Social networking is a little like baseball. Neither is rocket surgery, but both have their complexities and nuances. If you’ve decided to finally take the plunge, to give social networking the old college try, I say go for it. But have patience. Be prepared to tread water for a while. Every social network has its own peculiarities that take some time to comprehend.
General
Most articles in this category address general Web and Internet issues. Some of them are rants and ramblings that may have less to do with the Web and the Internet and more to do with life lessons and business lessons.
About.me: WTF?
Today I tried to contact someone a trusted friend referred me to. My friend had given me the link to the fellow’s About.me page. A page on which I could find no telephone number. No email address. (Forget about a snail-mail address.) When I clicked his About.me page’s Email Me button, I was given the opportunity to send him a message — but only if I either joined About.me or authorized About.me to access my Facebook or Twitter accounts. Is it just me, or is anyone else annoyed by this kind of crapola?
Why I Love Firebug for Firefox
Here’s a short video demonstrating just one way Firebug can help in Web design. I really don’t remember what I did before Firebug.
(Hat tip to compadre Mickey Mellen who inadvertently shamed me into upgrading to Snagit 11, which I used with glee to produce and upload this screencast.)
If you’ve got your own screencasts showcasing ways you use Firebug, please feel free to post them as video responses on my YouTube channel.
Unfollow-A-Huckster Wednesday
In yet another attempt to discover Twitter’s value, I started following more people yesterday. Then I spent time lurking and trolling, reading and scrolling. My dominant impression: there’s a whole lot of huckstering going on.
Short(er) Form Video
If you’re scratching your head over Vine and Instagram video, Mitch Joel offers an interesting perspective in last week’s Short(er) Form Video blog article on Six Pixels of Separation. Money quote: Who knows if Vine or Instagram will win this short-form social sharing video war? We just need to be asking better questions. For every […]
When a client trivializes your work, call a time-out.
In the spring of my senior year at Harvard, I was awarded the contract to make passport photos for any of my fellow Quincy House residents who needed them. By "awarded the contract" I mean that the assistant to the House Master was a friend of mine who knew I knew my way around a darkroom (that may have come out wrong…), and so she gave the project to me. This is the story of a brief encounter with one of my customers — and what it still means to me 40 years later.
Enough already with the formulaic blog titles
Scanning my newsfeeds tonight and finding way too many salesey, hypey headlines linking to boringly bland blog posts, I was overcome by a sudden and strong visceral dislike for the formulaic, overly-clever blog titles that are everywhere on the Web these days and which, admittedly, until tonight, I have been all too inclined to emulate (and recommend to others).
It’s got to stop. And stopping has to start with me.
Hang out with a friend online
This is the story — still unfolding — of the vendor and the client who became friends and started bi-weekly video hangouts for the alleged purpose of exploring joint venture opportunities but really just so they can visit on a regular basis and laugh a lot. I highly recommend you try it yourself.
What are WordPress Post Formats, and why should I care?
Whether you’re a blogger, a reader of blogs, a WordPress developer, or a content marketing consultant, you have reasons to like the Post Formats feature of WordPress. This article explains what Post Formats are and why you should care.
Post Formats have NOT been removed from WordPress 3.6 core
Contrary to what you may hear from sources who fire before ready and aim, Post Formats have not been removed from the core of WordPress 3.6, which is due to ship any day now. Only the new User Interface for Post Formats has been removed. My take from lurking around Make.WordPress.Core: The development team decided […]