Still, you know, the call of a WordCamp is pretty strong. So when the chance came up for me to fill a slot there, I mulled it over for a while. Honestly, looking at the agenda and list of speakers, I wasn’t sure that I’d have something new to say.

I saw all the major topics covered. Raul and Lorraine are both speaking there, as well as a guy I helped start using WordPress. Paul Holmes called me today to see if I was still interested in speaking, and I still wasn’t 100% on what I should talk about. Then like often happens to me, the idea hit me: the extra tools bloggers need.

I’m thinking the stuff like offline blogging tools, image editors, RSS readers, CoverItLive, FTP, all the stuff that just kinda starts coming up as you’re blogging. Since I’m in the non-technical track (which is nice, since I’ve been doing a lot of technical teaching lately), I’m going to keep this to just the good stuff that I know works.

Course, I am going to hit up some of the more techie folks I know to answer some nagging questions I have. I’m pretty much hoping to learn as much, if not more, than I talk.

If you’re around Victoria on Saturday, think about WordCamp Victoria. Should be a day of good geeky fun.

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Course Description: Learn how to make a professional looking website using the WordPress blogging platforms. Beginning with WordPress.com with little to no coding required, students learn the basics of how to turn a WordPress blog into a website, how to tune it for search engines and how to choose the right theme for your website. Wordpress.org will also be covered to delve into advanced tuning for search engines, basic theme and CSS edits, transferring files, installing themes, and how to choose and install plugins. Led by one of Vancouver’s WordPress and social media experts, this workshop teaches you how to use WordPress to build dynamic, elegant and professional looking websites quickly and easily. You don’t have to know how to code to have a great website, you just have to know how to click.
link: UBC Continuing Studies

If that doesn’t get you clicking how about that the class is almost full? Yep only 5 or 6 seats left! That doesn’t do it? Okay, this is also the last time I’m teaching this class until next year!

As a little bonus, since I just finished my first book—you can pre-order Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro on Amazon—it’s a fair bet that some of the handouts and material are going to come from my book (so a preview of the finished product). More? Well, I might give adventurous souls a peek at the next version of WordPress (2.9), which I’m playing with for my next project.

Of course I’m teaching next year, but I’m still confirming schedules, locations, and lesson plans. And really who wouldn’t want to spent Halloween with me learning WordPress!

Hope to see you Saturday!

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The first class was a huge test for me. I could have (should have) been a lot better prepared for it. Now, however, I have had the benefit of having taught my full-day and half-day WordPress courses (don’t forget my full-day WP class at UBC is Halloween!) several times and have a much better sense of just how I need to teach tech stuff in general.

Not to mention, this past weekend I finished my author review of Chapters 7 & 8 of my book, Create Your Own Blog: Six Easy Blogging Projects, which just so happens to cover audio and video podcasting. So fresh from putting the spit and polish on those two chapters, I have a lot more cool stuff handy in my brain to use in class.

If you have questions about either class shoot me a line or leave a comment on this post.

See everyone Saturday!

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I promise that you’ll come away from my classes learning at least a couple new tricks and maybe even a radio show or website. So, here are the details:

Intro to Audio and Video Podcasting:

Course Description: Learn the basics of audio and video podcasting from one of Vancouver’s social media specialists in this one-day, hands-on workshop. Students learn how to record, edit, encode, and post audio and video podcasts. Topics include: hardware, software, how to add music and titles, where to post your podcast, search engine optimization and how to host a live Internet radio show. One day is all you need to get on air and podcast with confidence and ease!

link: UBC Continuing Studies

Building Websites with WordPress (for non-geeks):

Course Description: Learn how to make a professional looking website using the WordPress blogging platforms. Beginning with WordPress.com with little to no coding required, students learn the basics of how to turn a WordPress blog into a website, how to tune it for search engines and how to choose the right theme for your website. Wordpress.org will also be covered to delve into advanced tuning for search engines, basic theme and CSS edits, transferring files, installing themes, and how to choose and install plugins. Led by one of Vancouver’s WordPress and social media experts, this workshop teaches you how to use WordPress to build dynamic, elegant and professional looking websites quickly and easily. You don’t have to know how to code to have a great website, you just have to know how to click.

link: UBC Continuing Studies

The Websites with WordPress course is now a full day course instead of the original half-day format, so we’ll have a lot more time to get into things than the June session.

All the classes are held at UBC Robson Square in the computer labs there. Yes, there will be an individual workstation per student, but if you want to bring your own laptop that’s great.

Time is short, so sign up now! For those who wished they could have taken the courses in June, well now is your chance!

If you have questions, just leave a comment or zap me an email:

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I’ve known Shel since the pre-Naked Conversations days, when he was “the other guy writing a book with Scoble”. Of course what this really meant was that we didn’t know Shel yet. Shel is the first social media storyteller I knew. He sat down with people (like SAP) and tried to get to the heart of what social media was all about for them.

In the time between Naked Conversations and Twitterville Shel undertook an ambitious project to interview people around the world. I think he covered a fair bit of the world and in doing so, opened our eyes to worlds beyond our own.

Shel’s influence isn’t something you can just point out. He spends a lot of his time advising big players in industry, so they aren’t really going to go out there and be tweeting about their meeting with Shel that day. What is important is the subtle sea change in business attitudes about social media. It’s taken folks like Shel, me, and many others years to get social media to a place where it is now.

I’m proud to consider Shel a friend, and prouder still that he considers me one as well. Thursday will be a great opportunity for me to wax poetic about someone who might not grab headlines, but whose influence is deep and vast.

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I read through a good number of posts:

• HowTo: River2 is a fresh start
  
• HowTo: Rebooting the RSS cloud
• How to publish and receive blog posts in Real-time
  
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com

Then installed the RSS Cloud plugin, like Corvida–Installing WordPress RSSCloud Plugin | SheGeeks.net–I was amazed at the simplicity (you turn it on and you’re done) and played with Dave Winer’s River2 for a short bit (not quite the RSS reader I could get into, but that’s fine). This morning I caught up on the news and saw that LazyFeed was already supporting RSSCloud–LazyFeed: 1st Independent RSS Aggregator Declares Support for RSSCloud–which should put pressure on other RSS apps to do the same. The bigger question is: so what?

The so what is that RSS readers have been losing out because they were losing relevance compared to rapid fire, fire hose information streams like Twitter and Techmeme. Dear Lord you had to check the sources for updates and if you relied on Google Reader, those “updates” might not be so fresh or up-to-date! Now, what if …

You combined the persistence of a solid RSS reader with the immediacy of a dashboard or ticker? Have your gignormous list of feeds, but mark a select few as HUD feeds. Feeds that maybe could be pushed to Twitter or tapped into by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Like your top 20 “I don’t want to miss a single thing” feeds, while in the background the “reader” part is building a relevancy-linked reading list. Find a way to consolidate articles on a topic, meme, headline, or concept into streams of articles. Sure be able to read your feeds like we do now (an interface like FeedDemon or NetNewsWire is good I think), but also have this information stream pulled together. Looking for the days posts on RSS or Facebook or social media or H1N1? Then they are already consolidated for you. Yes, you can build “smart folders”, but you have to know the topic first to do that. Sure you can have a folder with big concepts that you’re interested in, but when news breaks, wouldn’t it be good to have something like your own Techmeme based on the sources you follow?

I see the RSS Cloud giving info junkies like me and the casual news hound ways to grab data faster, in real time with potentially more metadata tied to the items (keywords, tags, categories) than we’ve had before. I also see that putting this all together isn’t going to be easy. More blogs have to support RSS Cloud and/or PubSubHubBub to have a critical mass of near-real time posts to work with, however that might not take as long as we think. If FriendFeed jumped on the bandwagon, well that would launch this data set into the digerati mainstream pretty darn fast.

That’s my idea and vision. I’d welcome the chance to work with someone like Nick or Brent or Greg on this kind of app. I think there is something there to get excited about. I think this is something we could all use. And I know it can be done.

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A dedicated FeedDemon user on my PC, when I switched to Mac I of course chose NetNewsWire. NNW is a great news reader, but I became swamped with the shear number of feeds I was following so I started using Times which has a (literal) newspaper layout…

Times is good for a few feeds, but not more than maybe 10-15 per section. Easy to skim, but a little hard to just dash through. It was the limitation of the feasible number of feeds that could be tracked brought me back to NNW, and this is where things get interesting.

NetNewsWire and FeedDemon now sync with Google Reader instead of Newsgator Online (which is being phased out), a move that I think makes both apps more powerful. The problem is (at this point) I’m back at the point where news readers are all lacking just a little something.

If I start with Google Reader, I have sharing posts (a great social tool for expanding your information reach) and “Send to…” but it’s rather hard to just skim, click, and move on. Google Reader lacks the very simple “Mark all these items read in this folder/feed and move on to the next” option and my choice of titles or the whole post is pretty limiting when you’re trying to consume a medium number of feeds (I’m back up to 300+ from a low of 50 from my once high of close to 1000).

As you know I prefer desktop clients for RSS and e-mail. I know this is rather behind the times, and I have played with site specific browsers, but it’s just how I find working most efficient. Syncing NetNewsWire with Google Reader isn’t a big deal. NNW has good keyboard shortcuts (including the one above for marking read and moving on with one key), but right now the beta lacks Google Readers’ sharing and send to features. I’m sure Brent is working on getting them in, but right now they are still missing so I wander to Google Reader to catch up on shared items. That said, NNW is really good … but I feel like something is missing.

A newcomer on the scene, Gruml, is like porting Google Reader into a Mac interface, but not making is a SSB. Half-way between NetNewsWire and Google Reader, Gruml is pretty interesting. It’s close, but not quite. And this is where I’m stuck.

It’s like we need a new reader. Once, like Dare suggests, allows subscription (and unsubscription) with a click. We need a connector to the rest of our friends, so I can share items with them, read items they share with me, and set the whole “like” thing as just a passing comment. I’d like to be able to skim headlines with a bit of text and then be able to mark that entire group read and move on. Writing a quick post or sending to Posterous should be a quick command, type a bit, and move on.

I think the metaphors of a newspaper/magazine or email client as readers can’t handle the amount of information people like Marshall and I (and many others) need to do our jobs. It also sounds like the folks at RWW have a good thing going there, but I gather they aren’t going to share their golden goose RSS app set up–though I think there could be something there worth paying for.

I’ve set the stage for part 2 of the post, which I still need to mull a bit, which is the “okay what would it look like” post. For now I’m going to look at the readers that have worked for me and the ones that have not (and why). See if I can find a common thread there. In the meantime, leave a comment below with your thoughts on RSS readers. Maybe together we can help picture a new app for all of us.

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Which then made me think, “wow I don’t really give myself much downtime do I?”.

Of course isn’t going to stop me from looking in the closet for a light bag…

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When I say “complete” I’m meaning sending in my last chapter with illustrations, bio, acknowledgments, etc to my editor. She will send it around to various other editors and it will get back to me to proof and polish.

This has been a really, really interesting journey for me. The book way, way behind schedule. I’ve had to learn a lot about writing, publishing, and just how hard it is sometimes to get your head around topics that can be a little tough.

From now until the book is published, I’m going to post more on the book site than here. Since the book is about starting a blog, and written for the non-geeky set, expect the posts there to be less deep thinking about social media and more meat and potatoes of social media.

So please venture over, subscribe to the RSS feed, leave a comment, you know the usual stuff.

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I wasn’t popular, or at the top of my class (in high school or college), or any of the “traditional” indicators of what future “success” I might expect.

I did fine through school, I got good grades, and learned a lot. It turned out that I’ve done just fine. Looking back now, I wish I could tell my 20 year old self it would all be good. That, no, learning all this Mac, Internet, and computer stuff would be useful someday (I still know how to use command line tools thanks to my days at dumb terminals writing emails and playing Rogue on the server.

This morning I stumbled on a post that I sums up a lot of what I’ve learned about myself and others. Wisdom that I’m trying to impart to my kids. This, of the ten, is my favourite (okay the being different is good is a close, close second):

The nerds make all the money in the end. No joke. The least popular, most focused, often anti-social people are thinking day in and day out about the big things they’re going to do with their life. And trust me, not all, but some will become the most influential and most successful people you know. Personally, I’ve grown to love and admire “nerdy” people. They’re often the smartest, most interesting, and most creative of us all.

link: Young & Successful » Blog Archive » 10 Things I WISH Someone Had Told Me While I Was A Student.

Growing up is tough enough, growing up geeky is even tougher. I find it ironic, bittersweet, and oddly satisfying that many of my traits that weren’t popular then are the very things that make me successful now.

How about we all make a note to ourselves to make sure when we have a chance to hang out with a young geek-in-training that we help them through the rough times.

Remember you have to be a padawan first to become a Jedi Master.

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Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made it clear that border crossing officials could continue to search any device that can store electronic media without any suspicion of wrongdoing.

Although the revised policy ensures searches will be completed in a “timely manner” (up to 30 days) and that travelers will stay informed about the search’s progress, travelers crossing the border might want to consider a few things.

Officials can still seize any device (including MP3 players or flash drives) and look at any file on it (including Internet browsing history) without giving any reason.

The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) believes agents take laptops, make an image of the hard drive and then return the laptop to its owner in the mail. Any copied files could be stored “indefinitely.” (Imagine what the Border Patrol’s iTunes Library will look like after “indefinitely” storing DRM-free music from several dozen searches.) The ACLU is also taking a dim view of the DHS policy, and is challenging it in court.

For the moment, though, it’s smart to be prepared. Although the DHS’s exact procedures are unspecified, the department’s new policy states when travelers are subject to a search, agents will provide them “with clear and concise material informing them of the reasons for the search, how their data may be used and detailed information about their constitutional and statutory rights.”

If you’re traveling for business and have important files you’ll need on your trip, it wouldn’t hurt to save them to multiple locations so you aren’t left without them. Better yet, use Google Docs or another Internet-based storage system to ensure your private information stays private.

In the case of a search, ACTE recommends you inform the agent that you have sensitive information on your computer. Try to get your concern noted in writing; at least, be sure to express it verbally. ACTE says this will help you retain more legal rights for registering your concern.

Although these searches don’t occur very often (the Border Patrol looked at around 1000 laptops and searched 46 laptops in-depth in the past ten months) the best bet for travelers concerned about privacy is to leave unneeded electronic storage behind.

And if you wanted to protect your data with strong encryption, I’d say forget it. It will either make things worse (what do you have to hide) and/or you’ll just have to cough up the password regardless. I wouldn’t bet that tech trickery will work either. Don’t you think DHS techs would know how to find anything they want?

Posted via web from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

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Alternate marketing slogans for Windows 7

by Grant Robertson (RSS feed) Aug 29th 2009 at 4:30PM

Normally, I wouldn’t do this. A source deep within Microsoft — who just happened to owe me a favor — passed along a list of new Windows marketing slogans which, for one reason or another, just didn’t make the cut. After careful consideration and soul searching, I’ve decided to release them to the public.

Frankly, I think a few of them deserved more contemplation.

• Really, it’s better this time. We swear.
• Because owning a Mac is just one step away from drinking lattes at a Green Party tweetup.
• Come on! It’s not that complicated.
• We shower, and we don’t wear Birkenstocks.
• We’re still on liver number one.
• 7 is a lucky number, right?
• Still the choice among pimply teenaged gamers.
• More stable and easier to use than your last girlfriend.
• WIndows 7: because the Mayans say none of us will live to see the next version anyway.
• Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down.

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Oh Grant…

Posted via web from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

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Unfortunately the default out-of-the-box action is still set to look everywhere on your Mac. But don’t worry, it’s easy to change. 1. Make sure Finder is your active app (either click on the Finder icon in the dock, click the desktop or a visible Finder window, or cmd-Tab to switch to the Finder). 2. Choose Preferences in the Finder menu. Or you can just use the Command-comma key combo to invoke Preferences. 3. In Finder Preferences, click on the Advanced tab. 4. Choose your desired search scope from the drop-down menu under the heading “When performing a search.” 5. Close the Preferences and enjoy a search or two. That’s it. Just one example of the many little changes in Snow Leopard that make life with the OS easier and more efficient. I hope you find what you’re looking for!

One of the most annoying things about Leopard was that when I search within a folder the default was actually “This Mac”…not helpful. Now you can force it to be the Current Folder, but it isn’t the default setting…

Posted via web from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

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Since I am an info glutton my ears perked up when I saw that the invite-only beta status had been taken off of LazyFeed. Come on, if Louis Gray likes it …

Posted via email from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

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For posting to my blog, does it just leave out tags and categories?

And yes, this will show up on Twitter twice.

Posted via web from Tris Hussey’s Lifestream

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