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, you become acutely aware where they go when they disappear. In some places, like on Maui, there are e-cycle programs to help keep them out of landfills or water sources, but not everywhere, and not for everything.
We can’t stop consuming these things, unless we’re willing to go back to the dark ages, and I don’t think many of us are. I’m certainly not. What it comes down to is we need better design for our gadgets. Annie Leonard says it very well in her latest video…
Socialnomics by Erik Qualman is one of the most intriguing and eye opening books about social media I’ve read to date. The Social Media Revolution video he created became a part of my workshops early on, and it still continues to make an impact when I show it today.
Since the release of the video last year, the social Web has evolved at an amazing pace and many of the statistics have changed. Qualman recently refreshed the video and graphics to reflect these changes. Enjoy the new video, and hop over to his website to see the updated statistics…
Originally posted at Kaiscapes Internet Consulting.
“How about Thursday at 2:00?”
“Nope… how about 3:30?”
“Can’t do it. 5:00?”
Don’t you wish there was a way to schedule meetings across different calendaring systems without having to actually meet to compare calendars?
I ran across a post by Mashable about Tungle on a friend’s Facebook page and decided to check it out. I’ve always wished for a universal calendar that syncs across other calendar systems so I could schedule meetings more easily, or allow people to schedule meetings with me without confusion on either end.
It actually works! I’m amazed. Check it out and Tungle with me…
I chuckled when I first saw the fake Facebook email messages this morning, but then I realized it isn’t a laughing matter. This one is cleverly disguised as something that might actually come from Facebook, and if you’re distracted, tired or not really paying attention, it’s an easy trap to fall into. Sure enough, Google revealed several articles about email messages like this one. Sounds pretty nasty.
Right off the bat, I knew it had to be fake, because it came to an email address Facebook doesn’t know about, and certainly not the one I use to login with.
There are several other clues that are telltale signs to the trained eye. The first is the address it came from:
Notice the domain “facebookmail.com”? Dead giveaway.
Another clue: mouse over the thing they want you to click on—a link, button, whatever (but DON’T PRESS IT!!). Raise your finger off the button for safety.
Unless they’ve done something to mask it, you’ll see the actual link revealed in the lower left of your browser or (usually) mail application.
See the stuff after “facebook.com”? That link isn’t going to facebook.com.
Slow down, be aware where that mouse cursor is and keep that virus protection up to date. Don’t fall victim.
Did anyone catch the first two episodes of Download: The True Story of the Internet on the Science Channel last night? The first episode was about Netscape. Some memories, some familiar faces. Feels weird seeing part of my career on national TV. Final episodes tonight.
Aloha…
