blogging

WordPress Embeds – images and videos the natural way

Those of you who, like me, were using WordPress for a very long time, as well as those who got into WordPress recently, probably don’t know that WordPress can embed images and videos into posts and pages without using any plugins at all. Even though there are plenty of plugins available (for example, Smart YouTube), you don’t always need them.

As per WordPress Embeds page, all you need to do is add URL to image or video in your post or page. Just make sure that the URL stands on its own line and that it’s not linked. Alternatively, you can use [embed] short code. WordPress supports quite a few popular sites – YouTube, Vimeo, Revision3, Flickr, Google Video, and more. The support is based on the oEmbed format.

Of course you’ll get more power with specialized plugins, but for many bloggers out there this built-in support will be more than enough.

Blog a day, or blog a week

New Year is the perfect time to raise hopeless hopes. Like any given Monday, or the first day of any month, it’s the time to start something that you hope to finish. People promise they will start (or stop) doing all sorts of things – quit smoking, start exercising, stop procrastinating, and so and so forth. This is non-sense of course, but that’s just what we, humans, do.

So in the spirit of a new era start, WordPress.com issued a challenge for 2011 – blog more. To help you complete the challenge, they created a separate website – DailyPost. This one will be updated daily with ideas and other bits of inspiration. All you need to do is post a single blog entry every day throughout 2011. If that sounds like too much, they have a lighter variation – a post a week. You don’t have to follow their subjects – post whatever you want. Just write something either daily or weekly. And to help others find and follow your stuff, tag your posts with postaday2011 or postaweek2011. That’s all.

I’ve done similar challenges before. Not necessarily they were centralized or aligned with someone else, but I did put myself to such a task before. And not only in blogging. For example, I’ve learned most that I know about photography in just a couple of months. It was when I followed someone advice to make a photograph every day. It didn’t matter what I was making a photograph of. Just that I made one. Of course, there were days when I didn’t have the camera around, or was too busy, or too lazy. But I was pretty close to a daily picture (see POTD – Picture Of The Day tag archives).And it did magic to my skills. And so did a blogging challenge.

Someone said somewhere that creativity requires fluency. In order to be creative, you have to be fluent. If you want to be creative in photography, your camera and equipment shouldn’t stay in your way. If you want to speak or write better, you shouldn’t need a dictionary for every other word. If you want to do experimental dancing, you should have good control of your body. And so on and so forth. But there is only one way to get better at something. It’s do that something. The more, the better.

So, if blogging sounds interesting to you, you should blog more. And it’s much easier to do it when you are not alone. Now is the time.

I’ve been quite busy last year. And I blogged much less than in previous years. I wanted to do more. And now I think I will. I will follow up with the challenge. Will you?

Blogging milestone : 5,000+ posts

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you post number 5,005. I nearly missed it altogether, so please excuse a not exactly a round number. And now, before you throw things at me, let me highlight some disclaimer points:

I’ve written more than 5,000 blog posts in my life. But quite a few of them went down, disappeared, or are blocked behind corporate firewalls. Today’s celebration is only about my personal blog.
Not all of these blog posts were written by hand. Some are aggregates from Twitter, Delicious, or some other third-party service that I used. But I count them anyway, because they compensate for those lost posts, and because the spirit of sharing even via a third-party is too similar to blogging. I found something worth sharing, I shared it, and it ended up on my blog in one form or the other.
Most of these posts are utter crap that nobody will ever read or use. But I still celebrate them, because I took the effort to write them, and because they were important to me at some point in time.
On top of that, I celebrate all these posts that survived over multiple blog software migrations, hosting changes, restructuring and reorganizations. While they are a huge mess that many of you would be glad to throw away, they constantly remind me of all those transformations that I went through. And if nothing else, they provide me with an extra leverage in any data organization argument. After all, thousands of posts and comments over 10 years of blogging should count for some experience.

Let the celebrations begin!

OhLife – private blogging via email

Over the years that I’ve been blogging, quite a few people asked me if I know of any easy way to maintain a private blog. They seemed to not care about the rest of the world and just wanted a private diary, but without paper and without too much technical hassle. Of course, there are many applications, like WordPress, that could be installed on a personal computer and used in private mode. But that still seemed too much work for a diary. So I never really had a good answer, except use any text editor and save files in some date-based directory structure.

Recently I came across a very elegant solution to the problem though. OhLife is a simple and straightforward blogging service. It has two very distinct features that together set it apart from most other blogging services. It enforces private blogs – only you see your entries. No public stuff, no friends, no nothing. And they help you build a habit out of blogging by sending you an email every night with a question “How did your day go?“. This seems so natural and so simple that I can’t think of anybody who won’t be able to do it.

Keep you blog posts dated. Always! Please.

I came across this article in Weblog Tools Collection, which asks the question of whether you should remove dates from your blog posts.

If the content on your blog is timeless and you could increase the amount of traffic coming to your blog from search engines, would you remove the post and comment dates?

While I appreciate a good habit of questioning best practices, I have a very strong feeling on this one. Never ever ever remove dates from the articles and comments. There is no such thing as “timeless content”. Dates are always relevant. Content easily outlives the author, the source, and anything that was considered “timeless” at the moment of writing. Time is a very important dimension. It is a crucial bit of metadata. Don’t lose it.

And on top of that, don’t try to make that kind of decisions for your visitor. It might appear rude and offensive. Let the visitor decide for himself if he wants to click through to your article from the search engine or not. Be transparent. Always let the visitor know when the article was written, which times it refers to, and when it was commented. Publish the date nearby. Also use it in the URLs whenever possible.

Even structure your text to refer to specific time periods (“March 2010”, “July 4th, 1985”, “Stone Age”, etc). Don’t use vague constructs like “yesterday”, “last year”, “when I was a child”. You never know how your content will reach its audience. Some people will find your article in full and on your site. Some will see an excerpt in their RSS feeder. Some will get just a quote emailed to them by a friend. The context might change, and the “timeless”-ness can disappear.

If you are still not convinced, try a practical example. Find some “timeless content” from before (last year, last decade, last century) and see how well it stands the test of times. Now break it in pieces and look again. Still there? Still timeless? Share your findings (both positive and negative) in the comments.

And in the meantime, keep your articles dated.