BlogOrlando

Over 200 bloggers and entrepreneurs from around the state converged upon Rollins College’s Bush Auditorium to hear speakers from around the country come to talk about blogging, social media, and the evolution of the internet community. This was the second year of BlogOrlando, an unconference. Last year, there were 90 attendees. This year, the registration was closed when they hit 290 and the organizers (basically . I was honored to be there and met some awesome people doing some very awesome things.

New Blog Design Coming

After having this design up for almost two years, I’m more than ready for a new design for this blog. And I’m hoping you’ll help me. With the amount of traffic I get, I feel I owe it to you just as much as I do myself.

For me, design isn’t just about a cool new look. I need to put some more function into this site as well. Let me share a bit about what I’m thinking.

The Design Wishlist

phpBB.com Down for a Week and Counting…

No one in the blogosphere seems to have commented, that I’ve been able to find, about the mysterious shutdown of phpbb.com, which hosts the support forums for the popular open source software phpBB, a bulletin board server program (or forum software, as some call it).

Their website says the following:

Ouch! RAID array failure…

We’re sad to announce that during the switch of a failed harddisk to the hot-spare and the planned 2 hours required for the array to re-sync, we’ve been hit by an extremely unexpected double-disk failure which leaves us with a dead array.

If No One Reads Your Post

If a Blog Falls

Seth Godin breaks his pattern of deep analysis and asks a simple question: If no one reads your post, does it exist? He goes on.

What do most people get out of blogging? After all, most blogs are virtually unread by outsiders…

The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude.

Speed Linking

I’m loathe to start a speed link section like so many other bloggers, but I’m ensnared by the possibility that information that some readers might want to know about is passing them by while I wrestle whether to write a long or short post about some of these items. So here is my first attempt at speed-linking with brief explanations.

Why Reading Blogs is Crucial to being Smart

It’s 2007. Few people in your neighborhood read blogs. Depending on where you work, you may have coworkers who don’t know what a blog is, much less a “blog reader”. Most people you know read more each year from magazines, trade journals, books, and newspapers than they ever read from a blog.

Not me.

I’m going to tell you why reading blogs is absolutely crucial if you want to be smart, well-informed, and street-smart. Moreover, I’m going to show you how reading blogs will make you more sociable, friendly, and confident.

Speeding up the Website

There are lots of things you can do to speed up a website. But that is a whole article in and of itself. For now, to make my blog more comfortable for my many new visitors, I removed some of my badges and third-party content on my sidebar. For now, this includes my Traineo badge that details how much weight I’m losing, my Amazon Wishlist, and my music listening profile on Last FM. They aren’t gone forever - you can still see them on my “About Lawrence” page.

Switched to Google Reader, despite earlier review

I reviewed Google reader sometime ago, after its major update, and wasn’t impressed. I had been looking for an online feed reader so I could make use of my time away from my home computer by catching up on the blogs that I read. At the time, I had been using the built-in feed reader of Thunderbird, my email program.

However, after continual frustration with being stuck somewhere, waiting on someone or something, and wishing I could use the twenty minutes to catch up on my blog reading, I finally decided to give Google Reader a more comprehensive try. I’ve been using it for the past two months as my only feed reader.

Spam is Beyond Control

One thing many folks don’t seem to fully grasp is that if you want to be available, that is to say, if you want people to contact you, then you must allow spam in your life. I hate these Russian-originated stock quote spam emails as much as you, but it is a necessary evil in order that people can conveniently have an email address.

Often, I’ll see blog postings and various tech magazines give a list of dozens of ways to control spam. It is quite often more time-consuming and frustrating to implement those ideas than it is to just let spam take its course.

Wall Street Journal Bashes Blogs

Joseph Rago, an editorial assistant for the Wall Street Journal has just debuted a smashing critique of blogs and bloggers on Opinion Journal, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial section. Entitled “The Blog Mob”, Mr. Rago, who was previously the editor-in-chief for the Dartmouth Review (an in-house publication for Dartmouth College, his alma mater), prefaces his article with Joseph Conrad’s quote about newspapers themselves “written by fools to be read by imbeciles”, but intones that this now applies to the very blogs which criticize newspapers - the kind for sale at my local convenience store - the type I don’t buy, or read because they “are predictable” and thus, “excruciatingly boring” - despite both of those terms used by Mr. Rago to refer to political blogs on the internet.

Creative Writing now on Booksie

BooksieI’ve removed some of my creative writing from my blog here and put it on my profile at Booksie. I didn’t want to clog up my blog with creative writing, plus I have a few projects I’m working on which are a bit long for a blog format. I will make mention of any interesting posts at Booksie here, but you’ll have to go to Booksie to read it and comment on it there - along with all the other great creative writers that float around that domain. There will always be a link to my creative writing at Booksie profile under “Some Cool Links” on the side column in case you lose track of this post. If you want to read my latest short story, check out “Upstate”.