Guess what!! The modern-day mobile phone can do a ton of things! For example, I am creating this blog post from a phone. Think about how close we are to have a full computer in our pocket! All you have to do is add a projected keyboard and screen on to flat surfaces, and you would have an awesome mini computer.

Minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but the WordPress app does not support setting a featured image.

I was on at the airport today and had a great conversation with a student studying information security. Our conversation made me think, and I took a few notes as we were talking.  This post is a partial result of our chat – Thank you Mark for the conversation, and I wish you the best in your studies!

I am no conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination nor do I have my head buried in the sand. I do not believe that every corporation is out to get your information, every government is monitoring every mouse click, or there is a fleet of hackers trying to steal your specific identity. That being said, a digital trail is real and anyone’s actions on a computer or network, including the Internet, is subject to monitoring. Yes, there are a lot of bad people online, and they do very bad things if given the chance.  So, I work not to give them a chance wherever and whenever possible.

Exercise good judgment is the first and foremost consideration. If your digital life was presented before you would it be a comfortable experience or would you start feeling a little squeamish?

The Internet is not anonymous so don’t treat it that way. Always expect that your identity can be revealed.  Accidents happen, either by the digital service providers revealing information that may not have intended to be public or by the user’s own mistakes in using the service.  This one happens more often than most people realize.  Once information gets out into the digital ether, it is very tough to get it back. Always remember, that someday someone might come looking…

Know where you are going and stick with brands (sites, applications, search, and services) that you trust.

Complete a Personal Digital Security Review regularly.

Clean-up after yourself and don’t leave digital scrapes behind if you can help it.

It is all about minimizing your risk for being digitally hurt. Some good common sense will go a long way to make sure that no unpleasant surprises pop up when you least expect or afford it.

Thanks for allowing us to play with the EC2 Micro Site for Free! I am having fun time playing with it. I am amazed how bad my Linux skills have gotten, but at least I have a new server to play with and learn more about.

I think I am going to move this blog to the Amazon EC2 cloud, so I can learn more about it in the real world. For those looking to do it, I would recommend that you look at the below links.

• http://aws.amazon.com
• http://gregsramblings.com/2010/09/22/my-dive-into-the-world-of-amazon-ec2-and-the-new-crazy-cheap-micro-instance/ (start here!)
• http://gregsramblings.com/2011/01/31/how-and-why-i-moved-my-blog-to-amazon-ec2-from-wordpress-com/ (this one is a very good resource!)
• http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_debian_lamp_server
• http://www.lavluda.com/2007/07/15/how-to-enable-mod_rewrite-in-apache22-debian/

Site Speed is a feature that I am most excited about as it offers us Google’s perspective on the average time it takes to load various pages on our websites.  This is not blinded aggregated benchmarks but the actual load times for various pages on our websites.  Google has given us this powerful and amazing feature.  No more will we have to guess or beat our collective heads into the wall by using various small or inconsistent players in order to help determine page load times.  Do not get me wrong, there are good services that help with this determination, but Google will quickly become the de facto standard for its broad-based consistency and ease of use.

A simple change is required in your Google Analytics Tracking code.  You need to add “_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);” to your tracking code.  Please see the below example for placement.

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER GOES HERE']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);

  (function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

Shortly after adding this code, you will begin to see values for page load times in your Google Analytics account under Content / Site Speed section.  You may need to move over to the beta version of Google Analytics to use this feature.  I did not check the original version of Google Analytics to see if it exists there, as I am delighted with the new beta release of the Analytics site. You can access the Google Analytics beta site by logging into your regular Google Analytics account and then clicking on the link on the top right-hand side of the page.

As noted in the Google blog posting about this feature, you will need to change your date selection to include today; otherwise, you will need to wait until tomorrow to view some results.  This is really a piece of cake to add to your site to give you some solid feedback on how well your site is being loaded on the net. Additional information can be found on Google’s help page for Site Speed.

I have been a huge fan of Google Analytics, and for us small site operators, you cannot beat the analytics for the price point (it’s free – yea!).  Google really has an amazing product here that you can use to enhance your website performance.  After all, nobody likes going to a slow and poky website.

After looking at some of the results for my website, I made a few changes and cut my average load time from 7.1 seconds to 5.2 seconds.  I will be making changes this weekend that I hope will get me into the 4-second range.  I am not sure that I will be able to do much better than that without changing my host and leaving WordPress.  Neither of these two options is highly likely for me to embark on to save another second.  As with many things in life, site performance is always about trade-offs between features/functions, hosting providers, time investment in recoding, and the almighty dollar.  We all need to find the proper balance to ensure our users get the best possible experience from our websites.

This weekend I tried to complete a MySQL upgrade but ran into a glitch.  Luckily for me, my excellent hosting provider, Media Temple, resolve the issue in short order.  This update also corrected a problem I had with one of my favorite plug-ins called “Better Related Posts” by Nicolas Kuttler.  Nicholas is one of my favorite plug-in authors as he is so responsive to his user community.  These two quick wins got me a little more excited about seeing what else I could be update on my blog.

I swung back over and saw that the fine folks at ColorLabs had updated my original theme.  This was a completely unexpected as I thought they considered this a dead theme.  The current update fixed all the glitchy problems I have been fighting with for the last couple of years.  I still look at my blog theme, and I like it as much today as the day I bought it.  Maybe one day in the future I will become bored with this theme and decide to replace it.  Now armed with the update I will not be forced to consider a replacement in the near-term.

Some of a few challenges I still have to work out are the large images that now need to be resized and compressed down based on rolling back to my original theme.  This theme is really the third iteration of my blog, and I have never gone back and corrected the layouts of the prior 200 posts.  Unfortunately, I am not motivated enough to do that even now so I will only correct about the last five posts.  Older posts are going to have to live with the less than optimized layout for this theme.

Cruising through the WordPress plug-ins list, I found JetPack by WordPress and Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron Campbell.  Both plug-ins are excellent, and I consider them great additions to the blog.  The Twitter feed seems to be flaky at best.  I tried four or five different Twitter feed plug-ins before settling in on Twitter Widget Pro.  I would love to see the Twitter plug-ins developers come up with a caching methodology to help reduce the amount of times a messages like “failed to contact Twitter” are displayed to blog visitors.  When you are Twitter and slammed by millions of users per hour, I guess you can understand some of the congestion problems they must experience.

I received a couple good retreats on some of my blog postings and blog traffic is up even considering how much I have neglected it over the last several months.  All good things to report with nothing for me to complain about; how often does that happen?  You really have to appreciate when unexpected good things happen.

]]> http://www.cruseit.com/2011/03/be-happy-in-your-updates/feed/ 1 http://www.cruseit.com/2011/03/what-does-%e2%80%9clike%e2%80%9d-really-mean/ http://www.cruseit.com/2011/03/what-does-%e2%80%9clike%e2%80%9d-really-mean/#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2011 05:09:31 +0000 Michael Cruse http://www.cruseit.com/?p=2286 Thank you Facebook.  Ever since I was a child I knew what the word “like” meant.  Now, the word “like” has taken on a completely new context because of the prevalence of social media.  As a child, I liked people, places, and things, which simply meant I enjoyed them.  Now, I get to “like” things on the net.  But what does “like” really mean?

For example, I have been reading about the horrific tragedy that has recently befallen Japan with the massive earthquake and tsunami.  I have read several stories about the situation unfolding in Japan and found them to be engaging and compelling.  This created a bit of a quandary for me.  Do I “like” them?

By “liking” something, am I endorsing the topic, tragedy, or the ability of the author to write a very good article?  I really must admit that I feel awkward when I “like” an article about a tragic event or anything that is not positive.  Am I completely missing the boat on the concept of “liking” something?  How do I show my appreciation to the author or the website for the content they are providing without seeming to endorse or supporting a topic that I am in strong opposition to or is related to some tragic event?

I do not think I am the only person who has a hard time “liking” an article about a tragic event simply based on the amount of “likes” that I see on so many recent articles.  Maybe on these types of articles, we should start a new craze that instead of liking something we could show our support with a button that says, “Like the article, but not the event.”  I know this is not very practical, but you get the idea.

So is what you “like” clear in your mind?

By no means am I suggesting that you should not “like” this posting or blog ;-)

I do find it crazy to see some of the comments that people make and the pure hate and discontent that are expressed.  Most sane and rational people would agree that moderators should control the insanity and purge the unduly harsh comments.  I was in this camp for a long time but have now come to the opinion that it is the community’s responsibility to control the antisocial types and not the various website operators or content creators.

NPR is instituting a “be polite” policy that will result in comments from “trolls” that do not respond to the website standards to be removed.  On the face of this, it seems like a rational action to help maintain the website standards for all community members.  This line of thinking strikes me as the homeowner association approach to online content.  I am sure most of us can express our “pleasure” in dealing with homeowner associations.  I do not believe the community members will receive this type of active policing by website operators ultimately any better.

The challenge that will arise is the subjective nature of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.  There is just too much fuzziness in standards such as “being polite”, “do not ramble”, and “stay on-topic”.  One moderator may read the comment and considerate it is rude while another moderator may consider the same comment as poignant or witty.  I do not like the idea that my thoughts are potentially being censored or policed by someone else.  Hence, this is why I have my own blog, and I get to police most of my own thoughts.

Ultimately, the community will have to respond to website operators and the standards that they are hopefully applying consistently.  Due to the very subjective nature of this type of moderation, this will ultimately create as much controversy as the inappropriate posts that they are trying to control.  I agree that nobody likes a flame war inside of a comment forum, but the community is ultimately responsible for the standards by which it operates and not the website operators.

I discovered this is an important difference.  My actual needs are very different from what I thought they were.  My iPad met almost all of my computer needs.  This was fundamentally shocking to me as I am a core Microsoft user.  The iPad meet all my computer needs except for those times where I spent an extended period of writing.  Even with an external Bluetooth keyboard, I found the iPad an impractical device for doing extended periods of writing.  For e-mail and calendaring the iPad and my mobile phone was more than enough to meet my needs.  The web browser and other applications I have loaded on the iPad and phone were sufficient to meet all of my other computer needs.  It also gave me the time to realized just how much of the web and web-based applications I use in my daily life.

When my computer crashed, one of my big concerns was the ability remotely to administer our corporate network.  I really do not have to do this very often, but it is always nice to know that I can manage things on the weekend or evenings if an issue arises.  The remote desktop application on the iPad worked perfectly, and I could be nearly as efficient on the iPad as I am on my desktop.  The only time I had to go to my laptop was when I needed to do some extended e-mail composition that involved several rewrites.  Again, I found the iPad’s ability to work with longer written material to be challenging.  I am confident that with some additional efforts, I could have gained sufficient comfort with writing on an iPad that I could say that it was a “gimme” as well.

I realize now that I really do not use my desktop computer for much except out of habit.  I am still more comfortable working on that computer when I write.  I do not fully understand if Microsoft Word and Outlook are just more conducive to writing or is it purely habit that I write better while working on my desktop computer.  I have taken my iPad out and completed some longer writing sessions while mobile.  From a creative writing approach, the work was acceptable, but I still had to edit, edit, edit it on my desktop computer before I was comfortable with the work.

In the final assessment, I think the days of the desktop computer are numbered.  The netbook, tablet, mobile phone, and notebook form factors have relegated the desktop computer nearly obsolete.  The gaming industry will keep the powerful desktop computer around for a while, but for most consumers the desktop computer has outlived its usefulness.  I am fully aware there will always be some subsets of users that will have needs that require a large and powerful desktop computer.  For example, I could not see photographers and video editors ever giving up their mouse for stylus or finger.  That being said, tablet computing has arrived and is changing the way we interact with computer systems and the web.  I do not believe this is hyperbole or an oversimplification of the impact of mobile computing.

Now that my desktop computer is happily raising my electric bill again, I can get a little more writing done and maybe play a game or two.  However, in all reality, I could make do with a tablet and smart phone and be as productive as I am today with a desktop computer.

Thinking of it in a slightly different way, has the tablet or slate computer arrived, or has the state of web applications progressed farther than everyone has even realized?

So now I am sitting here wondering how best to get started again. A long-term writer’s block is never easy to conquer especially when you add procrastination into a busy life and career. It took some time to catch up on the fair amount of reading that has stacked up, but I realized through the process just how much good content there is on the Net. It truly is staggering to realize the sheer volume of information that is at our fingertips. The unfortunate side is that it forces us to undertake the challenge of finding and figuring out what is quality from the voluminous garbage. It is sad to say that one cannot simply rely on the reputation of the website or sources for good decisions on content quality.

Therefore, I think it best that I start slow and slide my way back into the habit of reading and writing nightly. I will bounce from Facebook to twitter and then onto the blog but write something each day. So this I pledge, I will be leaving more comments for authors and reading more to get the brain rolling again. I found just this little journey of the last few nights to be almost therapeutic and relaxing from the stresses of the day.

I have a call to action for everyone to take a few minutes to read some of the great content on the Net and leave the author a comment or two. Trust me all authors greatly appreciate the comments left by readers, and you might just find yourself a little more relaxed and exposed to some new lines of thinking.

When does education stifle or retard technical and usage innovation? I am not sure, but it is something that I have been thinking more about over the past several months. The United States has been a hotbed of technical innovation, and many people I speak have a growing concern that we are losing our edge. Have we become over confident and lost the burning desire to innovate or does a generation simply need to absorb the changes and prime society for another creativity and innovation burst?

I recently finished reading a book (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) that makes the case on why we need to educate people of how to use online social media tools in order for them to effectively participate in the modern online culture. The book is thought provoking especially when you understand the usage differences among various groups of young adults.

After reading the book, I started to agree that we should consider the formal education of students in the YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter services of the world. Then I started to get that nagging feeling that it may be a mistake. If by educating people in the “proper” use these tools, we place them in an artificial “box” that stifles their creativity. I know that my thoughts have been influenced by the educators that I have studied under, and while they did their best to remain neutral, they did impact how I use and see technology.

I understand that the opposite can be said as well. That without a base level of understanding people cannot effectively use technology or improvise new uses and enhancements. This is a very sad but real situation of the modern era. I have worked with many people over the years that know so little about computers or the Internet that they could not participate in an online community. They are effectively locked out of participation and completely bared from being able to contribute to an online innovation.

Where does this leave us, or me? Why, I am still pondering the issue of course. Personally, I have limited my instruction that I give my children on social media and online technologies so as not to influence their usage, one way or another. I am available as a resource should they have questions, but I have opted for a more “play with it” educational approach. I am aware of my own biases regarding an online culture and do not wish to taint their views. Still, I cannot allow them to go into the wilds of the Internet unprepared so neutrality or ignoring the online danger is not realistic either.

We need to find the minimally effective education level for social media and online technologies. Give the youth of the world an understanding of the basic functions and then get out of their way. The younger generations will lead the way with new innovations provided, we do not muck up their thinking with too many rules about what can or should be done with social media and other online technologies.

The future of tech is very exciting, and I cannot wait to see what the next twenty years will bring.

“I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out.” (Roy Blount, Jr.)

To battle a bout of writer’s block, I have found my outline is one of my greatest allies. The outline helps me focus on the purpose of my writing, and it resolves the issue of not being sure what I am writing about in any particular sentence or paragraph. I also incorporate some basic tactics into my writing process such as taking breaks to read other materials, changing the location and time of where I write, distraction elimination, and just doing some free writing to get the flow going. For some reason, procrastination just loves to rear its head when I am struggling with writer’s block. To keep me on track and battling writer’s block, I follow a writing schedule. Lastly, I have recently found the idea of writing for shorter blocks of time to be appealing. In the past, I believed I needed to write for long periods to get into a creative mind frame. By working in frequent, but shorter periods, I am able to maintain a lower stress level and stay in a creative mind frame longer.

What is your approach for breaking through a writer’s block?

I have yet to be impressed with any blog editing software that I used. Most blog editing or authoring applications do not see to offer much in the way of new or additional features that is not contained in the  default WordPress. However, my opinion may be changing now that I have been playing with Microsoft Live Writer. Microsoft Live Writer is not perfect, but in several ways Live Writer is better than the default WordPress post editor.

Live Writer connected fine to my self-hosted WordPress blog and downloaded my tags and categories. I edited  an old post as well as create a new post and page. I liked that I could save posts and pages as drafts both locally or directly to my blog to finish of with the WordPress editor. Live Writer supports scheduling posts for future publishing and posting live to the site. The built in spell check worked well and allowed me to add words to the dictionary. The post images were uploaded correctly to the server and Live Writer allowed me to change, and standardize, the size of my blog images. The application supports plug-ins to extend the functionality, and it appears to have a decent development following with over 100 plug-ins available for download.

I had some display problems with right justified images, but they posted correctly to my blog. This was my only gripe with the software so far and may have more to do with my theme than the application. That is saying something.

So far, so good on the basics.  Now for the more challenging features.

One of the challenges working with the default WordPress editor is html tables. You need to use  a plug-in or code tables by hand. Microsoft Live Writer makes working with tables a snap. You enter the number of rows and columns you wish in your table, and you are done. You can customize the table with boarders and spacing as you need from the table properties. For me, the easy of working with table is the single greatest advantage of the application and why I will be using it for a while.

Microsoft Live Writer will not make you a better writer, nor will it save huge amounts of time, unless you are working with tables, but it is a solid blog editor. It is feature rich and easy to use. Live Writer is an improvement over any default blog editor that I have ever used.

Do you have a great blog editing application that you use that I should check out?

For me, blogging is as much about my enjoyment of writing as it is about learning new technologies. When I started my blog, I did not have great wisdom or insight that I felt I needed to share with the world. I wanted a venue that I could write my thoughts, interact with others, and learn. I am very pleased that I have achieved my objectives. My writing has gotten substantially better, and I have learned much about blogging, SEO, and other kinds of “techie” stuff.

I wanted to get my website to in the most optimal condition, and with a little searching, I found much in the way of improvements. There is actually nothing original in this post. I must give all the credit to the quality bloggers, techies, and software developers that have worked diligently to improve their own sites, write great software, and share information.

I started by running Firefox with the Firebug and YSlow add-ons. These two add-ons work great together and give you a good overview of what is going on with your site. YSlow grades your site based off of several criteria. I started with an “F” grade, how pleasant for me. By the time that I was done, I had my grade to a “B”.

Most of my improvements can be attributed to the fine folks at AskApache.com. I have included links to the relevant sections of their website.

• Turn On Compression
• Add Future Expires Header
• Add Cache-Control Headers
• Turn Off ETags
• Remove Last-Modified Header
• Use Multiple SubDomains

I added a database management plugin that optimizes, among many other things, the SQL database that WordPress utilizes. The plugin is called WP-DBManager and can be downloaded free of charge from the WordPress plugin site. The other plugin, W3 Total Cache, looks very promising, but I am waiting for some information from my host on support for APC or memcache before I proceed. I have also removed some of the elements off my blog. Frankly, I just had a little too much on the homepage.

I completed a few additional adjustments and tweaks that involved my WordPress theme. I took the extra time to  test and document these changes very carefully. Any time the theme is updated by the developer, I will have to implement these last few optimization changes. I only wanted to go through the discovery and testing pain once, so good documentation on my part was required. These last few changes were theme specific, so  I did not list them. Yours will be different then mine, so you need to go through your YSlow output carefully and do some research. Be aware that some changes can improve your YSlow grade but only trim off a small fraction of a second of page load time.  As always, you need to look at the time it take to research and maintain the change, against the improvement in page load time. Frankly, some changes may not be worth the time and effort.

According to websiteoptimization.com, I still have a bit much on my homepage. This is a great site for looking at load times of your site by object type. It performs a pretty thorough analysis of your site and should be read in conjunction with the YSlow output. I have a lot of images on my homepage, and I pay the price for that in download time.

When I started, my site fully loaded in about 22 to 27 seconds on a T1 (1.44Mb) Internet connection. I am currently running about 11 to 12 seconds to fully load. I would like to get this down to the 10 second mark, but it would involve me having to remove additional images off my homepage and make additional theme changes. On my home broadband account, which is much faster Internet connection, my site currently loads in about 4 or 5 seconds.

Hope this is helpful and will spur you into looking at the load time of your site.

The back-end updated was my first chore and that has finally been completed.  WordPress is running the current release, plugins are updated, and all is running happy. This had me a little stressed as I was more then a few releases behind. I just knew that I would have a database issue, but I am most happy to report that all went well. I will give kudos to the kind folks at WordPress.org.  The documentation was excellent and the upgrades completed with zero issues.

Next, I am turning my attention to site design.  This is going to take a bit more time then the back-end updates. I have downloaded the latest version of the theme from the nice person who created it, but I have made several tweaks here and there.  I have it loaded on a test site, but I need to document my changes (this time) before I move it into production.  Some of the spacing and glitches on the current live site will just have to live here for another week or two.

Well, all in good time.  I am happy that this is the way of the computer world, if it was not constantly changing, then people would not need us techie people.

Update:  When I got back to a computer and checked the post, I found that it looked fine. The application worked just as it stated. But I just had to fix some of the typos, wording errors, and add a link.  My writing is bad enough without all the extra damage the little keyboard and my big thumbs were doing to the English language.

Note: This post is being created from my Blackberry Storm. Oh how I miss spellcheck right now.

I found an application on the Blackberry online store that says it is for “mobile blogging”. It is called CellSpin and it is free – you just got to love that price!

The download and setup was quick and easy. The application allows you to post pictures, video, and audio directly to your blog or other social sites.

Text editing is a challenge on a Blackberry Storm, as moving back and forth in text is just plain hard. I never thought I would say that I miss the scroll wheel.  This is one feature of the Blackberry Curve that I miss so very much. The text navigation problems of a Storm will reduce my desire to write “on the run”. It is not a short fall in the application, but with the device. The lack of a spellcheck solution is a shortfall of the program. As you can see by now, I have a hard time spelling kat without a spellcheck program.

Is mobile blogging useful? Sure, for the right type of blog. CellSpin allows for postings to multiple sites, which I found impressive. I can see this being very popular for Facebook and Myspace users. They can snap some video or picture and post it in seconds with the appropriate commentary. That is a very cool feature. 

But I must say that it has more limited application when you leave the social site arena, unless you are very good at writing on your mobile device.  I am not, so I will have to give up on mobile blogging or get an fold-up keyboard for my Storm.

•  First off, I am not going to post daily.  I just do not have the time, but I should post a couple times a week.
• I am going to post about a greater verity of topics that interest me.  It is my blog after all.
• I am not going to be monitoring the web stats as much and try hard to drive traffic.  This is going to be fun…and stay fun.

Oh, and this is test as I had to get WordPress and all assoicated software updated and happy.  I have to upgrade the theme, but I am no rush as it does not appear to be broken currently.

Life is good.

While playing with Microsoft Word 2007, I noticed something new today. When I clicked on “New” under the “Office button“, it showed “New blog post“. I do not remember being able to post to a blog directly from Word before, but then again I do not ever remember looking. Does anyone know if this is a new to Word 2007 feature, or did I just miss it in Word 2003?

Below is the dialog box that appears when you click “New” from the “Office button” menu.

When I selected the “New blog Post” document a wizard opened for me to register my WordPress, or other blog provider, account information. I have a self-hosted WordPress site and had no problems with the account setup. I was surprised that I did not have to make a single change in my WordPress admin panel to get this to work correctly.

Current, Microsoft Word 2007 supports the following list of blog providers. I have only tested it with a self-hosted WordPress site.

Once you have selected your provider, you will need to enter your blog URL and log-in information. Be sure to change only the “<Enter your blog URL here>” text. Then enter your blog’s username and password.  This information is passed in clear text to the blog.  If you have concerns about your blog’s security, you should consider setting up an SSL certificate as the default log-in is most likely completed in clear text.  I have not set my blog to use SSL, but I see no reason why I would not be able to use SSL with Word 2007 by simply changing the “Http” to “Https” in the below URL.

I left the “Picture Options” information as default and had no problems have my images being displayed correctly or having Word 2007 automatically uploading the images to my server. Click “OK” when you have filled out the information, and If it is able to access your blog, it will give you a conformation dialog box.

Outstanding! You are now able to create posts and publish them directly to your blog from Word 2007.

I was able to add multiple categories from the “Insert Category” icon on the Word 2007 Ribbon menu, but not post tags. You are able to open and edit prior posts using the “Open Existing” icon in the Word 2007 Ribbon. The “Manage Accounts” icon will allow you to setup multiple blogs to work with Word 2007.

Once I completed my post, I publish it to my blog by simply using the ”Publish” button. I opened the post in the default WordPress editor and added image titles and post tags. I will look around to see if i can find a way to do this from Word, but so far, no luck. 

I was surprised by how clean the code was in the HTML view.

This is not a bad option for creating posts for a blog. Most of the more advanced formatting worked just fine, which I was very pleased about. Even my image placement worked as designed.  While this is the not the prefect blog post publisher, it is one of the better ones that I have used.

What do you use to create your blog posts? Have a recommendation for an alternative software?

Last month, I wrote a post discussing the potential dangers that social-networking sites can have on future employment. 

In my morning reading, I came across the below news story written by Nate Anderson on ars technica.

Every teacher wants to be the cool guy, the Robin-Williams-in-Dead-Poet’s-Society friend to students, but a court case from Connecticut offers a lesson to teachers-in-training: be careful when you buddy up to students online. While sites like MySpace make it easy to engage in casual contact with students, they also make it easy for the contact to cross professional red lines.

While this teacher clearly stepped over the line with his students, it does illustrate some of the dangers of social-networking sites and conflicts of interest that may have an effect on employment status.

The greater position of authority, or likely hood of promotion, that someone is in, the greater the level of scrutiny that people will be under. If someone is going to be considered for promotion, management and HR will review not only the work ethic and achievements of the candidate, but may review public information to be sure that the person is truly ready for the position.

It is simple, people checkout the people that are in positions of trust. At the beginning of each school year, I search the Internet for any information about my daughters’ teachers and principal. As a parent, I want to “know” the people that have influence over my children. I am fortunate that I have never found anything that was disturbing, but that does not mean that I do not continue to check. And if I find something, you bet I will bring it to the attention of the principal or school board.

Be aware of your online identify – It Matters!

I have spent weeks searching for a new design for my blog. I do not know if this is the look for me, but I like this design better then my last one. Still, I do not know if this is really “me”.

So what do you think? Should I keep this design, go back to the old one, or keep searching for something new?

It is appropriate to remove or prevent comments that are off topic, rude, spam, or contain unacceptable language.

It is unwise to remove or prevent comments based on a difference of opinion. This behavior destroys your blogs credibility and is counter to why we have a commenting system in the first place.

As I have expanded my reading and commenting, I have come across more frequent occurrences of bad commenting and terrible comment management. Over the last two weeks, a full 20% of my comments have never been released from moderation by the blog authors.

I take time to write thoughtful comments, but my comments are not released for posting because they are not in agreement with the blog author’s opinion.

I do not attack or make things “personal” in my comments. I offer a different, but respectful, opinion to the mater that was posted. All should follow the commenting golden rule: “comment on other blogs, as you wish your blog to be commented on.” I do not feel that comments should only reflect the blog author’s opinion to be valid, included and beneficial to a blog.

The only thing that I hate worse than over moderation of comments is the engagement in personal attacks amongst blog authors and commenters.

I find this mainly on political sites. I recently read an excellently written political post, that I totally disagreed with, and the associated comments. A commenter wrote and very good and respectful counter point to the post. The blog author called the commenter “a hate filled ignorant troll of a human for thinking that way”. I posted my support for the commenter, not is opinion, and my disgust at the blog author, which after six days, still has not been released from moderation. I reviewed a few other posts and comments on the blog, and found that this behavior was a pattern by the blog author.

As blog authors and commenters, we should write and engage in respectful dialogs. This is the power of the Internet and the blogging system. We should not eliminate comments from people who are critical of our writing or our views. However, we should not tolerate any derogatory comments directed towards us or other readers. We are able to set a positive standard in our comments, by how we respond to our commenters.

We help by spurring ideas and dialog, we should never stifle it!

If you must have a “free-spirit” MySpace page (or one of the other social sites), then take a few precautions to protect yourself. You should restrict access to these sites and use a nickname rather then your real name. Make sure the pictures you upload and the captions used do not use your real name or other obvious identifiers.

Reviewers tend to go back through the last 5-10 posting and then view posts by topic cloud, categories or complete site searches. You do not want words like “Drunk”, “Partying”, “Cheating”, “Fired” or other negative words to be in your tag cloud, or categories, if it displays you in a negative light. Watch your language as well! This can be a huge turn off for potential employers.

Really it comes down to this: if after you reviewed the site, would you trust that person with your livelihood?

A better idea is to use these tools to promote yourself. Turn social-network sites and blogs into sites that you want potential employers or admissions counselors to visit. Keep this in the front of your mind, especially when blogging, as you frequently post on varied topics.

Write about your industry or other areas that might interest potential employers or admissions counselors. You can have your site show off areas of personal interest, community and positive self growth. If your passion is of a more divisive area like politics, then be fair in your writing and do not demean people that do not share your vision.

Again, potential employers or admissions counselors are not looking for people that will polarize their environments.

Take time to write your “about” or “profile” page carefully. This is another great area to capture the interest of potential employers or admissions counselors. Do not regurgitate your resume or work history. Use this space to do a bit of “personal promotion”, but keep it realistic.

Since I have been reading more blogs, I have come across posting of people who received job inquires solely, or partially, based on their blog. This is not common but the trend in increasing.  Combine a sold blog, or other social-networking site, with well written profiles on job sites (if applicable), and you have a good foundation for someone to gauge your online life.

Remember that once posted on the Internet, you should assume that it will always be on the Internet. What you post is your responsibility, so exercise it wisely and to your advantage.

To-do List (not in any particular order):

1. Get bullet images on my Google Reader widget (right side bar)
2. Go back through 100 posts and correct layout issues and assign tags
3. All images need to be copied to the new server and have the location updated in every posting.
4. Locate widget to display monthly posts better then the recent posts that I am currently using
5. Add widget for XML site map
6. Setup Google Analytics
7. Update Google and Yahoo Meta tags for search engine inclusion
8. Update social and traffic referral sites with new URL (like Technorati Profile)
9. Work with InteseDebate to get my historical comments relocated
10. On new page creation, all images are left justified no mater what I set…more code time.
11. hmmm, give me a minute and I will think of a few more items…

I have determined that my comments are not going to move out of IntenseDebate to the WordPress comment system. Oh well, I may stay with IntenseDebate or not…I am not sure as yet.

So if the blog, acts a little weird over the weekend you will know why.

Wish me luck!

Bloggers will often refer to other bloggers, and sometimes themselves, as the “authority” in their niche. Often people, both offline and online, compete to become the most “powerful” and respected person/company in respect to the entire group. In a sense, blogging is no different. Once you have transformed your once worthless blog into something that others can link back to and claim that what you know must be right, it is definitely a great position that others want to be in.”

This is an honest opinion as I have never even traded an e-mail or comment with Kevin. I was just impressed with his content, as I am with several other bloggers that I have recently discovered.

Well, our little one is not letting me sleep so I thought I would surf a blog or two and work on my pending posts while she is having a late night snack. I have been looking at several WordPress blogs I visit regularly, and I really like the additional features and more flexible design that WordPress offers over Blogger. Here I sit, pondering what to do.

You, most kind visitors of my little blog, Please Help Me With a Couple of Questions:

When I make the jump to WordPress, should I use WordPress.com with a few paid upgrades or should I host with a third party company?

As a tech head, the technical side does not scare me but is it worth hosting at a third party over WordPress.com?

• Has WordPress.com had any service problems?
• Do sites hosted by WordPress.com load slowly? This is a concern of mine as some seem to load very slowly.
• Is WordPress.com slow to implement the open source upgrades?
• Where are you hosted and why?

This is a big decision as I am not looking forward to moving and I do not want to do it again after I make this change.

Thank you for thoughts, opinions and time!

I received an e-mail two days ago asking if I was concerned about my identity and the ability for someone on the Internet to track down additional personal information since I use my real name on my blog.

My response was that I was not really concerned about anonymity due to the following reasons. 

• I do not write about my current employer
• I do not write about anyone associated with my current employer
• If I write about past employers/clients, I do not use their names
• If I write about issues with friends or industry peers, I only refer to them as colleagues
• I mainly write about the IT industry, technology, general management issues, personal development topics, and current events

This way I do not have any conflicts at the office or have to worry about any disclosure issues.

The e-mail made me think about why the vast majority of blogs are essentially anonymous and how I value those blogs compared to other blogs that provide some information about the author.

I have not come across many blogs that are critical or really talk that much about their employer. I have come across one or two true “hate” blogs but the 99.999% of all blogs that I have read are tame to only mildly provocative. Only a couple have ventured into the very provocative or delved headlong into “indecency”. I can understand the need for anonymity if you write a very personal (diary) blog, if you get my meaning, and for the moderate to very provocative blogs. Again, these are minority of the available blogs.

I believe what I write, on my blog and the comments I leave on other blogs. This blog is who I am, and I do not have an issue with letting the world know it. Who knows, if I play my cards right, it might help me down the road with name recognition. If I play it wrong, it will certainly cause me great harm. Once on the Internet, always on the Internet.

Is this why people embrace anonymity?

I always read the “about” link on every blog I visit. I like to get a little glimpse of the author as a real person. I place a higher value on blogs where people do not hide behind the wall of anonymity that the Internet offers.

Whether you write a provocative blog or not, be proud of it and do not hide from your readers. I do not recommend that you post your home address but being just “John Doe in Noware, USA” does not give your readership much of a personal connection to you, the author, as a real human.

I am speaking from the male point of view, and as I write this, I am aware of that fact. I do not have concerns about my personal safety and I do not write a provocative blog. So does this change my thoughts, no, not really. I recommend that people with concerns for personal safety be more obscure, but as a reader, I prefer more information about the author.

I guess it gets down to the simple fact that I value the opinions of people who stand up to be counted in the full sight of the world.

Over the last weekend, I took some time to read my old posts, and for the most part, they suck to varying degrees. I started to edit a few of the posts that were really getting on my nerves, but stopped shortly after I started.

I believe my writing has improved over the last few months, but it has a long way to go before I consider it at an acceptable level. I stopped editing my old posts because I want to be able to look back and see my progress, and frankly, no one ever reads the old posts anyway. Looking at the Google Analytics report, people only read through the last four or five postings whether it be chronological or topic based.

I do edit the posts that bring traffic to my blog from search engines. I review and tweak these posts once ever three or four weeks, and I am amazed at how many small things I still find that needs improvement.

This blog is not what I intended; I wanted a deep thoughtful blog about “life”. I did not create that blog, consciously or unconsciously, I created a blog about my professional life, the Information Technology industry and other work related realities. I have been thinking about renaming the blog to something more appropriate based on the content I post, but I am undecided. I think I need to find the right name and tag before I jump ship.

I have found that blogging is fun, interesting, addictive and great way to improve your written communication skills. I suggest you give it a try! You have nothing to loose but much to gain.

I reviewed the Blogger help site (I am getting better at actually checking for known issues) and found people reporting the same problems but I saw no response from the Blogger team. This is disappointing to say the least.

I have been searching for a new commenting system as I get more comments via the e-mail form then posted due to problems with Blogger comment system.

I believe I have made my final choice and it is (drum roll please…) “Intense Debate“.

Intense Debate was a snap to setup, as it did almost all the work for me, and the integration into the site took all of fifteen seconds to complete. I did not import my prior comments so I do not know how well that works but I would not expect any trouble based on how well everything else has gone so far.

We will give this a try for a while and see if it is smooth sailing or not!

With all the positives in blogging come a few negatives and here is what I have learned so far…

1. Take everything you read that appears to be “news” with a gain of salt. I read all blogs as opinion pieces and not “news” pieces
2. Do not expect a high quality of writing – This blog is an example!
3. Do not expect readers of blogs to be kind in most of their comments
4. Do not expect most blogs to have a great layout

OK, the last item I am going to rant about. This is my real iteration with blogging. If your blog is so busy with ads or “widgets” that a visitor cannot tell content from crap, you have a problem!

Many blogs, that actually have good writers, are so packed with ads and other “widgets” that it makes the sites look like disorganized ad billboards. Or a better yet, maybe it should be called “electronic graffiti”, either way, it causes the blogs to load slowly and it distracts from the intended message. Excessive ads and widgets will bring down the value of the blog in the reader’s mind and reduces the likelihood of returning visitors.

In my opinion, unless you are in the top 10%-15% of blogged sites, in your category, you are not going to create enough cash from PPC ads to make it worth the possible loss of regular visitors.

One other issues I have with blogging sites, if you post daily, or near enough, do not put a months worth of postings on the landing page. Again, the site takes to long to load (even on broadband) and it does not look organized. A week is more then sufficient to catch the reader attention and make them look backwards through time, if they wish. By the way, from what I have read, most blog readers do not read much past the last 3-5 postings. They tend to read forward in time as new posts are added.

To the blogging world: Time to simplify!

I signed up for a service (Blog Explosion) that says it will increase traffic to my blog. Why you ask, especially since this is not an overarching goal of mine? If I have an increase in traffic it will be purely a secondary benefit. The service operates much like Link Exchange.

I visit other people’s blogs and in turn earn credits that will drive traffic to my blog. I would say about 20% of the blogs I have visited using their service have been noteworthy. There are some very, very, good bloggers out there. I am sure that I am in the 80% of average to below average bloggers. As I’ve stated before, I not the most eloquent writer and can barely craft a coherent sentence.

In my opinion, it does not matter if you have a blog or just interested in finding other people’s blogs. This service will work for you and it costs you nothing. I like this idea a little bit more than just using one of the blog search engines. Users of the service have gone through steps of increase traffic to their blogs; this leads me to believe they are more serious about blogging. Blog Explosion is certainly not the Holy Grail but I have found some really nice blogs with their service. If you have a blog and you are interested in increasing traffic, give them a try. If you just enjoy reading blogs, I would also give them a try. You just never know the type site you’ll find.

On to the Analytics Report:
As a very new user to Google Analytics, I was amazed at the level of detail available in the reports and dashboard. Reports covered many areas like the pages visitors entered and existed on. Time on site/page is great information as it really lets you know if they are reading the content you are posting. I saw the keywords visitors used on the search engines that brought them to the site. Geographic, browser, network provider, new visitor vs returning visitor, even connection speed was all in the reports. It has the ability to track sale conversions, site searches, just about anything/everything you can think up. I have have used Hitbox for a long time and I think Google’s product is as strong a contender for entry to mid-tier web analytics market space.

It did take me a bit of time to write filters to exclude my access from the reports. It took a little time searching to locate the correct information. I found detailed information to create the exclusions based on IP address ranges or based on a cookie. I believe this would be a fairly common request and I was surprised that it was not prominent in the help section of the site.

I wanted to find out if newly created filters were retrospective. After a short time testing , later confirmed via the Google help section, I confirmed that filters are not retrospective. The filters are processed against the data as it is received by Google Analytics. This was a bit of a disappointment but I can understand why.

Overall – I must say that I am pleased with the service. It is a winner in my book.

The links below are to my other posting about Google’s applications and services.

• Part 1: Background
• Part 2: Initial Thoughts
• Part 3: Account Setup
• Part 3a: Notes and Tasks
• Part 3a: Notes and Tasks Continued
• Part 4: Docs
• Part 5: Final thoughts, for now…
• Part 6: Notebook and Tasks

My web developers have suggested a few solutions but really like the output an cost structure of Google’s Analytics platform. They tell me it is not the most feature rich product compared to tier-1 providers but then again our needs are basic. Being the anal retentive person that I am…THIS MUST BE TESTED!

I created a Google Analytics account for the Blog. The creation process took about 2 minutes to complete and it was a snap to setup the code in the web pages. I even enabled the search term tracking as well. Getting giddy here…

The management site interface was easy to use and I found myself looking at many of the features the product has to offer. I was impressed. This looks like a robust feature-rich product and if I was in the analytics business, I would start worrying. If the site has less then 5 million page views a month, the product is free. That is a lot of page views for a smaller company and the best possible price point.

The reports update once every 24 hours. I am not sure the exact time, as yet, but I expect it is in the early morning hours. Hey! maybe I will be able to confirm that I am the only person that ever comes this blog! w00t Me – 1 visitor! ;-)

I was looking at my blog and the tools that Blogger provides and I am impressed. I know that services like WordPress have more features but for the easy of use, Blogger rocks. I had this site up in 30 minutes. I found lots of templates on the net that I could use and the cost, oh ya – FREE. The integration to other Google services is seamless and easy to setup.

I would like to add a couple of static content pages but I have not found a way to do that as yet. I am sure it will be added in the future. Who know, I may try WordPress at some point but right now, Blogger works well and it has the majority of the features I would use.

I would encourage everyone to start a blog, what a lot of fun and it is wonderful to express yourself.

I am not sure why but I am going to leave it where it stands for now…

I changed the look of the blog based on a great template I found. I like the look but I need to fix the posting date section when I get a little more time.