Blogging Workshop

I’m working on a Blogging workshop for first delivery in February and have decided to offer Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr as the three main blogging tools. Yes, I know there are others but these present a good range of free options for getting started. It makes sense that I blog the development of this workshop on those three platforms and these can be found at https://steveblogstory.wordpress.com http://steveblogstory.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://steveblogstory.tumblr.com/

This post ought to be sticky in each platform so that will be the first test. After that some posts  will be uniform across all three platforms and some will be specific to just the one.

The workshop is NOT about Websites or Content Management Systems (CMS). It’s about the tradition of Blogging and Journalistic approaches and a range of tools, resources and processes to support it.  Many blogging platforms have now become fully functional Content Management Systems (CMS) and can be used to manage a whole website. The 3 hr workshop looks specifically at pure blogging as an online diarist, journalist or simply posting news and musings or event rants against the world!

Conclusions on Blogging

With the blogging workshop imminent http://bit.ly/embdig15 I have decided to blog my conclusions on the 3 platforms I used to in the development stage

From the outset I was clear in my own mind that I wanted to deliver something that was not about the Content Management systems (CMS) that many blogging tools have become but focussed on the idea of personal journalism or being an online diarist. In other workshops I’ve talked about the importance of posting regular and relevant content to our business website and this would include the act of blogging. However, everyone’s case is different and one person may post their entire written output into their business website whilst another person may desire a different vehicle in order to write content that is not pertinent for their business/website. In either case, building up a portfolio of interesting and useful content will have value to the writer from both a personal and business perspective (in my opinion)

I set out to use Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr for my Blogging workshop. I chose these tools for a few reasons. First of all I was already reasonably familiar with them but more importantly they are all free, fairly easy to use and all very popular and mainstream.There are other tools for sure  but I think these three tools give a good range of options for  blogging.  I did a quick check using namechk http://namechk.com/ and found that I could use the name  steveblogstory on all three platforms so my address for the three was www.steveblogstory   followed by dot.wordpress.com - dot.blogspot.com and dot.tumblr.com respectively.

With the blogging workshop imminent I’m getting into practicalities. My first decision will be to ditch Tumblr. In my opinion it’s way too “niche” for what I have in mind. Too many platform specific idiosyncrasies for my liking. My hunch is that if you like Tumblr then you probably love it so I’ll still suggest that participants try it out but it will not form part of the practical workshop.

This leaves Blogger and Wordpress. Well I love Wordpress and Blogger is really THE original in my book. The downside of Blogger is that I think it’s stayed pretty static over the past few years but that might be a plus. Wordpress is constantly progressing and is really sophisticated but as I write it seems to be half way through a transition that is a little annoying. One or the other of these platforms will certainly meet any bloggers needs with the added bonus with Wordpress of installing the software on your own webspace if you want to go the whole hog. So, now we’re down to two platforms for the workshop. I’ll blog later when we see how it all went.

Workshop Planning

So now I've set up and checked out 3 platforms. I've come to the conclusion that the workshop participants should try them all out and make a decision later on their preferred tool. They may use one platform regularly but call on one of the others for special event blogs. Now I'm planning the rest of the workshop: looking at ancillary tools, devices, techniques, the writing process and a host of other things related to Blogging.

Second Impressions

You will see my “first post” in this blog giving my initial impressions and these are my thoughts having done a little looking around. If you would like to check out my “second impressions” in the other platforms here they are WordPress  – Tumblr

The set up process with blogger was a doddle. I lately bemoaned the lack of much development of the Blogger platform in some senses this is a Godsend. My sessions notes on setting up are just as current now as they were two years ago and you can't say that for the other platforms. The Typography and styling is not as slick as Wordpress or Tumblr but it is a good solid platform.

So, here I am blogging in Blogger. With all the platforms I'm removing all but the blog i.e. pages etc and I've found the simplest skin/theme that I can to concentrate largely on the blogging. This one is called SIMPLE and I made a few minor tweaks to it.  I posted a "sticky" to put the overview posting at the top but the way to that is quite convoluted. I first published the post and then I edited it and set it to publish in the future. This makes it sticky until that date. If I had not published it first then it would be a scheduled post and not actually appear until that date. I have set Wordpress to also trigger out to Facebook and Twitter as Wordpress does that so well but I will explore this with the other platforms to see if they can do this too. I have hooked Blogger to also post out to Google + because, being a Google product it does this rather well.

First Post

Well this was quite simple. There's something to be said for the fact that Blogger does not seem to change year in year out.