When I was young, I kept a journal.  In it, I wrote about all of the private thoughts, fears, and feelings that I felt I couldn’t tell anyone.  Well, that was the general idea.  By "kept a journal", I really mean I wrote in it for about a week, rediscovered it a month later, wrote in it once more and then forgot about it for another three months.  I was never very good with writing things with paper and pen.  My love of writing only flourished when I was first introduced to computers.

Fast forward to the present.  Sometimes there things we feel the need to write about that we just can’t blog about.  Perhaps family members read your blog or perhaps the issue crosses a TMI boundary.  However, despite these misgivings, there might still be an urge to write about it, just not in a public manner.  After all, writing is a very good way of organizing your thoughts on matters.

At one time, I considered setting up a private WordPress blog for my son for this very purpose.  He could use it to express his thoughts on anything and everything.  The posts would not be publicly visible.  After all, he’s only 8 and doesn’t need a public blog.  However, B and I would be able to read it.  I actually got it all set up, but never showed him it.  Perhaps when he’s older he’ll use it.

As for me, I’m thinking of setting up a private blog for some of my thoughts.  They might be matters that I don’t feel comfortable shouting out to a random mix of strangers, friends and family.  They might be matters that I feel don’t interest my TechyDad.com audience (or my Twitter or Google+ followers).  Or perhaps it is something that has been on my mind that might be a blog post at some point, but hasn’t been fully fleshed out yet.  In any event, it would be nice to have a place to record my thoughts privately and a non-public blog seems ideal.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you ever had a journal or a private blog to record your thoughts?

P.S. If you haven’t already, go visit FollowerHQ and let me know what you think of my Twitter application.

P.P.S. For a bit of fun, try my other Twitter Application, Rout. It’s a +F in Fun!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #122

Disclaimer: The “Paper,Write,Pen” clipart above is from OpenClipArt.org.

That big red line shows how many spam comments I got daily.  The green line hugging zero?  Those are my non-spam comments.  If only I could transform spam comments into real comments, I’d have more comments than I could reply to.  Of course, if I had that ability, I think I’d use it on all of those “Nigerian Princes” and “European Lotteries” that keep e-mailing me.

Thankfully, Akismet snags most of the spam comments.  Sadly, some slip through.  This means that spammy comments are visible on my blog until I take them down.  I think I need to find some WordPress plugins to help reduce my spam load.

What do you do to reduce spam comments?  Also, any guesses on how many spam comments this post will get?

In case you are the single person online who hasn’t heard about it yet, TheBloggess was pitched by PR firm Brand Link Communications to run a piece about one of the Kardashians in pantyhose.  Now, TheBloggess’ blog is many things, but it is not about celebrities and what they wear.  This wasn’t the first bad pitch she’s gotten.  In fact, she gets so many that she has a dedicated page to send them to.

Normally, PR firms will either not contact her back or will apologize and/or remove her from their lists.  This time, however, they replied in a bit of a snippy manner.  At this point, I’m sure TheBloggess would have just shrugged and gone on with her life.  She would have, that is, had Jose from Brand Link not hit reply all and used quite a colorful phrase to describe her.  From this point on, the situation spiraled out of control and not in a positive way for Brand Link Communications.

What does this have to do with Yom Kippur?  On this Jewish holiday, we realize that we’re going to be judged for the things we’ve done in the past year.  To make amends, we traditionally apologize to people we’ve wronged.  An apology doesn’t always make everything better, but it can go a long way towards repairing all sorts of relationships.  However, these apologies need to be sincere.  Just saying “I’m sorry, but I’ll do it again” or “I’m sorry if you were offended” isn’t enough.

When Jose realized his mistake, his response should have been an unequivocal apology.  Something along the lines of: “I’m sorry.  I messed up both in my language and in the match between the original pitch and your blog’s content.  I’ll look into ways to better target pitches so that you receive pitches that your readers will actually find useful.”  This would have helped smooth things over and we would likely have never heard about the interaction (a good thing in hindsight).

Instead, Jose sent an “I’m sorry but…” reply.  He even went so far as to blame TheBloggess for starting the mess and to tell her that she should be thankful that they send content her way.  As if, without PR firms, TheBloggess would be a nobody with nothing to write about.

TheBloggess replied with soon-to-be-immortal (and hopefully emblazoned on a shirt) words: “Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.”

What happened next was quite a demonstration.  TheBloggess blogged about the situation and many of her 160,000 followers on Twitter started tweeting about it.   The story was picked up on by none other than Wil Wheaton (1.8 million followers) and Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers), and Perez Hilton (3.9 million followers).  Obviously, there’s likely some overlap in followers, but needless to say that this story had millions of people worldwide viewing it.  It was a very public affair and very bad for Brand Link.

At one point, Jose (who has since deleted his Twitter account), tried defending his actions as trying to defend Wil Wheaton.  Then he claimed his account was hacked and finally, he mentioned that he had apologized to TheBloggess.

Could this have been avoided?  I was thinking about this during Yom Kippur and realized there were many times that Brand Link could have apologized and made it all go away.  After the original pitch and TheBloggess’ response, they could have apologized.  (And not had someone commit Reply-All-icide.)  After the Reply All, Jose could have been proactive, realized what he did and quickly followed it up with an apology (and not just a “I’m sorry if you were offended, but…”).

Once TheBloggess posted her blog post, however, the quiet person-to-person apologies needed to be big public apologies.  At that point, they didn’t need to satiate one angry Bloggess, but a few thousand (if not hundred thousand or million) folks.  There are many lessons to be learned from what happened between TheBloggess and Brand Link Communications, one of the big ones is how *not* to apologize.

Over time, I found Zoundry Raven and then Windows Live Writer.  This helped with the composing of posts.  Suddenly, creating blog posts wasn’t a chore.  Recently, I even hooked my blog up to get mobile photos from my phone.  So now, instead of using TwitPic or a similar service, I can post a photo right to my blog while on the go.

As far as readership goes, I reminded myself that I couldn’t expect to open a blog and suddenly get thousands of readers.  I dove into the social media community.  I commented on other blogs.  Of course, I also tried to put only the very best content on my blog.  (It doesn’t matter how much “promoting” you do.  If the content’s not good, people won’t come back.)  Slowly, but surely, the number of readers to my blog increased.

I owe a lot of exposure to my wife also.  She got into blogging before me (well, at least under this pseudonym) so her “social reach” was far greater than mine.  When she promoted a post of mine, it went further than if I promoted it alone.  I believe the gap between us has slimmed a bit, though she still has over a thousand more Twitter followers than I do.

It’s been a wild ride these past 3 years.  I wonder what the next 3 years will bring.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What do you think the future of blogging/social media will look like?  Where do you think we’ll be in 3 years?

Don’t forget to enter my Hot Wheels Nitro Speeders giveaway!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #104

This has happened to me before.  I begin writing a post only to realize that I’ve written about this before.  In fact, as I write this, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve written a post before about writing a post before.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you ever experienced Bloggus Repeatus?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #96

That night, I worked a bit on My Upcoming Twitter Application and a blog post.  Every press of the key brought pain and I found I needed to take frequent breaks.  I finally finished and got to bed at about 1:30am, hoping that some sleep would help my elbow feel better.

Sadly, the next day didn’t see any improvement.  And the 5-6 hour drive home (actually longer, but at least 5 hours of actual driving) didn’t help.  Even holding onto and moving the steering wheel hurt.  To make matters worse, the pain is in my left elbow and I’m a leftie.  Can you guess what arm I instinctively use for everything?  Yup, my left one.

Yesterday, I went back to work.  Now, I work as a web programmer.  So my entire job involves typing out code.  Hitting keys on a keyboard.  Exactly the kind of thing that elicits pain from my elbow.  The pain has continued into today.  Every time I think it is getting better, I move a finger or turn my arm and the pain returns.

I’ve had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome before so I know how that feels.  This feels just like that, only in my elbow instead of my wrist.  It turns out that there is a name for this: Cubital Tunnel Syndrome.  I’m going to try to cut down on using my arm as much as possible.  That means you get a short, all-text blog post instead of one chock-full of photos and detailed stories.  For now, you can read about some of our Niagara Falls trip over on B’s blog.  Here’s hoping my elbow gets better quickly.  I need it for my livelihood!

I have to admit, I was one of those people who weren’t quite reassured.  I switched over to YFrog.  However, then I began to think.  YFrog said they would never do what TwitPic did, but how could I be sure.  Perhaps a year from now we’ll all be talking about some big scandal about new YFrog TOS changes.  Or maybe YFrog will go belly up.  What would happen to my photos then?

In addition, I began to think about traffic.  When B was at Disney Social Media Moms, she saw Chris Brogan speak.  She relayed some of what he said to me including that you should treat your blog like your home base and Twitter, Facebook, etc like outposts.  Perhaps it was time to move my “photos shared from my cell phone” operation back into my home base.  After all, wouldn’t it be ideal to drive traffic back to TechyDad.com rather than SomeRandomPhotoSharingService.com?

I already had a pretty decent idea of how it would work.  I would create a super-secret e-mail address used only for posting photos.  A script on TechyDad.com would check this inbox for photos I sent and would make them into blog posts, uploading the photos and any additional text I provided.  Finally, an auto-tweet script would alert my Twitter followers of my uploaded image the same way that TwitPic or YFrog would.

While I’d have loved to have written the script myself, I decided to see if anyone had done a WordPress plugin.  Sure enough, I found Postie right away.  I figured others might want to do something similar with their blogs, so I’ll detail my basic steps below.   (NOTE: WordPress has a “Post By E-mail” feature, but you’ll see soon enough why I didn’t use this.) 

Step 1: Be Using Self-Hosted WordPress and install the Postie Plugin

None of this will work if you’re using Blogger or are hosted on WordPress.com.  There might be some solution for you, but I’m not sure what that would be.  Sorry.  If you do have a self-hosted WordPress blog, add the Postie plugin from the Admin control panel.

Step 2: Create a Post From Cell Phone E-mail address

You don’t want to set Postie to use your publicly available e-mail address.  There are protections against just anyone posting to your blog (more on these later), but do you really want to chance it?  So have your web host set up (or set up via their control panel) some kind of super secret e-mail address.  Something like thisisonlyusedby5551212topostpics@mysite.com.  Add that e-mail address to your cell phone’s contacts under a name like “Post Photo.”

Step 3: Configure Postie

In your sidebar, under Settings, click on Postie.  You’ll get a list of options to set up.  First of all, you’ll need to tell Postie just how to get to the e-mail inbox.  So give Postie the mail server, userid and password information.

Next, under User, you want to make sure that you’re the only one who can post.  This is where WordPress’s basic Post-By-Email function fails.  If a spammer were to guess the e-mail address, you might find your blog relaying a Nigerian prince’s pleas for help.  Make sure “Allow Anyone To Post Via Email” is set to No and set up the authorized addresses to be the e-mail address of your phone.  If you’re not sure about this, you could always send a TXT and Picture message to your normal e-mail address and see what e-mail addresses they come from.  (TXT and picture messages often display as two different e-mail addresses.)

Under Message, select the category that the messages should take.  I created a new one called Mobile Photos.  Text/picture messages received as e-mails can often contain signatures added by the providers.  (For example, “This message has been sent using the picture and Video service from Verizon Wireless!”)  Obviously, we don’t want that posting, so go under Advanced options and any signature as a new signature pattern.  You don’t need the whole thing, just enough to for Postie to recognize it and not confuse it with your own text.  (e.g. Don’t add in “This message” lest it cut you off when your post should say “This message comes overlooking a beautiful landscape.”)

You can customize the template under Image and fiddle with the other settings if you wish, but the basic functionality is there now.  Now, you should be able to take a photo, send it to your blog and have it posted.  The only thing you’re missing is tweeting it.

For this, I turned to the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.  Sadly, this plugin required a prefix for tweets.  Something along the lines of “New Blog Post”.  Of course, I didn’t want my Mobile Photo posts to be called “New Blog Posts”, so I went into the code.  It turned out to be a simple fix to make it stop using prefixes.  (I actually set it so that a prefix of a blank space would result in no prefix used at all since the application errors if no prefix is used.)  Since I don’t want to assume that everyone out there is comfortable coding, I’d simply recommend finding a prefix you can live with or using another plugin such as Tweet This.

Once this is set up, you’ll be able to completely replace the functionality of those Twitter photo sharing services.  Your photos will remain under your control, you’ll drive more traffic to your site and you won’t need to worry about some random terms of service changes (at least not with this).

If given the opportunity*, would you set something like this up for your blog?  Do you see an upside to TwitPic/YFrog type services that my Post-To-My-Blog solution doesn’t have?

* If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, but aren’t techy enough to set this up,  I do freelance work on the side and might be able to help you out.  Send me an e-mail via the Contact Me form above.

Don’t forget to enter my Dinosaur Train giveaway.  You could win Dino Poop and Hatchers.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Have you ever had bloggy writer’s block?  If so, what did you do to get the creative juices flowing

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #77

On Monday, JSL got sick.  He had been coughing for awhile, but the cough was getting worse.   B took him to the doctor, afraid he had caught my strep throat.  They put him on an antibiotic, but that didn’t seem to help.  That night, he developed a fever and threw up.  The night was very rough with him waking up multiple times coughing so much that he could hardly breathe.  Eventually, he came into our bed.  Needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep and writing a blog post was not a high priority.  Tuesday was busy at work.  By that night, I figured I would just work on my Wednesday blog post and skip Tuesday.

Wednesday night, I should have worked on a blog post, but was too tired.  Thursday saw some heater issues.  (Heat went out. Pilot light wouldn’t stay lit and a professional eventually had to be called when it proved too much for me.)  So, by Thursday night, I decided to write this Friday post instead.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: How far in advance do you write posts for your blog?

Also, make sure you add some spice to your marriage by entering my Eden Fantasys $50 gift card giveaway.  Less than a week to go!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #70

I began the year on a quest to lose 20 pounds in 20 weeks.  I’m proud to report that I was successful.  I’m not so proud to report that, in the remaining 32 weeks, I’ve gained those 20 pounds back.  I’m even less proud to report that those returning 20 pounds brought some buddies along.  Looks like I’ll be beginning 2011 with the goal of losing 25 – 30 pounds.

2010 marked the first time we attended blogging/social media conferences.  The first conference was Disney Social Media Moms 2010.  Actually, B attended this one.  I hung out with the kids and rode on rides.  To be completely honest, I think I got the better deal.  No offense to those of you who were chatting with B and enjoying the conference, but NHL, JSL and I got to go on Disney World’s rides!  It’s really hard to beat that.  Despite some injuries, problems and some face-remembering fears, we all had a great time.  Even better, we’ll be attending DisneySMMoms 2011.  And by “we”, I mean B again while the boys and I ride more rides.  Small World, here we come!  (By the way, if I don’t remember meeting you from last year, please don’t be offended.)

The Disney trip forced me to reexamine some of my long-held religious practices.  I think I’m much happier with my modified practices than I was previously.  I know that B’s much happier, though she likely misses getting total remote control custody from sundown Friday to an hour past sundown Saturday.

The high of the Disney World trip was followed with a low of constant nosebleeds.  First, I got them once a week.  Then, they got more and more frequent until I had to have my nose electrically cauterized.  That’s as fun as it sounds (unless you think it sounds like a blast in which case you have issues).  Sadly this only worked for awhile and then I had to get my nose chemically cauterized.  This procedure hurt less and wasn’t as intense afterwards, but still is something I’d rather not go through again.

Towards the end of March, it became apparent that my grandmother wasn’t going to be alive much longer.  She passed away in mid-April.  I had previously taken custody of her photo collection with the goal of scanning them all and distributing DVDs of the photos to everyone.  This scanning project uncovered some incredible photos.  I only wish my grandmother was alive to tell me the stories behind them.  The scanning project also turned into a genealogy project using various tools.

April also saw the launch of Dad Revolution: a joint blog hosted by about 10 dads.  (The actual number fluctuates.)  It’s been a bit of a rocky go at times, but I’m proud to have my posts alongside the rest of these dads!

Towards the end of May, I realized my blogging limitations.  Determined to break them, I did an Eden Fantasy review, attended an Eden Fantasy party at BlogHer 2010 (NSFW) and even had a “Frisky Vacuuming” guest post on Blogging Dangerously.

In May, I began a project near and dear to me: My Bullied History.  Here, I detailed how I had been bullied from elementary school through high school.  I even showcased a piece of writing I had unearthed from my freshman year of college when the bullying was fresh in my mind.

In August, just before BlogHer 2010, we got a diagnosis for some of the behaviors we were seeing in NHL.  The doctor said that, since I shared some of these same behaviors, I likely had this condition as well.  This led me to question how much of me was from my experiences as a child versus the “condition.”  In the end, it was a moot point as further testing showed he didn’t have this condition at all.  A rollercoaster of emotion, to be sure.

Speaking of BlogHer 2010, we attended that conference in New York City and had a blast.  I’m intentionally not going to say much about it because I know that if I try I’ll go on for about a dozen paragraphs.  Suffice it to say that we highly enjoyed the panels, meeting with fellow bloggers and meeting with company representatives.

BlogHer 2010 was also where I cheated on my long-term relationship.  And by that, I mean I used someone’s DSLR camera instead of my trusty point and shoot camera.  We tried to repair relations, but after its flash broke, I got my own DSLR.  My point and shoot will be given to NHL to use in photographic excursions with me.

Of course, 2010 also saw a lot of cooking (including duplicating a chickpea recipe I’ve been wanting to make for years), video game playing, math learning with NHL, milestones with JSL and more.

What will 2011 bring?  I’m not sure, but if 2010 is any indication, it’s sure to be a wild ride.