Your blogs (66 enrolled)

–        17 enrolled but no blog URL provided (26%)
–        31 blogs look inactive (only 1 or 2 posts) (47%)
–        18 blogs tracking well (27%)

The results above at this stage mean that 73% of students who have enrolled (INB346 – Enterprise 2.0 @ QUT) are in trouble at this stage and there was a bit of discussion on this before the lecture started.

In reply to the discussion I thought I would post some of my opinions and some hurdles I’ve come across. Tips to get your site out that and hopefully get you in the right direction. I’ll keep it fairly generic so this can be applied in other areas, in other situations.

Site platform: What to use for your website? Is it free? Should I get hosting? What about a domain name?

There are a lot of choices out there. Perhaps that can be a bit of a problem. I decided before looking what to use I was going to buy a domain and host the site on the web. To purchase the domain I went to www.godaddy.com entered in a few details and there it was. I already had hosting organised, so it was fairly easy for me to point the domain to the correct name servers and other stuff.

My next choice was to pick what software to use. Open Source, stable and already established. I could quickly short list this to: Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, Mambo. As I knew Blogger was owned by Google and didn’t really allow full control I crossed that out. Mambo was a fork of Joomla made a year or so ago and Joomla itself did a fair bit more than blogging so I took that off the list. That left Drupal and WordPress. WordPresshad a great write up and had both hosted solution (of their domain) and a version you could download and host yourself so I gave that a try (and stuck with it).

Once I had purchased the domain and installed WordPress. My main goal was to make my site searchable. Now that it was on the web, getting it on the search engines was the next challenge. This brings me to the second hurdle.

Content: Remove standard content, writing posts, integrating twitter, categories, tags

Removing the standard content such as “hello world”, the standard links and all that for me was a must. I didn’t want Google searching my site and identifying it as a generic installation that is going no where. I didn’t want to “give the wrong impression” and get black listed as such. I quickly changed the about me page, knowing that this can be changed later. I wrote up a first post (and edited it a few times after it was published) and I was on my way.

So how do I pick what to write about? I attend the lecture and listen to Jason Watson talk and if I get some thoughts going on a particular topic I wrote some points down. I look at the workshop activities and take things from there. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts are everywhere, and we interact with them daily. I know some students voiced that they didn’t want to get shot down in case the said something wrong. Instead I think of it is an opportunity to voice what I know where someone else can agree, disagree or even provide feedback to further my knowledge (best case scenario).

Categories and Tags. To be honest this is something that I might not have done the best at this stage, but one thing I make sure I do with every post is to make sure I put it in a category, and I tag it with key words which summaries the post. This way you can find that article by looking in a specific category or specific tag. Having more ways to find your content, and search for it isn’t going to hurt.

Integrating twitter – well first I had to join which was easy, and the next step was getting my updates to display on the site. This took a bit of searching around but in the end I decided to go with a plugin called ‘WordPress’. It does what it says, and after installation it was very easy to set it up as a widget on the side of my site.

Web Presence: How am I increasing my web presence? How to give yourself feedback?

One of my main goals is getting a web presence and the site on to google.com and very high up there in the rankings when you search for my name. I believe this is achievable so I’m going to achieve it…. and I’m monitoring my progress so I know if I’m getting closer or further away. This is one thing which I set up from the start with my Have you googled your name? post and have followed up on it later with a Web Presence Update post. This is a way of personal feedback and I way to assess how your blog is going. If you get the feeling of movement and progress you might find you get a bit of snowballing effect. I also have stats running on my site “called AwStats” in the back end which monitors who visits the site, time of the day, what pages have been viewed, etc which allows me to judge where I’ve gone right or wrong. This is how I found out that my Negative Web Presence Example – Abbey Sherwell post was suck up by Google and spat out in the search results.

Exposure: How will Google find my site? How will my search engine ranking increase? Comments? Pings? Trackbacks?

Very similar to my last hurdle, but I thought I would break it up.

So how do you get your site on Google? I bet most of you haven’t thought about actually telling Google have you?

1. It does sound crazy, but once you got a few posts on your site tell Google it is there. You can do that by clicking here and adding your URL.
2. Pings – your WordPress site also sends out pings when you publish a post – More info here, but if you’re not using WordPress it might be something you can look out.
3. Add your blog to the Google Blog Search (yes there is a separate site on Google to search blogs) – by clicking here
4. Submit to other sites like Yahoo! (I didn’t do Yahoo! but my site has come up there already), Bing (click here), others?
5. Trackbacks – If your post is related to someone elses, or you link to someone elses post make sure you “send trackbacks”.
6. Links – Link to other peoples posts, site. If you join up to another site (twitter), make sure you’ve put your website in your profile.
7. Comment – If you comment on other peoples site (leave url link in the URL field if possible) and you might get comments back. Network
8. Keep the content going. Search engines need a reason to keep coming back to your site and you need a reason for people to come back also!

Other: Something I’ve missed? Forgotten? What about comments?

Well these were some of the first hurdles I’ve had, and I think this is what other will come across too. One thing mentioned in the lecture was comments. We all like comments and like to here feedback (I know I do) but this shouldn’t be a crucial aspect of your site. Think of it as a bonus if you get any. We also have a fair amount of students in this subject, so once you get the ball rolling have a look on other students site and leave a comment. If you receive a comment, try and return the favour. If I’m going to comment, I try and add extra value to the original post which I would like to recommend my readers in doing.

Outro:

There are plenty of tips, how to’s, screenshots, guides, tutorials, posts and resources on the net to help you get started. I’ve only touched on on a few things here but if you feel like there was something I’ve missed let me know and I can update the post. Also if you are struggling to get started let me know and I might be able to assist (or point you in the right direction).

I thought it would be worth mentioning that having a regular backup of your data is important. In particular I would like to focus on your wordpress site.

There are a two components of a wordpress site that need to be looked after.

• The Database – which has all the posts, data, text and for me is the most important part
• The Files – which include the bits and pieces they make the site work, photos, themes, uploads, etc

So how can you back these up? Many many many ways! WordPress.com has there own examples which are really great which you should take a look at over here – http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

There were a lot of good solid ways there, but for me I took a quick and easy approach (yet to fully test). I went over to ‘Plugins’ > ‘Add New’, and did a search for Backup. After looking through a few of them I picked out two.

• WordPress Backup (by BTE)
• WordPress Database Backup

Why two? Well like I mentioned before there are two area of the site that need to be backed up. Once you have these plugins installed you can set it up automatically. For me, as I have a small site I’m happy to get an e-mail once a day. If down the track my site gets to large that I can’t send out an e-mail I will look into doing FTP backups.

It also gives you the option to “Download” now, if you don’t want to set up an scheduled back.

So have you thought about backing up your own site yet?

What methods have you used? Do you recommend anything?

Have you had the need to restore from a backup?