It’s been quite a while since my last post here. I must say that the day job and household responsibilities and chores have sapped quite a bit of my energy, and I haven’t really felt much like blogging very often lately. As in the game of American Football when the quarterback throws a pass, when you start a blog, 3 things can happen and 2 of them are bad. One, the blog can quickly become stagnant with no updated content for weeks or months (bad). Two, the blog is updated too often in an attempt to keep the content fresh. Without purpose and focus, creativity and originality can begin to suffer and the blog can become boring and readers may quickly lose interest (arguably better, but still bad). Three, you achieve that ideal balance of providing intriguing content on a regular basis.
So far I’ve fallen into the first category, but this week I have something important to say and hope that you’ll follow my updates as I write about a week of volunteer work happening in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It’s been nearly 3 years since hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the area, and there is still much to do for the residents and environment in the Gulf Region. I leave this afternoon for a week long effort with several co-workers and volunteers from several other companies. I’ll be providing written updates for my company’s intranet site and will also post updates here.
Until the first update, you can find more information here.
Tags: Volunteer
Okay, after further consideration I think it’s best to avoid pushing a daily digest of my Twitter updates as content for the blog. Instead, I’ll just use the sidebar functionality to post the latest updates. I tend to agree with David Peralty who posted a rant about the practice of “Twitter blogging” on his website.
What you end up with as a reader are half a dozen or so one hundred and forty character messages, most of which have no meaning or relevance to you as a reader since they are responses or aimed at specific people.
It is really a shame to see so many blogs heading down this road, and that Twitter has captured their attention so much that they don’t continue to work on their real blogging efforts, a type of communication that can’t occur on a platform like Twitter.
My situation is somewhat the opposite, but just as detrimental to what I believe is the proper use of both Twitter and my blog. Since I was pushing a daily digest from Twitter into the content of my blog, I have tended to be less spontaneous and prolific in posting to Twitter by trying to make my Tweets somewhat more relevant to the blog. I’ve seen the error of my ways and hope that more follow. Thanks for setting me straight David.
Tags: Blogging, Twitter Updates
Just testing out the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin and trying to decide how I want to configure the settings. This looks like a really great plugin. I just want to make sure I don’t blast my followers with irrelevant crap. Oh wait … it’s Twitter so I guess maybe they should expect irrelevant crap from me.
The plugin offers some pretty nice settings like creating a blog post for each tweet, creating a daily digest of all tweets in a single blog post, and updating twitter with a link each time you create a blog post. I think I’ll probably refrain from having Twitter Tool create a blog entry for each Twitter update. I just don’t think I need blog entries declaring that I’m stuck in traffic, eating sushi, or having a latte. I probably will enable the daily digest though.
Tags: Blogging, plugins, Twitter Updates