The New York Times is reporting this week that blog use is waning among teens and that teens are instead favoring services like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe that’s a good thing.
I look back at my Livejournal that I wrote in my late high school and early college years (I can’t bring myself to delete it but it’s private so that only I can read it) and now I think it’s all pointless, snippet-y drivel that’s not drastically different than what the average person posts on Twitter or Facebook today (those services didn’t exist then).
Blogs are the perfect platform for meaty content that you want indexed by search engines but I don’t think the average (or above average like I always thought of myself) teenager is out there to create meaty content. I can go back and look at a good chunk of what I was posting online in my teens and, I’m a little bit shocked to see, none of it is anything that I’d want showing up in Google so it’s probably a good thing that Twitter and Facebook posts start to fade away after a few days.
On one hand we’re telling teens to be careful what they post on Facebook because it might come back to bite them when they look for a job later and on the other we’re worried they’re not blogging when blogs get scrapped and would be even harder to scrub out of Google’s search results.
It’s fine with me that teens aren’t blogging because my experience tells me that teens aren’t blogging anything they’d want out there in a couple years anyway.
My junior year of high school, the administration introduced a 15 minute “sustained silent reading” period each day. The dictionary definition of sustained that I think they were referring to is “be prolonged for an extended period” and I’ve always been a voracious reader so I found 15 minutes to be so far from sustained that I felt the need to be snarky and bring books like Where’s Waldo? to school with me (yes, I was 16 at the time). Then I discovered short stories where I could read the entire story in that limited 15 minute time slot at the beginning of calculus class.
One of the first short story books I read was The Rose and The Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block and since then I’ve been seriously hooked on the concept of looking at classic stories from other angles. This concept is why Ever After is my favorite movie and why when I first heard about the book Wicked in 2004 I was instantly hooked (though Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister is probably better and actually my favorite of Gregory Maguire’s books).
I spent all of last week in New York sightseeing and attending the BlogHer conference. Get ready because it’s going to take me weeks to tell you everything I have to say about my trip.
Tuesday night, my mom and I went to see Wicked. I knew that one thing I absolutely had to do while in New York was see a Broadway show and even though I saw Wicked in San Francisco last year, it was so good that I couldn’t resist seeing it again.
I won’t spoil the plot details of Wicked for you but I will tell you that everything about the musical is amazing and you should first read the book (the beginning is slow but power through it because the middle and end are great) and then go see the musical. Even my brother has expressed interest in seeing it so I might go see it again in San Francisco with him and my sister who’s obsessed with steampunk and would thus love the set design and costumes.
Friday night, I got the icing on my Wicked cake.
One of the events during the BlogHer conference was the Voices of the Year community keynote where 15 amazing bloggers presented posts they had done over the past year live.
I wouldn’t say I’m an expert by any means but my brother decided he’d like to start a blog so he looked to me for advice. After we got him set up to share my hosting and got WordPress installed on his domain, I told him that writing is the most important part of blogging but there are other parts to consider too like design, marketing, and back end management. I could either:
Let him figure it out himself
Give him a list of the resources I’m using and then he can figure out if he wants to and how to implement those resources on his own
Set up what I’m using for him and then he can edit and play with things from there
He picked option number 2.
I’ve made a personal vow never to blog about blogging or making money online but since I was already compiling this list of resources anyway, we will consider a blog part of social networking and consider this post a how to get started with a type of social networking post.
Domain Name Registration
mydomain.com I’ve been using these guys to buy domain names for many, many years. Great prices. Make sure you buy a .com name. If the name you want isn’t available as a .com then think of an even better name.
Hosting
godaddy.com Once you’ve purchased your domain name you’ll need hosting. Go Daddy will provide you with DNS servers, enter that info back at mydomain.com and then install WordPress via Go Daddy’s “Your Applications” panel.
hostgator.com While Go Daddy is easy to use, I’ve since moved to Hostgator where I have a VPS. This isn’t necessary for one small blog, but I have the websites of several family members sharing my hosting at this time so Hostgator is a better option because we can each have separate log in information for our own websites but only pay for one account.
WordPress Plugins
Akismet Comment spam protection also by the creators of WordPress. You’ll need to create an account at wordpress.com to get an API key.
Broken Link Checker No one likes to click on a link only to find it broken, this plugin will check for broken links every couple days and alert you to any new finds.
Clean Archives Reloaded Generates a chronological list of posts along with how many comments they have received.
Future Calendar Marks the days you’ve already scheduled posts for in the future. Handy if you’re planning to be away from your computer for vacation or don’t have time to write new posts on a regular basis.
RSS Footer A tool to put a message at the bottom of each of your RSS items. I use this to put a copyright notice and link back to the original post in case someone republishes my RSS feed on another site.
SEO Slugs Filters out commonly used English words to make your post URLs shorter and more keyword focused. For this to be effective you need to be using a permalink structure (found in your WordPress > Settings > Permalinks panel) that uses the post name, I have mine set to a custom structure that uses only the post name.
Shockingly Simple Favicon Helps you get a small image of your choice to represent your website in browser tabs and bookmarks.
Sociable Puts icons to submit your posts to social bookmarking and networking sites of your choice at the bottom of each post.
Subscribe to Comments Let’s people get replies to their comments by email.
Thesis Openhook You only need this plugin if you’re using the Thesis theme, but if you are using the Thesis theme this makes it very easy to customize.
WordPress.com Popular Posts & WordPress.com Stats For WordPress.com Popular Posts to work you need WordPress.com Stats. These plugins require a wordpress.com API key like Akismet. I use these in combination to automatically generate the popular posts list in the left sidebar.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Automatically generates a list of related posts at the bottom of each post.
Theme/Design/Layout
I’m using the Thesis theme for it’s ease of customization.
I purchase images and icons from istockphoto.com, I prefer vector illustrations for my design elements since they can be manipulated and scaled to different sizes and applications more easily than photographs. You will need knowledge of Adobe Illustrator or a lot of patience to learn Adobe Illustrator in order to take full advantage of vector illustrations. I choose istockphoto.com over any of the other available stock art options because I’ve been a contributor there for over 5 years now.
To really be able to customize your layout you’re going to need to know a bit of HTML. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide from O’Reilly is, in my opinion, the best book available for learning HTML. I have the second edition (just HTML at that time, XHTML did not yet exist) which I got when I first got interested in web design in the mid-90s (back when you had to create the site entirely in code because what you see is what you get editors also didn’t exist) and it is the most used book of all the books I have ever owned.
Advertising/Affiliate Programs (this list is limited to only the programs I have actually received a payment from)
Linkshare The only affiliate program for iTunes and I love iTunes.
Widgets
Widgets are the items WordPress displays in your sidebar (or sidebars depending on how you set up your theme). These are what I’m using on this site.
Search
WordPress.com Popular Posts The plugin I talked about above will generate a list of posts by popularity according to the criteria you select.
Recent Posts
Tag Cloud
Text/HTML I manually write the HTML to display my 125×125 button along with the code other bloggers can use to link up to my site and I paste in the generated HTML for my Facebook badge.
Google Tools
Google Analytics For tracking stats (Google Analytics is not updated constantly and doesn’t track out clicks so I also use sitemeter.com).
Feedburner Allows you much more control over your RSS feed than the WordPress default. Also allows email subscriptions and allows you to track how many total subscribers you have.
Google Webmaster Tools Use this to submit your site to Google so that they know to crawl and index your pages. Also allows you to see incoming links and the anchor text others are using to refer to your site.
Google Reader To be a good writer you have to be a good reader. I use Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of other blogs and to research blog topics and interact with other bloggers.
Promotion
Whatever you do, don’t spam. Only promote yourself on sites where you are active in other ways and make sure that self promotion is never your #1 use of any service not meant for self promotion.
On Twitter and Facebook, I post a status message about writing a new blog post with a link each time I post something new.
Put your URL in your email signature (for any personal email addresses that is, I don’t promote my blog to my work contacts but depending on your employment situation it might be an option for you)
Put your URL in any online profile or form that has a space for it
Put your URL in forum signatures (keep your signatures short and sweet so they don’t come off spammy)
Comment on other blogs when you have a meaningful, relevant comment to make. Don’t just post the comment for the purpose of garnering a link back to your own blog and don’t put your URL as your name or as part of your comment. Use your first name, nickname, or initials as your name so you don’t look spammy. Don’t use a keyword as your name when commenting on other blogs, I delete those comments immediately.
Pages
Pages are similar to posts but don’t show up in your blog entries timeline. Some pages you may want to create include:
About (either about you or about your blog)
Archives
Contact
Blog Roll A blog roll is a list of other blogs that you read and enjoy that may be relevant to the content of your own blog.
ProBlogger I particularly recommend his 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook, I find it highly useful to have a printed copy to work through from time to time. I put a post it note on each task, work through it at my own pace until all the post it notes are gone then put them back and repeat.
Do you have any absolute essentials that you think I’m missing out on?
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links and I will receive a small compensation if you make a purchase or sign up for a service after clicking through them. Affiliate links are an easy way to support Carrie Actually at no additional cost to you.
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Tuesday night, my mom and I went to see Wicked. I knew that one thing I absolutely had to do while in New York was see a Broadway show and even though I saw Wicked in San Francisco last year, it was so good that I couldn’t resist seeing it again.
Here at 