Good People Day 2008

I've been sick the last couple of days, so I didn't have much time to type this up.  I actually have been sleeping for about 90% of the last 48 hours.  I'm barely going to make this post on the right date, but it still counts, right?

If you have never heard of Gary Vaynerchuck, you should really check him out.  He's a good guy, and produces some great stuff.  I'm a big fan of his wine show over at Wine Library TV. That is his daily show where he tastes wines and gives good advice about wines in general.  If you're even the least bit interested in wine, you should check it out.  He also has another daily show at GaryVaynerchuck.com where he covers a whole variety of topics, including personal branding.   On yesterday's show, Gary made a call to action that we declare April 3rd, 2008 as Good People Day.  He wants everyone to spread the word about good people, and to talk about someone that is a good person.  This seemed like a good thing to do, so I thought I'd join in and do my part.

I wasn't sure whom I should talk about as a good person, and since I left myself so little time I'm just going to have to wing it.  I think I'm just going to talk about a group rather than one person.  That group would be the Wal-Mart greeters.  Those old people are always really friendly.  They have to stand there and put up with so many lousy people, but they still smile at everyone.  It doesn't matter how unfriendly you are, the Wal-Mart greeter will always be nice.  I don't know if it's just because they're all old and have nothing better to do, or what, but I think that they're good people.  So next time you head to your Wal-Mart, make sure to smile at the old guy at the door, and let him know he's a good person.

Takeaway From WordCamp Dallas Part 2

Yesterday in Part 1 of my takeaway I covered some of the cool new tools and programs that I am starting to use as a result of going.  I should probably give an honorable mention to Twitter in there too, since I did start using it just before WordCamp as a result of FriendFeed, but I'm using it a whole lot more since WC.  Today I'll cover some of the good advice/tips that I picked up.

Some of these things I already knew, but just haven't been following. I'm really going to try to be better about that, though. One that got brought up over and over again was maintaining a large repository of posts. Always keep some posts written, or in the process of being written, so that you'll always have material at your reading in case you don't have time to write something else. I always tried to do this myself, but found that I could never keep more than one or maybe two posts done. The people at WC, though, had anywhere from ten to sixty posts in some stage of completion. I've already started to come up with some things that I can write about, and started on a couple of them. I always have a few ideas swimming in my head, but usually don't let myself start on them unless I know that I can finish it in the same sitting. I'm changing my mentality now. Another thing that I've always known I should do but don't is use more images. Most people say they try to have at least one image in every post they do. Scoble has even said that he's much more likely to look at something just because it has a picture. I rarely use any pictures on my posts, but I think I'll try to start doing that. It was also suggested that you make sure to keep them hosted on your server, and that you use descriptive names and appropriate alt text. For some reason, Live Writer likes to post my pictures to my Picasa online album rather than my own server. I think I'm going to try to change that, though. One thing that was suggested that I've never really thought about before is using the title attribute on all of your links. I also already knew, but failed to follow, this next thing which is to post consistently. It doesn't matter if you post five times a day, or just once a week, it is important to be consistent. If you are posting every day, and then take ten days off, you're likely to have some people get aggravated. It's also just good practice for people to know that every morning/afternoon/Monday/weekend they can do their reading and catch your post. I'm going to start aiming for a post a day, at least M-F, and see how that goes. If I stay on the ball with it, I should be ok. It probably means staying up a bit late sometimes, or taking my laptop to the bar with me.

A lot of the things I just covered can be found on John Pozadzides's site, One Man's Blog, in his post 45 Ways to Power up Your Blog, which he used as his talk. His was one that I really enjoyed. I also liked Aaron Brazell's WordPress FAQ which covered quite a bit, and was pretty informative. Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, was the first to speak and announced the launch of WordPress 2.6, and hinted at what's to come from 2.6. You can watch a recording of Matt's talking about where they've been, and things coming WordPress 2.6 thanks to Michelle Greer. His was the first talk, and it definitely piqued my interest in using WordPress as my platform. The other discussion I really enjoyed, though it doesn't necessarily directly relate to me, was the panel on the business of blogging.  The panel consisted of Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, Aaron Brazell, and Matt Mullenweg. The questions and answers were all really great, and John P did an awesome moderating. I probably would have enjoyed seeing it, but I missed the first session on day two which was a live recording of the WordPress Podcast with Charles Stricklin. Fortunately, though, since this is a podcast I can just download it and listen when I have a chance. There were a number of other speakers, but those were the ones I enjoyed the most.

That takes care of part two of my takeaway from WordCamp.  I had a great time, and enjoyed meeting people and learning new things.  I should also mention a thanks to Frisco, TX for letting us use the city hall there for the event.  The facilities were very nice, and I know that we all appreciated them letting us be there.  I hope to see more events like this here in the Dallas area in the future.

Takeaway From WordCamp Dallas Part 1

I was fortunate enough to get to attend WordCamp Dallas, which was a great experience. Living in the Dallas area doesn't afford me a lot of opportunities to go to many web related events so this was really nice. I went with zero expectations of what I would get out of it. I just wanted to meet like minded people and see what WordPress is all about since I haven't used it before. It turned out to be a really enjoyable two days, and I'll cover some of what I took away from it.  I originally planned to have this all as one post, but it seemed significantly longer than I normally like so I decided to split it into two parts.  This one will cover things that I'm going to start using because of WordCamp, and in my next one I'll go over tips/advice I picked up, and which sessions I really enjoyed.

I've never used WordPress. When I first started my site, I did everything myself. All of the coding and whatnot I setup on my own. I even built a rudimentary comment system. To update I had a little form I made in PHP what would update my database. I was pretty proud of myself for doing everything on my own. The problem, though, is that it's a lot of work do maintain that way. I was doing a lot of things manually, and decided that I could either invest time in writing things to automate some stuff and make scaling easier, or I could use a blogging tool. I decided that lazy was the way to go, so I set out to find a tool. The choice wasn't really that hard, though, since Google owns Blogger, and if you know me you know that Google also owns me. I use all of their other services so I saw no reason to not also use their blogging platform. Eventually I started using Live Writer so I never even visit the Blogger page anymore. Despite my using it for about a year now, I've never been 100% sold on Blogger. I especially feel this way after seeing WordPress 2.5 in action. As such, I'm going to be migrating my site over the the WordPress platform. I already have it setup and am currently running it parallel to my Blogger so that I can make sure it's all working and can just be switched over. I'm working on getting a design that I like put together before I go live with WP. I'm hoping to do that this week, but my schedule may not allow for anything to happen before this weekend. Get excited, though, because it's coming.

WordPress wasn't the only thing that got talked up that I've decided to start using. Feedburner was also touted by a few people. I visit gobs of sites that use Feedburner, but I never really bothered to set it up. After hearing the praise given to it, though, I've decided to give it a go. I don't know how many people are actually subscribing to my feed as it is now, but I'm pretty sure it's not many. It's because I'm guessing that number is so low that I've not bothered using anything special. I'll give it a try, though, and see what it's like.

What may be the coolest thing out of WordCamp Dallas is the new stat tracking service Woopra. This tool is amazing. There is a desktop client that provides real time tracking and shows live usage data. You can actually see what pages are being viewed by which visitor as they are viewing them. That's just the whiz-bang awesomeness, it also provides a plethora of detailed stats. I'll try to play with it some more and write up something in more detail later. Check out the coverage at GeekBrief.TV, Mashable, and TechCrunch. Everyone present at WordCamp was lucky enough to get a beta invite and I started playing with it instantly. It really is amazing. You can try for a chance to win an invite for yourself over at Culturefeast, or request one from the Woopra website.

That wraps up part one of what I got out of WordCamp.  I can't recommend playing with Woopra enough.  It is an incredibly awesome app, you you really should check it out.  I'll have to use Feedburner and WordPress more before I can give real thoughts on them.  From what I've seen, though, WordPress will be great.  I already see it as being a great tool for me, and one that should improve my blogging experience.  I'll probably have part 2 up sometime tomorrow, so check back.

Browsing Habits Based on Wi-Fi Usage

Every now and then I'm out somewhere that offers public Wi-Fi. This is a great thing, and I'm always happy to see places that have it. It's really becoming more and more prevalent, showing up in many bars, most every coffee place, and tons of other locations. There is one problem, though, and that is how much can you trust it? When you are using the Wi-Fi provided there, you expose yourself to all sorts of dangers. Given their openness, someone with nefarious intentions could really pose a threat. With the right tools and know how, someone could monitor all of your traffic, and do with it as they please. This seems to be something that is becoming more common knowledge, but there are still a lot of users out there that just don't think about this. I'm not here to teach you Wi-Fi safety, though. If you want that, you can head to CNET for a basic lesson on protection at public Wi-Fi hotspots, or just look to our friend Google.

I'm here to see what you find your usage habits to be when you are on a network that is not your own. I was thinking about this when I was at WordCamp this weekend. Just like a good conference should, they provided open Wi-Fi for everyone to use, and I'm willing to bet everyone did. While there, people did everything from logging in to their email to logging in to their web servers. These are things that you want to keep secure, yet people are logging in on an open network that is being heavily used. The thought, of course, is that the group at a conference like that is hopefully not going to be interested in doing bad things, but you never know. I would be interested to know if they maintained the same browsing habits if they were at their local coffee shop. Would they feel more or less safe there? In addition to using their emails and such, did anyone do any shopping? Check their bank account?

Personally, I usually try to error on the side of caution. This weekend I was logging in to my server, email, and other things just like everyone else. When I'm out at a random place, I usually won't log in to certain things. If I'm on any network but my own, I never log in to any financial related site, nor do I do anything where I enter a credit card. There are some places that I won't log into anything from. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, maybe I'm pretty normal. I know there are people that don't seem to be as cautious, though, since I've seen people logging on their bank sites while at Starbucks. What about you. How does your internet usage change based on where you are?

Learning Things at WordCamp Dallas

I'm at WordCamp Dallas and we're just barely over halfway into day one and I'm already learning some stuff.  First, I'm already thinking that I like the stuff that WordPress has to offer.  I am thinking that when I get some free time (not any time soon) that I'll migrate my site over to it.  I'm also picking up a lot of tips that I'm going to try to implement.  John P from One Mans Blog had a talk of 45 Ways to Power up Your Blog that contain a number of useful things that I want to try too.  He also had a really awesome statistics tool called Woopra that looks incredibly cool and I'm going to play with it soon.  Lots of cool stuff going on here, I'm really enjoying it.

Finding New Things with FriendFeed

I find myself becoming addicted to FriendFeed.  I started using the service about a day or two before it exploded everywhere.  I find that I"m actually discovering a number of things just by leaving it up all day.  Not only do I love finding out what's going on with the people I'm following, but their "everyone" public feed is great too.  Every now and then I'll click over there and just watch the stream of stuff coming from a ton of people, and I don't even know who they are.  Today I thought I'd see what searching for Dallas (where I am) in the public stream would get me.  I actually discovered that there's a WordCamp event this weekend here as a result.  I have no idea how I missed hearing about this before.  I'm thinking that since it is a WordPress thing, and I don't use WP, that I just passed over it if I saw it somewhere.  However, I'm now trying to figure out my weekend schedule and try to go.  It would be great to go and network with people, and try to learn more about WordPress.  And to think that I never would have seen this had it not been for FriendFeed.

It's a Cubicle World

I work in an atrium building so you can see into the offices on each floor.  Riding the elevator up to my floor, I see that almost every floor is populated with cubes.  Most of the people I know work in cubes.  I work in a cube.  This is nothing new, offices using cubes to house workers has been going on forever. They site all sorts of reasons for why they do it, trying to pass it off on the employees as if it is a benefit to them.  The truth, though,  is that it's cheap to use cubes.  I don't blame them at all for this, I'm all about cutting costs.  I honestly don't care about having to work in a cube, I don't feel like it demeans me or anything like that (as seems to be the case with a lot of people).  I do have a problem with my office using cubes, though.  I have a feeling that most of my problem is that I wasn't always in a cube.  When I first started working here, I had my own office.  This office was located down at the end of a hallway, and there was nothing else there.  The only reason anyone had to be down that hallway was to see me, and I don't get a lot of visitors.  This meant that I had pretty much zero distractions, and the only noise was that which I made.  My productivity was great.  I could focus on what I needed to, and I didn't have to deal with anything going on around me because there was nothing around me.  I had my own office for a while, and then they moved someone in with me.  This wasn't too bad, though the distractions did increase quite a bit.  Every time she was on the phone, had a visitor (she had a lot due to her job), or just wanted to talk to me, that would hurt my productivity.  As a result, the volume of work I could do took a hit.  That lasted for a while, and then we all moved into cubes.  Now I've got people all around me.  The lady next to me, she's great and I like her, but she's on the phone all the time (work and personal), and she's loud.  I keep turning my music in my headphones up, but that only does so much.  I've got a lot of foot traffic coming by now, and people feel like just stopping by to talk.  I've got people that just yell over the cubes to each other when they have a question about something.  The guy next to me is constantly getting into arguments with people on the phone (he is the guy that reviews all the contracts, so he is making sure people stay in line, which they don't like to do), and he is loud too.  Basically, I have tons of noise and distractions going on.  As a result of this, my productivity is just shot.  I can definitely see how some people could benefit from being in a cube environment, but I'm a financial analyst for Pete's sake, and my job doesn't really see any benefit from others around.  Not to mention the fact that I work with confidential information, and am basically out in the open here.  Why don't companies understand that the cost savings of sticking everyone in cubes may not be greater than the loss of productivity?  Is that always going to be the case?  No, of course not.  Do I think it's the case for me and some other people here?  Yeah, definitely.  I don't feel like I should get anything special, I just want four walls and a door so that I can shut out the world and get some work done.

Oh, did I mention that the location of my cube is such that when the receptionist isn't at her desk I'm the one that gets the door? That happens a lot.