CT Biz Blogs

Today I wanted to share a bit of what I do behind the scenes to keep friends’, clients’, and my own blog running.

One of the first things I do is make my rounds: I check every blog I’m responsible for, to see how it looks and see if there are any new posts. I read everyone’s posts with eager anticipation — these are folks new to blogging and it’s exciting to see how they’re doing and what they’re saying.

There’s been a bit of a pause for a few of our client bloggers, but we’re back on track. Kim Fawcett (Your Voice), Anthony Gordon (Integrated Health Management), and Valorie Luther (Creative Concepts) are getting the hang of it.

Well, Valorie already has the hang of it, and she really understands what blogging is about, as her last post on blogging and ethics, shows.

I’ve been especially impressed with Kim Fawcett’s blogging lately. She’s written some great, from-the-heart posts in the past few days, with her thoughts on the war, and on emergency contraception. These took courage to post, but I think if you’re going to be an honest politician in this day and age, that takes a lot of courage, too, to face down all the detractors and cynics. Blogging is surely one way to show people what you’re made of.

Sometimes there are formatting issues in some folks’ posts, usually when copying from MS Word is involved. I go in and fix those up immediately. I look at the posts in edit mode, and look at the actual HTML code, make sure it’s correct, and take out the extra bits Word puts in that mess up the look of the blog.

I also check for comment spam. These blogs are new, so there’s no spam yet, which is nice. I’ve got email notification, so that if there’s spam, I’ll know. They all use a spam blocker, Akismet, which is ready for any attempts. But even the best software won’t block out everything, so I’m watching, too.

Next I try to write a post or start a post in my own blog. I’m experimenting with different blog editors, to see if there’s something that I can whole-heartedly recommend to novices. I’ve found some ok software, but nothing that gets an A+ yet.

I’m also working on technical issues on my own blog — I’m getting deep into the template, because I want to update the look, and also move up to WordPress 2.0. I’ve installed a local version of my blog on my computer. This isn’t simple, because WordPress pages aren’t actually HTML, they’re output as PHP, which basically means that the posts don’t exist as independent documents you can look at. They’re built from a database and a bunch of code.

This is a good thing, really, but it means that to look at the pages on my computer, and to have a test-bed for my tweaks and upgrades, I needed to install a program that turns my desktop computer into an Apache server.

One resource that helped me do that was a site called Urban Giraffe. John’s got an excellent series of articles on How to Install Wordpress on Your Own Windows Computer, which gave me valuable tips and saved me a lot of time.

I highly recommend reading his blog if you’re using WordPress.

These are some of the things that are keeping me busy these days, and getting me out of bed full of anticipation for what the morning will bring. (Well, the smell of coffee gets me out of bed, and the caffeine does the rest!)