Clearly things can go wrong online, so it pays to be aware and prepared. Recently Cindy had to undertake a ‘spontaneous blog vacation’ (as she put it) after her WordPress installation was compromised. The problem here seems to be that WordPress wasn’t updated when new versions were made available. This is a problem I’ve experienced with one of my websites in the past. Fortunately starting a new WordPress installation is fairly straight forward however if you haven’t backed up your blog you will lose all your content. You wouldn’t leave your only copy of your manuscript outside on a windy day so why risk your blogging content?

How To Export Your Blog

While logged into the WordPress dashboard, locate the Tools: Export option.

You will be then presented with the export screen. Here you have the option to restrict your export to specific blog authors (assuming your blog has multiple authors). This might be desirable if you had a communal blog but now want to set up separate sites for each author. For the most part however you’ll just want to leave it as ‘All Authors.’

Click on ‘Download Export File.’ A dialogue like this one will show up, however note that the look of this window will vary slightly from browser to browser. Make sure you select the option to ‘Save File.’ Give the XML file a meaningful username – especially if you have multiple blogs – but leave the date stamp intact. This will help you determine which backup is most recent at a glance if you have multiple backup files for the same blog.

Remember to back up often. If you couldn’t tolerate the thought of losing all the work you’ve done between now and your last back up take this as an instruction to back up right now.

Make multiple copies of your back up XML files. If your only backup is on your computer and something happens to your computer, then it’s all been for nothing. Consider keeping copies of your backup files. Put them on a CD or an External hard disk or a USB stick. Email copies of your XML files to your ‘cloud’ email account. Better yet why not save them to your Dropbox and have your essential files synced between all your computers? The 2GB option is free.

Realise your contribution to the Internet is important enough to take seriously and protect. Happy blogging and happy backing up!

Separate Tags With Commas: If you look at the WordPress dashboard you’ll see a reminder of this advice but it is still sometimes ignored. Tags are a helpful way of searching for specific information within your blog. If you maintain a blog about rock and roll music people will be able to click on the tag ‘Elvis Presley’ for example and see all the blog posts relating to Elvis Presley. However if you don’t include commas between your tags as you enter them all the tags are treated as one entry. ‘Elvis Presley’ as a single tag is meaningful, ‘Elvis Presley Carl Perkins Blue Suede Shoes’ all together is garbled, confusing and not very helpful.

Think About Your Categories: Starting a blog can seem a little daunting at times, especially if you don’t know exactly what you want to write about. I actually think it’s quite natural for blogs to evolve over time – so don’t lose sleep if your blog takes on different dimensions as it develops. But thinking about what subjects you want to write about up front gives your blog a focus in the beginning. Listing blog entries under the ‘Uncategorized’ default category is lazy and doesn’t help your reader understand the entry subject matter. It’s a missed opportunity from a search engine optimization perspective too. [You can't delete the uncategorized category but you can change it. Consider what your most blogged subject will be and change the category name and category slug. This will save you time in the long run.]

Create Meaningful Permalinks: The URLs that WordPress produces for your individual blog entries can be either pretty or ugly, generic or meaningful. Search Engines find a URL with relevant keywords in it more meaningful than a number. By default, WordPress produces permalinks that look like this:

http://www.domain.com/?p=2028

You can customize them however you like, personally I like to use a /%category%/%postname%/ format.

http://www.johnlacey.com/blogging/basic-wordpress-blogging-tips/

Use absolute – not relative – links when linking to external resources: If you link to Google for example from your blog entry and type in ‘www.google.com’ browsers will assume it’s a relative link. It will produce something that looks something like this:

http://www.johnlacey.com/blogging/www.google.com

http://www.google.com

Remember you’ll learn by doing… so get started. WordPress is a great platform and whether you’re using WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress it’s a powerful tool that will help bring your ideas to the world. Happy blogging!

Blogging Tips
James had some great tips for blogging and writing in general. I particularly adored this:

First rule of writing: put your ass in a chair.

He also notes that because there is so much content on the web readers can be fickle. He recommends being clear and thinking about how accessible your writing style is. He also spoke of the importance of offering a story – a rich narrative thread – to your readers. He recommends updating regularly.

But I’m famous on the Internet…
Christian describes ‘Internet fame’ as being the lowest form of fame you can ever hope to achieve. He suggests that serial killers have more fame than Internet people. He tells bloggers to not try to become famous, insisting that readers can easily tell when someone is doing something for the joy of it and when they are just trying to make a quick buck.

Does Being Published Give You Validation?
The answer is clearly a resounding yes. I think it’s important to appreciate that these bloggers were at the Sydney Writers’ Festival not because they were bloggers, but because they were published authors and had books to promote and sell. (I mean there were no unpublished bloggers on the panel.)

Christian explained that by generating publicity through his blog he was in a much better position when approached by a publisher. You can be a ‘nobody’ he insists and still get the power of an established author before being published through blogging.

Christian also points to collaborative community efforts online that have become books such as Post Secret, something he touts as a great way of getting a book deal without ‘doing any work.’

Christian is the genius behind Stuff White People Like the ‘micro-humour magazine’ that chronicles… well, actually the title is fairly self-explanatory. James used blogging as a way of communicating with the outside world while working with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in Sudan. Antony blogs extensively about the the Israel/Palestine conflict, and is also the author of The Blogging Revolution in which he discusses individuals living in repressive regimes who are using blogging as a tool for sharing information and political change.

What is Blogging?
Christian Lander:

Blogging is not an artform. It’s writing as it always was. Maybe it was a little shorter and you publish quicker.

James described blogging as a ‘new kind of journalism’ and one that offered greater immediacy than other forms of print media and one which could incorporate multimedia elements.

Why Blog?
Antony suggests that in many countries there is no alternative to blogging for independent thought and that even in less repressive nations most newspapers are ‘crap.’ He identifies the aim of independent political blogs as being heard. Having worked as an Australian journalist he admits that editorial stances put considerable constraints on journalists and that having an independent blog gives the writer much greater autonomy.

For James, having little contact with the outside world, blogging gave him an outlet to communicate with others and process his own experiences in Sudan. He started it as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends, and was surprised that it attracted a much broader audience over time.

Christian started his blog just to amuse some of his friends.

Community and Feedback
Christian admits that he no longer reads comments because they are really vicious and that apparently there is some sort of ‘race war’ going on within the comments on his blog. Negative comments don’t encourage writing. He also notes a difference between the kind of feedback he gets from email as opposed to via blog comments, explaining that the ratio of positive email to negative is 100:1. He doesn’t believe in comment moderation, laughing as he explains that, “You can delete the comment but you can’t delete the person.”

Similarly Antony explains that comments do not form a large part of his writing. He does however have a novel approach for dealing with particularly oddball or offensive comments. He takes them and publishes them on a special page within his blog including their email addresses.

For James blog feedback was his only connection to the larger world and in his experience the comments were mostly positive. He suggests that blogging offers an opportunity to connect not just with information, but with people – and people you wouldn’t ordinarily have the opportunity to connect with. When he was struggling to heal a three year old boy he made information about the patient’s symptoms available online (including photographs, obscuring the boy’s face for privacy and security reasons). With the assistance of the collective wisdom of his readership, he was able to reach a diagnosis.

You can read part two here.

It is such a far cry from the hand coded pages I created ten years ago. Back then, in an attempt to streamline my workflow, I would make page templates – essentially HTML files that included a header and a footer and some information about the way the page would be formatted. It saved some time though I still had to manually upload each page. It made adding new content an awkward time-consuming process. Even after I had added a new page I would have to go back to the front page of the website and add the link there, perhaps with a thumbnail, perhaps with a brief description.

WordPress is celebrated also for its ability to present information in Search Engine-friendly ways.

I confess I had never really considered WordPress in terms of its accessibility. I just discovered a wonderful video from Glenda Watson Hyatt on how WordPress as a platform and blogging more generally as a channel of communication have changed her life.

The easy answer is through the use of widgets. However I have also made a PDF explaining this process in greater detail with lots of pictures to help along the way.

You can download it below.
Adding Widgets To Sidebars In WordPress [PDF]

You will need Adobe Acrobat (or similar) to read this document. Don’t forget you can right-click and select “Save File As…” to save this file to your computer.

Hope this helps!

Any wordpress questions? Leave a comment or talk to me on Twitter.

You want to be covering the topics your audience are interested in, while pointing out how your products and/or services can help them… but without sounding like an advertisement!

How do you know what your audience is talking about?

By following your audience on social media sites like Twitter. Follow the flow of conversation. If one dilemma, question or concern keeps coming up – maybe you should be blogging about it?

By setting up Google alerts with keywords relating to the brands and issues you represent.

By subscribing and reading other relevant blogs. Don’t be afraid to tackle a topic another blog (even a prominent blog) has already addressed. You will have unique contributions to make to the discussion as well as an opportunity to offer your product/service – which should (hopefully) be a unique solution to these issues!

Don’t limit your research to just text blogs however… Check out video sites like YouTube and podcast directories like iTunes. If a video has hundreds and thousands of views, or a podcast is highly ranked in a podcast directory, there is obviously interest there! [If a video offers something you can't - or don't wish to - reproduce, consider sharing it with your readers anyway. It is easy to embed most videos into blog entries.]

Ask your audience. This is often overlooked but there is great power in just asking your audience – whether on social media, in a blog post or in a podcast – what would you like to know? What are you struggling with? What do you need more information about?

Find out what questions have already been asked on other websites. Sites like Yahoo Answers are set up exclusively for people to pose questions and suggest responses. Yahoo Answers has a list of categories and I’m sure one of them will contain questions about your area of expertise. [There is even an opportunity to answer a question briefly on that site and include a link to your own blog with more detailed information in the 'sources' section.]

Please Note: There is also a Google Answers site. This website has been discontinued so isn’t as useful as an opportunity to answer questions and produce links to your blog, however the archives are still available so it might be useful from a research perspective.

News Media – online, newspapers, television, radio – may cover subjects that relate to your area of expertise. If the mass media carries a story this means a lot of people will have encountered it. There may be a great opportunity for new visitors to your blog here. If you have already covered the subject don’t be afraid to create a new blog entry identifying the publicised case/event and include links to earlier information.

Specialised Media – niche sites and blogs, books, magazines, industry publications, specialised (often cable) television shows – will cover topics that relate to your area of speciality. If an editorial, new technique or technology causes a lot of excitement/fear/speculation you should be covering that too.

By reading your blog’s comments. This is a no-brainer. If people read your blog entry and have further questions then why not share your thoughts and answers not just with the person who asked for more information but with ALL of your readers?

By checking your inbox. Do you have questions, information and announcements that would benefit your readers? Share that information with your readers!

By attending relevant events and trade shows. As well as being just a great networking opportunity, events and trade shows give you the ability to report back to all those people who wish they were there but aren’t able to attend. Just take a look at the recent coverage of MacWorld for example. Blogging live from an event (where capabilities exist) can provide your readers with a sense of immediacy and relevance they will really appreciate.

Find existing online communities. Discover what they are discussing. Consider investigating any relevant communities that might exist within Google Groups, Yahoo Groups and NING Networks. (Google groups incorporate twenty year’s worth of usenet newsgroup postings – something to remember if you need a historical perspective on anything, particularly technical subjects.)

Finally I’d like to offer one caveat. Just because your audience isn’t talking about something don’t automatically assume it won’t be of interest to them. They may not be aware of the issue or its implications, and as an expert in your field you should use your own judgment to determine what you write about. Who knows you might be responsible for breaking a hot topic or news item?

You will learn how your blogging platform works and what you can achieve with it. The best way to learn something is to do it. Starting with a personal blog takes the pressure off and allows you to learn and experiment as you go.

You will get used to writing and producing content. If you’re not used to writing anything longer than a SMS message or a shopping list, this is a good way to identify your writing voice and get used to the process of creating content online.

You will be able to share your life with your friends and others. Facebook, Twitter and other web services are wonderful but blogging provides a great forum to go into greater detail about the activities of your life. It is also easy to combine various forms of media – audio, video, photographs, text – to tell your story.

You will be able to share your new found blogging knowledge with your friends and colleagues! Here is a very informal non-threatening way to introduce them to useful technologies. They might wish to do the same themselves and you will be in a great position to introduce them to the process.

You will be able to replicate your efforts in the future. Once you understand the process of blogging and how your particular blogging platform works, you’ll be able to create additional blogs. You might like to do this with a more narrow focus – such as a blog relating to particular interest or hobby, or even to set up a blog for your own business!