Here’s what you’ll need to bring with you to the workshop:

• Laptop* and power supply
• Software: web browser(s) of choice, e‑mail client of choice. (Or user name and password for a web‑based e‑mail account, if your laptop is not configured for e‑mail access. Some of the resources we’ll be exploring will require verification by e‑mail.)
• User name(s) and password(s) for your own WordPress site(s)
• User names and passwords for your accounts on any or all of the following social-media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Please give us a call at 713-562-1813 if you have any questions or need help to prepare for the workshop.

Featured Strategy: Local Search

WordPress Mod-of-the-Month
Plugin: Social Media Widget

/* Adjust position and width of Social Media Widget */
div#social-widget-3 {
position: absolute;
top: 25px;
left: 675px;
width: 275px;
}

/* Hide heading on Social Media Widget */
div#social-widget-3 div.widget-title {
visibility: hidden;
height: 0;
}

/* Tighten space between icons in Social Media Widget */
.socialmedia-buttons img {
border: 0 none !important;
margin-left: -2px !important;
}

Questions

Feel free to post your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future workshop topics as comments at the bottom of this page, or using the Comment Wall area at right.

Web and social-media projects include:

• Web site built in WordPress.
  Note the custom-made bullets in bulleted lists!:
  
• Facebook fan page. New blog posts on the web site are automatically posted to the Facebook page using the Networked Blogs application.
• Twitter account that tweets Mark’s blog updates
• PBworks wiki for internal communications and project management

Fortunately, WordPress comes loaded with a strong defense against comment spam. It’s a plugin called Akismet, and it’s provided by Automattic, the same folks who supply the WordPress software itself. The plugin checks new comments from unknown users against a database of known spam sources. To activate Akismet, you need to register with WordPress.com and obtain an API key—a password that tells the Akismet servers that a request for data is coming from a legitimate WordPress user. It’s free and easy to obtain.

Comment form with CAPTCHA feature

Akismet quarantines everything that it suspects is spam, so you need to take a look from time to time to make sure that no legitimate comments get caught in the filter. But I’ve been using Akismet for a couple of years, and it hardly ever makes a mistake.

If you don’t want to bother with moderating your comments, or if you just want a second line of defense against comment spam, you can install a plugin to add a CAPTCHA feature to your comment form. (I’ve had good results with one called SI CAPTCHA Anti‑Spam.) This will prevent robotic agents from posting any comment spam to your site. But only your attention will stop the human shameless self‑promoters.

Yesterday I went looking for an image to illustrate a blog post, and I stumbled across an exciting application of “free as a business model” at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. This stock photography site offers web-resolution versions of all of its images for free on one condition: the user must acknowledge the photographer and FreeDigitalPhotos.net. You can also purchase higher-resolution versions at very reasonable rates and without the acknowledgement restriction.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net’s terms of use are simple, clear, and very generous. Few types of use are prohibited even for the free versions of images. The site merely requires you to include a photo credit on printed pieces or a hyperlinked text acknowledgement in online media. You can find an example of the required credit on the latest post on my lifestyle blog, Working or Playing?

The Newsletter Article Archive on The Clutter Fairy web site is an example of the List Category Posts plugin at work. Here’s the shortcode:

[catlist name='Newsletter articles' orderby=date
order=desc date=yes excerpt=yes numberposts=-1]

Explanation: Display posts from the category “Newsletter articles.” Sort them in descending order by date. Show the date and an excerpt of the post. The numberposts=-1 parameter set the number of posts to display as unlimited.

Read more or download the List Category Post plugin from the plugin site.

Then I felt like a hypocrite. I thought about all my own half-baked writing projects. I kept my mouth shut.

Last Friday, at our weekly consultation, she still seemed to be struggling to find the time, the motivation, the inspiration—or maybe just the confidence—to write. She’s received kindly feedback on the articles she’s posted. But she didn’t have anything new ready to publish, so we talked about some other projects she’s contemplating. When we’d worked our way through the meeting agenda, she had some time left before her next appointment. I asked her if she’d like to try to write something.

I guess I caught her off guard, because she couldn’t come up with any excuses not to write. I set a timer, and she clacked away on her laptop keyboard for 20 minutes.

If you have something to say, why wait to get your message out there?

At the end of the timed-writing period, we were both delighted to find that she’d written something pretty good. Pretty darned good, in fact. While she browsed her photo collection for an image to decorate the post, I made a handful of very minor edits—punctuation tweaks, a word change here and there for emphasis. We plugged in the photo she’d picked out, gave the piece some tags for the search engines, and posted it to her blog.

As she headed out to her next appointment, I said, “You should think about what you just accomplished.”

I closed the door behind her and thought, YOU should think about what she just accomplished.

Why do I make this so hard? I write thousands of words a day. I speak hundreds of thousands of words per week. People seem to enjoy hearing what I have to say. Why is it so hard to sit down and write a few hundred words that I’m willing to share with the reading public?

I should take my own advice once in a while. And if you have a great message, but you’re struggling to get it out there, so should you: Just @#$%ing do it already.

YouTube permits registered users to post an unlimited number of videos and to share, rate, and comment on other users’ videos. Unregistered users can watch and share videos. The ease of sharing has turned some YouTube offerings into “viral” videos—clips that spread around the Internet like wildfire (see Evolution of Dance, for example)—and has made some obscure producers into Internet celebrities.

As a registered user, you can also set up a “channel,” a user page that organizes your own videos and others that you’d like to feature. If you’re producing video content, YouTube can be a great way to find an audience and to lead them to other elements of your online presence. Google also offers the option of designating your content as a Promoted Video. Promoted Videos are a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system for driving viewers to your channel.

Your channel can contain a photo or logo image, information about your business or organization, and a link to your web site, blog, or Facebook fan page. The channel can be customized to coordinate with other branding efforts. For example, we’ve configured the font and color scheme of The Clutter Fairy’s YouTube channel to match the client’s web site:

YouTube channel
[Click to open in a new window.]

Web site
[Click to open in a new window.]

Projects include:

• Web site built in WordPress and featuring a portfolio of Anne’s design projects.
• Facebook fan page. New portfolio posts on the web site are automatically posted to the Facebook page using Networked Blogs.
• LinkedIn profile for Anne
• PBworks wiki for internal communications and project management
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