Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
I haven’t had time to writing anything for Web Teacher today because I’ve written two posts for BlogHer.
The first is What I Remember about the 2013 Oscar Show. I figure if Dori can write about the Oscars at Backup Brain, I can too.
The other post is Moms Join Facebook to Creep on Kids. Oh, REALLY, Mashable? This one is about an unrealistic infographic that Mashable published.
Please check them both out.
If you have a Posterous blog you are probably concerned about losing your content now that Posterous is closing down. Posterous has systems in place that will allow you to back up your content or export it to another blog.
You can move it all to a wordpress.com blog in a few easy steps.
Being a woman in the male-dominated business world does have its disadvantages, but a growing movement towards equality in all things is helping ladies in every professional niche to be both better and better-paid at what they do, and one of the fields most notable for this growth is blogging. Women are coming to dominate the blogosphere as visitors realize that they’re unique wit and wisdom offer a fantastic take on nearly any topic, making that sector one of the fastest growing for female entrepreneurs.
Meet women in your niche for the purpose of both friendship and professional development by checking out any of these four female blogging meetups for 2013:
If you’re a female blogger who will attend only a single industry event in 2013, the Blissdom Conference is an easy choice! Promising to be the premier destination for women on the web yet again this year, Blissdom will offer three days of speeches, panels, workshops, and the best networking opportunities that you’ll ever come across.
Besides its structure, Blissdom also provides an electric atmosphere of energy and creativity given the hundreds, or even thousands, of unique minds in attendance, giving you the opportunity to make alliances, gain inspiration, and learn new techniques in a setting that is fully conducive to making you better at what you do. No matter which aspects of the event you take advantage of, you’re guaranteed to leave refreshed, rebooted, and ready to tackle the web with renewed vigor!
When and Where: This year’s Blissdom Conference will take place at the Gaylord Texan hotel in Dallas, Texas, from March 21-23, 2013, bringing together ladies involved in a wide array of disciplines to share their blogging expertise.
Whether you’re a lone blogger or a burgeoning web guru, your business needs every edge it can get when it comes to taking over the internet and being truly successful, and what better way to learn the secrets of success than by hearing directly from women who have made it happen for themselves?
The 2013 Women Business Owners Conference will bring together ladies from a wide variety of businesses, online and offline, in order to allow each to share their stories in the interest of giving everyone in attendance a leg up on their competition. Jam-packed into a single day, this low-cost event presents a fantastic opportunity to take your business-savvy to a new level, helping you to tackle your blogging endeavors from a fresh perspective once you return to your desk.
When and Where: Take in this one-day event by heading over to the Anaheim Marriott Hotel in Anaheim, California on March 22, 2013.
Another of the premier industry events for female bloggers is the aptly named BlogHer conference, a gathering of women from every niche and every level of success that aims to help each to achieve new goals. You’ll take part in technical workshops and networking events, learning from some of the most prominent ladies in the business and allowing yourself to leave with a fresh mindset and new toolkit in the pursuit of your own personal success.
When and Where: If you needed an excuse to visit the exciting metropolis of Chicago, Illinois, now you’ve got it; BlogHer ’13 will take place in the Windy City from July 25-27, 2013.
Creativity is the name of the game at the Snap! Conference, with each aspect of the event helping to make you a better and more interesting blogger with its three days of dreaming, planning, and learning to implement. Instead of a rigid schedule alone, Snap! provides a place for bloggers to share their thoughts and ideas, inspiring one another all the while, and leading to each attendee becoming a more well-rounded and engaging writer.
When and Where: Visit the unique town of Salt Lake City, Utah, from April 18-20, 2013, in order to take part in this year’s Snap! Conference!
Writer Jessy Troy is the creativity blogger behind TekSocial.
Last time I checked, I had 12,000+ tweets on Twitter, where I’m @vdebolt. It took me several years to achieve that number – watching my grandkids tweet, they could do 12,000 a day – but I’m just a few-a-day kinda gal. I was thinking about the various ways I use Twitter in a day or a week. Here are five ways.
I’m required by a couple of my jobs (BlogHer Tech Section Editor and Web Standards Sherpa Community Manager) to tweet about whatever new content is ready for outreach and promotion.This is a triple treat most of the time, with a tweet, a Facebook status update, and a Google+ mention.
I consider writing for my blogs to be part of my work day, so I tweet about what I write here when it’s something original. I seldom tweet useful links posts. I have another blog that I keep up on a regular basis as part of my “work day” but I seldom tweet about it. That blog is First 50 Words. It’s a writing practice blog and I don’t tweet the daily prompt because I haven’t found that many people are interested in them.
Are you aware of the number of bloggers who do not include a contact email anywhere on their blog? It’s epidemic. I often contact people via Twitter to ask them for their email address, especially if I want to feature them in a post on BlogHer.
Casual conversations about weather, TV shows, books, or what some boneheaded politician just said are frequent subjects of my tweets. Or I reply to someone else’s conversational tweet with a remark that I hope will get a conversation going.
In the vein of conversation, I often tweet or retweet strictly local information about my city and state.
I sometimes comment on my personal life: where I’m going, what I’m doing, what I’m cooking or where I’m eating, how I’m feeling. I don’t do much of this because it’s boring, but I think people need to be a little open about them selves, even in a public forum. Not completely open, but open enough to seem real.
I’m not sure I have a brand, but if I did it would be something like “Web Teacher is that site that shares all sorts of useful stuff about web design and web education.” So I tweet a lot of links to stories written by others that tie in with what I do here. Supporting myself by supporting my community might be another way to state it.
I tweet and retweet things that support women. Not that I don’t support men – see item 3 – but I love to point out the technical achievements, great writing, great presentations, and other accomplishments of women in general. (That’s probably why I like working for BlogHer so much. I get to do things in support of women every single day.)
Liberal is a term that applies to me, so I tweet things in support of the liberal agenda and of various liberal causes.
I know some celeb with a gazillion followers doesn’t care what I think, but Twitter has opened up a channel that lets everyone comment on everything. So I send Scott Simon tweets about his latest turn of phrase on NPR or tell Eliza Dushku that I mentioned her in a blog post about Swipp. I don’t consider these tweets in the conversation category, because I don’t expect a response. Sometimes I retweet celebrities if they say something I think people will want to know, for example when Dana Delany announces you can finally get China Beach in a boxed set of DVDs, I consider that worth broadcasting with a RT.
These 5 kinds of tweets are a consistent pattern with me. I hope the people who follow me on Twitter find at least one of these five topics of interest to them. Do you have a Twitter pattern? What are your topics?
The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue
I’ve never heard Sharma Kabani speak, but I can almost feel her voice reaching out of this book: an enthusiastic and very present voice that inspires listeners to make the leap into social media marketing. She’s full of encouraging quotes, examples of success, and tips to help marketers understand various social media sites and how to use them to best advantage. The book feels as if it was created from her speaking engagements and carries a vibe that feels like she’s right in front of you with a set of slides.
Kabani begins by explaining basics like the need for a website and/or a blog. She talks about SEO and what social media marketing is and is not. Then she goes through a series of chapters about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. These chapters about specific social media sites are all organized in the same way. She explains,
The chapters about individual sites provide both basic how-to information and tips on marketing that are valuable and specific.
The book also has chapters about using video, about creating a social media policy, social media case studies from real businesses and advertising on social media.
Kabani made occasional statements that seemed a bit arbitrary to me, for example, you should blog twice a week, or you should synchronize all your social media efforts with ping.fm. I think she would certainly be more nuanced than these statements appear if you could engage in a Q&A with her.
Summary: A helpful guide for marketers who are unfamiliar with social media marketing and strategy.
A review by Virginia DeBolt of The Zen of Social Media Marketing (rating: 4 stars)
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book, but my opinions are my own.
I frequently work with content that gets moved from one place to another. Sometimes I get guest posts here on Web Teacher that have to be formatted from one source or another into WordPress. Most often, however, I work with content from a BlogHer network blogger who is putting content from their own blog on BlogHer.com.
Sometimes it can take me as long as a hour to clean up the HTML that gets pasted in from one blog to another. It is possible to write clean HTML in a blog, but it doesn’t always happen.
Clean HTML is the bare essentials. It is content with just the tags that format it as headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. There isn’t any style information added to the tags about alignment or margins or text colors. Here is an example of clean HTML.
Clean HTML is content formatted with an appropriate HTML tag that describes the content. The example above has some paragraphs, a couple of headings, and some links. The tags (p, h3, a) describe exactly what the content is semantically. There is nothing added to the HTML that affects alignment, spacing or anything that is related to the appearance of the content. There’s another name for clean HTML. It’s called POSH, or plain old semantic HTML.
Here’s an example of HTML that is not clean or semantic.
In this example, the tags do not describe the content. A div is a generic container, so we don’t know if what is enclosed in the div is a paragraph or something else. The style rule in every div should not be in the HTML at all. Style rules belong in the style sheet, not the HTML. When you move that blog post with its added style rules to another blog, the styles in the HTML may be completely inappropriate in the new location. It’s okay to have a class assigned to an element in your HTML, it that class is really needed. In this example, I don’t think it is. Both the class and the style rules could be eliminated by formatting the text properly as paragraphs.
A big part of it is what you touch and what you don’t touch.
I’ve outline items you do touch regularly in WordPress in this image. Other blogs look approximately the same.
Touching the other icons, such as the alignment icons or the color and size icons generally add unwanted style rules to your HTML.
The indent and outdent icons will create a blockquote if you apply it to text. (Use the quote icon if you want a blockquote.) The indent and outdent icons are for making nested lists.
There are tags that create text that is either bold or italic. They are the <b> and <i> tag sets. If you actually want something to be bold instead of <strong> or italic instead of <em> you can do it in the HTML pane of your blog. The HTML button is in the upper right corner of your blog post window. When you click it you see the HTML you’re creating.
You can type anything you want in this window. HTML works with opening and closing tags that turn formatting on and off. So <b> says start bold here. Then </b> says stop the bold here.
Suppose you wrote this sentence:
I love my dog, Buster.
If you want the word Buster to be bold, click into the HTML pane, find the word Buster, and put the; tags around it, like this:
I love my dog <b>Buster</b>.
You can do the same with book titles or foreign words using the <i> tag.
If you find yourself fussing around with margins or borders around images, or the colors of text, or the alignment of text and images, or the spacing between things each and every time you enter something in a blog post, then you are muddying up the HTML. Appearance should be taken care of in the style sheet. The blog post window should be used only to enter content. All those things you fuss with can be in the style sheet so they can apply every time you insert an image or create a heading.
I’m not going to explain how to modify your CSS rules in this post, but I may write a separate post about it at some point. I did talk about how to hunt down the rule you need to modify in the CSS in a presentation from 2009.
Less fussing with appearance is really the key. Making your style sheet do all the fussing for you is the goal. Then you won’t need to do anything with your post but add the content and mark it up with the proper formatting using semantic tags for headings, paragraphs, lists, images, and blockquotes.
Copyblogger published this infographic which struck me as pretty accurate. It mentions 15 newbie mistakes that might jump up and bite you in WordPress. Get a look at it after the break.
Continue reading “Don’t Let Yourself Look Silly in WordPress (Infographic)”
