Time to save the world

This is the second part of my instructional blog post about…errr…blog posts. You can find the first one over here: How to write a blog post, and just to re-cap: this is mainly for the guys (friends and colleagues) that I have recently installed WordPress blogs for, and who maybe not are entirely used to writing for an online audience. If this is not you, and you don’t have a blog, you will probably not find this overly interesting.

So, with that out of the way, what can this blog do? Quite a few things actually, however, for any post you add you only need to keep track of a few things:

1. Paragraphs
2. Headlines
3. Images
4. Where the “Read More” link goes

If we start from the top:

1. Paragraphs

Paragraphs

These should be the main bulk of your content. Even if you only post a YouTube video, add a few paragraphs on the reasons why you find it blog-worthy or interesting. It doesn’t have to be a full on bible you need to write, but something is a lot better than nothing.

For text based posts I would recommend you just sit down and type stuff in paragraphs and “go with the flow” of typing. Don’t concentrate on anything else just yet apart from getting the meat of the post in place, which should be paragraphs.

When you think you are done, either for the day or completely with that post, spend some time reading it. Over and over again. Save it as a draft and read it again tomorrow. Use the “Preview” button at your top right. Ask yourself:

• Does it read well?
• Are you mentioning something that you can link to? If you talk about Google Maps, or about a specific article on Mashable, make sure you are also linking to it.
• Are you mentioning something that require prior knowledge? Provide a link to Wikipedia or wherever the reader can read in more depth about your topic.
• Are the paragraphs broken apart from each other to allow the readers eyes some breathing space? Can the readers eyes latch on to natural breaks or breakers in the text? Or is it one huge mass of text?

When you link ensure you are selecting enough text to provide context for users who use link extractors (this is about Accessibility and best practices). Don’t use “Click Here”, as people with link extractors will not know the difference between 15 “Click Here” links. Also, when creating links, make sure you don’t select “open in new window” etc. No bloggers do, and it breaks “best practice”. If your blog post is good enough they will find their way back. If the users are web savvy in the slightest they know to hold CTRL whilst clicking the link which opens it up in a new tab in their browser.

Also use the “B“(old) and the “I“(talics) buttons where appropriate to emphasize context.

1.1 External Text Tools

Don’t use MS Word for blog texts

I would strongly recommend that you do NOT use Word as your editor for posts. The reason for that is that when you select all your text in Word and then copy/paste it into the blog, Word adds a million lines of crap code (slightly exaggerated for effect here…). Word is not good at HTML. WordPress is. You are better off typing your text in Notepad (Win) or Textpad (Mac) than you are typing it in Word. Just don’t do it. Trust me on this.

2. Headlines

Headlines

When you think your paragraphs are flowing and are all linked up, have a think about where you can insert headlines. Headlines serve two purposes:

1. They make it easier for the readers to latch on to with their eyes, and makes the text much more “scannable”.
2. Headlines carry more weight for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

Headlines is also where you can go a bit creative. Make the headlines fun. Make them enticing to ensure the reader reads more. Make them memorable.

To add a headline, just move a paragraph down a few steps in the editor and plonk in your text for your headline in the space in between two paragraphs. Then you select that text. Now, if you look in the editor toolbar you’ll see a droplist that has the text “Paragraph” written into it. You rarely will need to use “Paragraph” as such, as the system does them automatically, but you do need to look a little further down in that list, until you find “Heading 2″. Not 1. Not 3. Heading 2 is what you want. This isn’t complicated, so moving on to:

3. Images

Mirror Mirror by Mubina H

This theme is based on having one large image as the start of the post, and then it also handles smaller content based images well. The large “post hero image” should preferably come from Flickr. There are many reasons for that, but “Most Linked” is one, “using social networks to their fullest” is another, “lowering server load” is a third. The fact that Flickr has a couple of standard sizes is probably one of the best ones though, as we then know the width of the image quite certainly.

To add images to your Flickr account you would need to acquire the login details, or set up a new account. You then upload your images/screenshots to Flickr. So far so good. Back in this blog, in the editor toolbar, you will find an image at the far right (in the toolbar) with Flickr’s blue/pink circles on top of an image. Click that button.

Now, you can either use the images from your own account, in which case you just add that user to the overlay window that will have popped up. You will then be able to browse all images from that Flickr user (so yes, it can be any Flickr user, more on that below though).

Plastic @ Victoria Baths by contactmcr

An added benefit with that Flickr button is that you can add others images that you actually are allowed to use as well. If you in the search box put in your search term, for example “carrot”, it will list all images that you can use royalty free, hopefully with carrots in them. When I say “royalty free” that usually means “with attribution to the photographer, including link to original image”, as per the rules of Flickr and the Creative Commons Licence.

Regardless of where on Flickr you get your image from in the button above, for the hero image, you want the “medium” size. Nothing else. The reason for that is that a medium image is 500 pixels wide at the most, which is nice for this theme. If you pick a larger size it will break the layout of the page, as all text will also try to fit that larger size. If you pick anything smaller it will look wonky. It should be noted that visually, horizontal images make for the best Hero images, as portraits will be 500 pixels high, not wide.You do NOT have to select anything in the droplist that says “alignnone” as far as the Hero image is concerned. Basically that means it will be centered. The other options in that list is “left” and “right” and you want them for the images described below.

As for captions, it defaults into having the checkbox for “automatic captions” checked. That means you either settle for what is suggested, which should be the title of the image and a link to the photographers Flickr account (as per the Creative Commons Licence). If you think that text isn’t suitable, or if you’d like to write something yourself as a caption, make sure you uncheck that box and instead use the field for custom captions below.

Hiko Sejuro by Daniel Y. Go

In the field for “custom caption” (after having unchecked the box above) you basically type in the text you would like to sit under the image. Keep it short, you don’t want to create line breaks in there (I have, on purpose, illustrated with images in this post what that looks like), and if you want to write longer texts you should do so as a text paragraph, not a photo/image caption. The image will still link to the original image on Flickr.

For images that support your text I would recommend you do as above, but instead of “medium” select “small” (with a maximum width of 240 pixels). On the Small images you do want to ensure it doesn’t have “alignnone” in the droplist for alignment. Instead you really do want “left” or “right” as that will make the image go to the side you’ve selected, with the correct padding between the text and the image as well. As for captions, which we should have on any and all images, the same as above is still true to read that paragraph again if unsure.

3.1 Image placement

So for the smaller images I normally put down the cursor to the left of the first paragraph after a headline and click the Flickr button. After having selected my image as per above I then go to “Preview” to ensure it all looks good.

Not Rocket Science

If you did that the image will be on exact level with the paragraph, and that sounds good, but at times it can look strange (depending on context, text layout etc). If it looks weird, just undo what you did and pick another location for the image. This isn’t rocket science by any means, nor is there any “right or wrong”. It is what you find look best that is the correct way of doing it.

4. Where the “Read More” link goes

Blogg Bliss

Now, if you’ve done all of the above you are almost done. It is time to think about the fine details of things. One of those is to figure out where the “Read More” link will be placed, and this affects the readability of the home page. I would say you place it after the first 1-2 paragraphs (if they have 2-5 lines of text) below the Hero image, as that gives just enough information to make things interesting, whilst being able to see more than one post on most screens at any time on the homepage, to encourage further exploration.

The End

Yes, well, that is about it. Again, I have to stress that all of the above applies to this specific theme, which also is the theme applied to the blogs I have created of late. In reality it is a “child theme” to the awesome Thematic Theme Framework and based on the Thematic Power Blog Theme, which is extremely powerful right out of the box. Both are made by Ian Stewart, who is doing a great job.

I have then modified it (mainly CSS) and enabled a set of plug-ins that they all use. I have also hacked a few plugins, most notably the awesome Flickpress and added some JavaScript and some CSS to add a few options mentioned above. In following the GNU licence, under which both Thematic Power Blog as well as Flickpress are licenced I shall make those modifications available for download on this site in the near future.

As for the images, I have been a bit “free” in my thinking regarding attribution. This is mainly due to giving artistic freedom to the authors, combined with the fact some people give their images VERY long titles indeed. I have reasoned as such that if I still follow the Flickr guidelines, and ensure any externally used image still links back to the Flickr original image, we are probably fine, as that also attribution, even though it perhaps isn’t written out. It is most definitely clear if you click the image (or hover it for that matter).

Questions? Comments? Use the comment field below.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

I have recently been setting up several different self-hosted WordPress blogs, covering many different topic matters. All those blogs are being maintained and content edited by people who are not me, and I have noticed that several of those the content editors do not have much experience in writing for online audiences. That is ok. No one has experience until they’ve done it.

However, there are a couple of quick wins one can do for the articles per se, to make them easier to read and more entertaining for the reader, and I shall, completely non-scientifically, go through a few things I appreciate with other blogs out there. This also means this will turn into a blog post about blog posts, a thing I said a few years ago I would never do (because there are enough of them out there already), but I shall make this one exception to that rule in an attempt to be kind to colleagues and friends.

The basics

WordPress

Firstly, we are using WordPress, The Premium Blog Tool On Planet Earth. Get over it. Get used to it. I don’t care if your cousin swears by blogger.com nor do I care if your old colleagues neighbours middle son is claiming he can build you a system for a pack of cigarettes. A large percentage of the leading blogs out there run WordPress. Now your blog is as well. Great eh?

And, for sake of clarification, seeing as my work require both .NET(C#), PHP and other technologies: even if you were to write about Microsoft Sharepoint only, your blog does not need to run on Microsoft Sharepoint. In fact, I would challenge you to point me to any single .NET blog engine that is as comprehensive and competent as WordPress. Your blog and its underlying technology should quite possibly not be the topic of your blog articles in any case. Don’t confuse those two separate things, use the right tool for the right problem. Moving on…

WPtouch

One of the main benefits with a WordPress blog that you run on your own server is the vast amount of plug-ins you can install (7144 at the time of writing this). There are literally millions of really clever people out there with far too much time on their hands. There are a few not-so-clever-ones as well, but let’s focus on the good ones here. Quite a bunch of those are trying to still their create-wordpress-plugins-fetish. Guess what? You are the winner. Most of them give away their hard labor for free, to you.

Enjoy, but most importantly, don’t let their hard work be for nothing. Try stuff out. Use the plugins I have installed, they are not only really good, they are also very helpful for you and your creative writing vein. You can also install various apps and extensions on your Firefox browser and in your iPhones to enable you to type and write more effectively.

How to write

Target well

The most important thing: Remember who you are writing for. Who is your target audience? What tone are they expecting from you? If you don’t know your intended audience, how would you like them to get to know you? After you have decided on that, stick to it, at every point within your blog and your articles where you interface with your audience, which should be pretty much everywhere unless you are doing this as an ego trip only.

Blogs are personal, even if there are several contributors on the blog. If you start sounding like a machine people will not talk back, at least not nicely. If you sound like a massive corporation the only ones who will talk to you are probably going to say things you don’t want to hear. Be nice. Be personal. Be relative. Be conversational. That is, after all, what you are trying to achieve with a blog. If you want to burp out marketing messages there are other, better, ways to communicate.

You are trying to make people comment and to enable them to create a dialogue with you. Hopefully that dialogue is interesting to others, who also will become regular readers and in time will contribute with comments, you will perhaps even get to know new people, possibly even gain new friends.

Final Verdict Not Needed

Not needed?

If you read up on the “pro” bloggers out there you will notice that their success rarely is accidental. They plan their blog posts, often quite carefully, and you can often figure out their post patterns by viewing their older posts. It goes something like this:

1. Some posts have news value. Time is of the essence, as you want to be perceived as one of the first ones to blog about your particular topic. That means that you will end up quite high on the search ranking when the rest of the world start to figure out what you figured out a full 3 days ago. These posts you should type as quickly as you hear someone sneeze it. It is more important to be quick than right with these ones, though if you get it wrong enough times people might actually think you are not all that clever after all, so moderation could be a good lead word here, and some fact finding would be recommended. Another common practice is to play it somewhat safe and let a known expert do all the hard thinking and to only contribute with a “me too” post, though again, people will in time see through this, and the benefit of awesome “googlability” gets somewhat diluted.
2. Other posts have longevity. They are not news, usually because they will always be true. This very post fits into this category. This also includes comments on various topics, or insights, which may or may not be triggered by something news worthy (cunning trick to sort of fit into point 1 above as well). Regardless, it is the insight that is of importance, and the “Pro’s” often create series of these articles to make you come back for the entire series. This type of posts you can type in “Draft mode” for forever. Type a little bit every day. Stock them up, and publish them when you are feeling a bit off on your news finding skills.
   1. Even better with this type of articles is that you have a reason to expand on it at a later date, and link back to your original post when the insight, or key elements of it, have changed. People will read both your articles to ensure they have understood your initial point and how it now has changed.
3. There are lots of lists out there. “My Top 10 iPhone apps” has a lot of keywords in it that loads of people will click on. “The 5 best ways to use Twitter” is another given crowd magnet. The good thing with lists is that they will not be relevant in 6 months time, which means you can repeat the topic in regular intervals.
4. Some people, depending on the topic of their blog, mix it up with something rather personal. Others avoid the actual mixing up of things, often because they have a separate blog for that very purpose. I leave it for you to decide, but I have noted it more common than I thought it would be when I looked around. Perhaps I saw more of it because I looked for it, much like I now have a pregnant wife and therefore mainly think every woman out there also is pregnant, as that is what I see.
5. You do not have to reach a conclusion. The idea with a blog is that it starts a conversation with the reader. Feel free to post articles where you haven’t actually come to a revelation or a revolutionary insight, you can always go back and edit the original post, reply to comments on your post or to re-post your new insights in two weeks time. This is often a massive barrier to people (included yours truly), where they/we think we have to present a final exam result.It is not needed, and people love to shine with their brilliance in the comments, telling you how it really is. If you think this is wrong please say so in the comments below.
6. Despite point 5, it is good if you have something to say.

I could go on, but in the true spirit of presenting sooner and looser rather than full-on insight I realise this will have to be a two-part post after all. If you have any comments so far, type away below.