How Blogs Can Help You Become a Better Writer

If you're a writer, you probably have a blog. If you are a writer without one, or you want to be a writer, you should probably have a blog. Like few things, there's absolutely no reason not to have one. It's a painless, free way to improve your writing, to find an audience without fighting for it, and to even find out what is and isn't working for you as a writer or for that audience.

If nothing else, blogging is sudden access to a platform through which you can do a few things that you simply can't do anywhere else. A blog allows you to write however often you want to and in however much detail you feel compelled to write in; it sidesteps the issues of finding an outlet for your writing, as well as the tedious requirements that would otherwise require you to keep things either extremely brief or go in-depth about something. That decision is yours to make on a blog, and you have as much freedom as you'd like to take risks, especially as you're simply getting started.

Furthermore, the mere act of writing more often will improve your writing. By rereading what you've already finished, you'll see places in which you have improved, where you want to improve, and where you need to change things to make your work more effective, and a blog gives you all of those things for free, as well as an easy chronological index of your work through which you can see trends, growth, perhaps moments of frustration, and how you worked through them. 

The blog, unlike other mediums, is also interactive by design. By enabling comments you allow anyone who feels compelled to do so to interact with you -- to provide their own thoughts, feedback, and opinions on the subject matter your blog addresses -- and to let you know what's working best for both of you. If even more information is what you desire, you can set up a service like Google Analytics, which will give you remarkably detailed breakdowns of who visits your website, when, and where they're from. A Google Analytics readout will let you know, down to individual towns and cities, who reads you, how many hits you're getting on a regular basis, and what search engine terms brought readers to your blog, all details worth knowing if your goal is to increase your reader base or develop strategies in order to better cater your content towards your readers.

Finally, the blog creates an online portfolio for anyone who might possibly be interested in you or the work that you do as a writer. It's a showcase of the things you're interested in, how you approach them, and your talents in a way that few things are or possibly could be. As opposed to press clippings, which come through following an editor's processing and the restrictions of your format, the blog is you, uncensored, for the world to see, and it just might sell you better than anything else.

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on online schools for Guide to Online Schools.

Squarespace or Self-Hosted Wordpress: Which is right for you?

I’ve just moved this site from Wordpress to Squarespace.  Both platforms are powerful and have their advantages and disadvantages. For me, it boiled down to my Wordpress installation becoming over bloated and self-hosting being overly time consuming.  A simple solution like Squarespace came to the rescue to help me create a streamlined version of the site in a week. Here are some points that aided me in my decision:

Setup

Squarespace:  Setup in minutes pretty much.  The interface is click, drag, drop.  You can add pages, sidebars and content pretty quickly.  Upload zip files of photos and they’ll unzip and appear on your gallery.  Sidebars can be hidden on certain pages

Wordpress:  The Wordpress setup is simple, but can feel technical and scary to beginners.  Adding pages does involve dealing with the template system which can be fairly technical if you want to customize them to the level that Squarespace does out of the box.  Plus, self-hosting had lead to folders filled with legacy files which I had to manage and keep track of.
Winner: Squarespace

Versioning:
Squarespace: When I first wrote this post, I saved it as a draft, wandered off, and when I went to publish the post ... It was blank.  A long post was gone and tech support had no way of getting it back. I couldn’t recover anything from the Firefox cache.  It’s a pretty big weakness.  After the second time losing the post, I’m now writing this from Google Docs.

Wordpress:  Versioning allows you to roll back your blog posts to earlier versions. Wordpress is a mature platform so it has pretty extensive features like this built in.  Both platforms allow you to use an external XML-RPC editor that could add this feature in.

Winner: Wordpress

Time/Price:
Squarespace: Since time is money, these were grouped together in my decision making.  A Squarespace site can be setup in minutes.  No backend setup, dealing with file structures. Much of the simplicity of the site let’s you spend your time worrying about content. Squarespace starts at $8 a month.

Wordpress:  You can set up Wordpress on a host pretty quickly too, but a lot of the backend tweaking ate up most of my time.  The CMS and it’s plugins needed updates frequently, which is something Squarespace does for you in the background.  My hosting with ICDSoft (still would highly recommend them) was only $6 a month and Wordpress itself is free.

Winner (Squarespace): Wordpress  Winner (Time): Squarespace

Lock in:
Squarespace: Both Squarespace and Wordpress have import and export features.  Squarespace exports to Movable Type’s export format which is compatible with most platforms including Wordpress.  Importing into Squarespace, the platform will also copy over your images.  

Wordpress: With self-hosted Wordpress, you can just download your file structure and maintain it on your new site.  It’ll import most blog platform files, just follow the documentation.  Wordpress also gives you fine control over your URL structure.

Winner: Draw

Templates:
Squarespace: 60 professional templates are provided for you to customize.  They are easy to use with a WYSIWYG (“What You See is What You Get”) interface.  It’s very easy to get a nice looking site quickly for beginners to do some designs that would be extremely complicated in Wordpress.

Wordpress: Hundreds of templates from a large community, but there’s a learning curve to figuring out the template format.  It’s very code-oriented for beginners, but with that comes a lot of flexibility

Winner: Draw

Help

Squarespace:  While there is a community behind the scenes, you have paid technical support included with your account. They’ll answer questions and fix problems on your behalf.

Wordpress: The support community is vast, but there’s no guaranteed answer and you’ll have to implement your solutions yourself
Winner: Squarespace

Functionality

Squarespace:  Their service tends to come up with easy and polished ways functions like a nice gallery or widget. Rather than being everything to all people, they roll out features that they can do well.
Wordpress: The clear winner here is Wordpress which is extensible with pretty much any feature you might hope for thanks to the community of plugins.
Winner: Wordpress

Gallery/File System

Squarespace: Built in gallery system is great for portfolio sites such as mine.  The file download system is what I use for my music, while on my old system I had reskinned Movable Type to create a music download index.

Wordpress:  No built in gallery system, but plugins or even a seperate gallery CMS can be used and integrated.  I used Gallery2 in my previous setup, but there was little integration between the two systems.
Winner: Squarespace

Conclusion:

I won’t give a final verdict because each of these categories will be weighted different depending on your needs.  If you need an easy to use, no hassle, interface Squarespace might be a good time saver for you.  I chose Squarespace for itself content driven system and ease of use no hassle backend.  Wordpress’s flexibility and power can’t yet be beat.  In the end, it’ll come down to content. What system will help you product the best content and interface for your users?

Embedding Your Zazzle Store in Wordpress

I have just integrated my Zazzle store into this Wordpress blog thanks to Zazzle's Store Builder feature. Take a look at the result on the Sketchee.com Art Prints Shop Page. You can include items from any shop, not just your own, and you make the referral fee on all sales. While there is documentation on the Zazzle site, this article will focus on specifically embedding the store builder in a Wordpress page.

photo credit: jelene

First, you'll want to download the store builder files. You'll have to customize the files with your identifying information. Open the file configuration.php, in the folder include, using your favorite text editor. You'll see some fields in quotes marked to be edited. Your contributor name or contributor handle is the name of your gallery on Zazzle.com. Your associate id number can be obtained by logging into Zazzle. Upload the files anywhere on your site that supports PHP using your favorite FTP program. This could be in your Wordpress theme folder, although I installed mine in a root level folder. You can call it whatever you like, for example I called the folder /storebuilder.

In Wordpress, you'll want to make a copy of the template that you'd like to embed the store into. I made a copy of my Pages template, pages.php, and renamed it shop.php. This is in the wordpress folder under /wp-content/themes in the folder of the current theme. Log onto your site admin panel and navigate to the Theme Editor in Wordpress. In Wordpress 2.6.5 this is located under the Design Tab. Select shop.php and above any other code you will need to insert the following code; the Template Name can be anything you want:

< ?php
/*
Template Name: Shop
*/
?>

Next, we'll edit the shop.php template to add the shopbuilder code. This can be anywhere on your template. Note that the path must be a full server path as in the example code. There are a ton of customization options to be aware of. The full description of each is available in the configuration.php that we had edited earlier. These variables can also be set there, but it is more versatile to do it from your templates since you could have multiple pages or multiple includes of the storebuilder on one page! The productType variable lets you choose a product (shirts, stickers, etc) by using one of the numbers form configuration.php. If showPagination is true, it will allow your shop page to have several pages of products to navigate through. showSorting lets users choose between sorting by popularity or date added. gridCellSize is the size of the image (tiny, small, medium, large or huge).

< ?php

// configure Zazzle Store Builder display
$_GET['productType'] = '';
$_GET['showPagination'] = 'false';
$_GET['showSorting'] = 'false';
$_GET['showProductDescription'] = 'false';
$_GET['showByLine'] = 'false';
$_GET['showProductTitle'] = 'true';
$_GET['showProductPrice'] = 'false';
$_GET['gridCellSize'] = 'medium';
$_GET['showHowMany'] = '100';

include "/home/FULLPATH/www/www/storebuilder/include/zstore.php"; ?>

Using the theme editor, you'll need to enter a line in the header.php of your Wordpress theme. This should placed between the <head> tags. Note that if you named your /storebuilder directory something different, you'll have to change this to reflect that. You may also want to put this css file in the theme's folder instead and refer to it there; that way it could be modified in the theme editor although you probably won't need to touch it. This contains the styles that the store uses and are already named so not to conflict with your blog styles:

<link id="ext_css" rel="stylesheet" <br/>type="text/css" href="/storebuilder/css/zstore.css"/>

Finally, create a new Wordpress page (Write > Page). You can write a little bit of intro text as the post itself. The most important thing is to scroll down under Advanced Options for the page. Look for Page Template and set that box to the Template Name you created above. You may also want to disable comments for this page if your theme isn't already set to do this. Publish the post.

That is pretty much it. The item links in your store even go to a version of the Zazzle's product page with a smaller header bar to minimize their branding on your store. If you have any difficulty, feel free to post here or at the Zazzle forum.

Update: If all of this sounds too technical or just too time consuming for you, try out the zStore Helper Plugin

Embedding Twitter in Your Wordpress Blog

Twitter can easily be embedded into almost any site including Wordpress blogs, Typepad, Moveable Type and any site allowing for liberal handcoded html or flash (ie for MySpace). For those of you don't know, Twitter is a "microblogging" service; it accepts only small 140 character posts for quick dispersement of information. You can update your phone through text message if you are in a supported country allowing you to have another sticky element of your site.

The easiest way to embed Twitter in a website is to use any of the official Twitter Badges. The most flexible of these is the HTML/JavaScript widget which can be customized using [[CSS]]. This is the one I use here. It matches the look of my site seamlessly on the Wordpress sidebar. Make sure you put the script tag at the bottom of your website right above the body tag to prevent Twitter outages from stalling out your site.

If you prefer, you can use any RSS compatible plugin, such as Feedlist for Wordpress to display the Twitter RSS feed.

There is also a Twitter for Wordpress plugin. I haven't tried it since it seems like the cut and paste code is so simple to implement, but it's another option available.

If you encounter the "Tweet My Blog" plugin in your search for Twitter integration, avoid it. There is word that it is adware. Not great for SEO.

In other Wordpress news, Wordpress version 2.6.1 has been released. This is a bugfix release without much in the way features. If you or your users have experienced any of the problems mentioned, install it as soon as possible

Microblogging, Twitter and the Big Deal

photo credit: 7son75

What is a [[microblog]]? At the time of posting this, I have an experimental microblog on my site powered by Twitter (I have the username Sketchee). Microblogs are just short posts and updates limited to a very very small number of characters. You can text a quick thought right to your phone about whatever you like. I've been hearing about it everywhere. Everyone makes it seem so revolutionary, but it's such a simple concept. It'll take time before I get used to the idea and find out how useful it really is.

Why is this supposed to be interesting? When blogs first emerged, they tended to have diary and journal type of entries. While many of those blogs still exist, blogging as a medium has moved into topical and reader-centric type writing. Many of the twittery microblogs are being used to quickly get out the latest news and really useful information.

So join up, follow your friends, and when posting try to think about your audience. Some folks I thought to follow right away were Will Pate, Amber Mac, and Leo Laporte. And of course you might want to follow me too. I'm just starting out too, so drop me a note here or there if you're using it and how your experience has been!

For more information if you really want to start making the most of it, take a look at The Beginner's Guide to Twitter.