Mar
10
2010
Session 1 – How to Become a Social Media Guru and Make WordPress your Bitch
Sabrina Dent – @sabrinadent
Sabrina kicked day two off with her talk on a managible approach to social media using WordPress as a platform. As she later admitted herself, being the first speaker up after three hours sleep in the previous 72 was probably not the best idea in the world, but nevertheless she delivered a very nice presentation.
Sabrina’s talk concentrated on the big three social media sites: LinkedIn, Twitter and facebook, and how you can use your WordPress blog as the hub between all three.
- Linkedin more focused than other social media sites. Unless you have your own domain, it’s likely that your LinkedIn page will be the first result in google results. For that reason, be sure that your LinkedIn profile is as you want it.
- You can pull feeds from WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile. Everybody should do this. This is one of the best ways to let your LinkedIn connections know that you have a blog. Can get traffic from LinkedIn page to blog.
- LinkedIn groups? Useful for some applications, but often not for many others. Very few groups done well. If you’re going to use groups, make sure that you’re the group owner, rather than just a member. Build your own community rather than join somebody else’s.
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Mar
8
2010
Here are my notes from the various sessions that I attended on day one at the recent (excellent) WordCamp Ireland event, which was held at Langtons in Kilkenny.
Session 1: Building Online Communities
Leo Ibanez and Loughlin O’Nolan – @CommunityStorm
Leo and Loughlin had the unenvious job of being first up on Saturday morning. I had high hopes for this talk. I was hoping to come away with a bunch of specific actions that I could take to help to build and grow an online community using WordPress and other online tools. Unfortunately, I found the presentation was a little unfocused and lacked a clear message. The first half (or more) of the talk was given over to a protracted history of online communities, back to email and Usenet in the late ’60s and early ’70s – unnecessary and irrelevant.
The meat of the presentation revolved around using facebook, Twitter, YouTube, commenting on forums and your blog to develop reputation and a community. The presentation could have greatly benefited from real, practical examples of what steps to take, and what a developer/site owner can expect to achieve.
One interesting takeaway from this presentation was the observation that comments on blogs peaked around 2007, and that since then the conversation has moved elsewhere. That is, rather than leave a comment on your blog your visitors are more likely to post a link and a comment on Twitter or facebook. Because the conversation has moved elsewhere, you have to too.
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Mar
8
2010
WordCamp Ireland finished up yesterday afternoon at about 3pm. I took copious notes over the weekend, which I hope to edit down into something vaguely intelligible over the next few days.
In the meantime, huge congratulations are due to Sabrina Dent (@sabrinadent), Katherine Nolan (@doChara) and their team, who put together a packed programme, and a fabulous event with a great vibe.
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Feb
28
2010
Having flirted with Typo and Mephisto in the past for this blog, I eventually switched all of my blogs/websites (bar one) over to WordPress. In my view, there is simply no more powerful, or easier to use blogging platform than WordPress.
Next weekend, March 6 & 7, Kilkenny plays host to Wordcamp Ireland – a WordPress conference/camp/general love-in. I booked my ticket months ago, but the missus, hot on the heels of a Social Media course that she’s doing hosted by Krishna De (nothing but excellent feedback, by the way), has decided that she’s going to tag along as well.
To their immense credit, the organisers of Wordcamp have gone out of their way to make the event family friendly, with supervised play areas, free meals for the kids, and so on. So, we’ve decided to go along en famille. Should be an opportunity to indoctrinate them at early age. (As an aside my 4.5 year old mentioned the other day that she has to “get the internet” on her toy laptop – don’t need to worry about her).
The only problem will be deciding which talks to attend. The camp has been organised as three parallel tracks, with a few plenaries. Great content, great speakers, and to top it all off, a fantastic price: €50 for a day and a half, including lunch on both days – outstanding in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Can’t wait! See you at #wordcampirl.
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Jun
18
2008
In my last post, I mentioned that I was considering moving back to WordPress. We’ll I’ve gone ahead and done it.
Unfortunately, mephisto was getting too frustrating to use, and in particular the lack of a webservice API to allowing blogging clients to post made it untenable to continue.
To effect the port I followed the instructions in this post. In general, it all went fine, and without a problem. I have noticed a few caveats which will require a bit of manual work:
- mephisto does not have the concept of a page, in the same way that WordPress does. When you convert the one post categories in mephisto, these show up as regular posts in WP. I had to manually create WP pages, and cut and past the content in.
- I will have to manually move the assets (images) over from mephisto to WP. In fact, I’ll probably move them to a 3rd party (e.g. Flickr or Smugmug), and not have to deal with porting them again.
Other than those relatively minor niggles, everything appears to have gone just fine. Many thanks to those who wrote the relevant scripts.
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