How to combine SEO, blogging, and social media for powerful marketing results.

Context is Everything – For architects, computer programmers, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians – context is everything. The essential reading list for a lawyer is different from the essential reading list of an architect, physician or pastor.  I’m also searching for common themes, and patterns to reuse…

Is there a book (or a blog) that should be essential reading for architects (who build large buildings)  — and for computer architects (who build large computer systems)? I think there might be… and I’m getting to that… hang on a minute…. Are there books and blogs that every designer should read, whether they are designing websites, bikes, book covers, or baby-clothes?

The quest for the best – There are a lot of dead end streets on this quest. For instance, sometimes you find a really cool blog, but alas — the blogger quits blogging. Example: Loosely Coupled – a great blog for software developers and systems architects (covering SOA) – but the last entry appears to be from May 2006.

So, I sent emails to a few friends, saying:

What do you consider essential reading each day, each week, each
month? Books, journals, magazine, blogs?
What technical journals to read each month?
What do you read that keeps you going and growing?
I’m interested in your thoughts.

So, that’s the long contextual explanation as to why I’m building an essential reading list for various professions. Then I want to see if there are common themes — books, magazines, journals, and blogs that are considered essential reading by a lot of people from various backgrounds and professions.

So here’s a few books and blogs that my friends suggested, and guess what? Some of them were already on my blog roll, or books that I’ve read. This is not the distilled list of essential reading… yet… but here are some suggestions that are coming in from my initial survey of computer geeks and web designers…  not a comprehensive survey… (It’s kind of a list from A to Z – with the middle part still missing).

Suggested blogs:

1. 456 Berea Street – A blog by Roger Johansson. A Swedish web professional who has been working with the web and other interactive media since 1994.
2. AlertBox – Jakob Nielsen’s Newsletter on Web Usability
3. A List Apart – A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
4. Authentic Boredom – A blog by web designer Cameron Moll.
5. UXMag – The User Experience Magazine – Elevating user experience one article at a time.
6. Zeldman – Online since May 1995, “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents” is the personal site of designer, writer, and web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. We’ve mentioned (and reviewed his best selling book), Designing With Web Standards, several times before.

To be continued…

60 second video explains how to use Google Reader to find and subscribe to the news feeds you like. You can also publish your favorite news-feeds for your friends (or the whole world) to enjoy.

A total blogging bummer…

So, I have to find a backup of my old blog, and re-create it, and find all you wonderful people again. I say I lost my blog roll — really not sure when — sometime during the past several weeks, because I’m not sure when it happened, or why it happened, but a lot has been happening. I recently moved my website and this blog to a new hosting company. I think everything was OK then. Then I backed up my hard-drive on my PC and downgraded my PC from Vista back to Windows-XP pro. I think everything was OK then, however, I did backup all my old backups to DVD and CD’s before downgrading to Windows-XP. And Windows-XP is running much nicer than Vista was. (Vista really sucks on an Intel box with only 1GB of RAM.)

So anyway, might need to dig through a box of CDs or DVDs to find an old backup of a backup.

But then I also upgraded from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 and finally to WordPress 2.5, and also tried out a few new plugins, and everytime I always tried to make backups before I installed a new plugin, or a new theme… but like I said I need to look through the box of backups of the backups… or could it be the WordPress Import/Export feature that bit me.

You might recall that I wrote a few articles about Managing Your Blogroll, and Refactoring Your Blogroll, and now it looks like I wrote an article about Losing and Recovering your blogroll.

Man, I really miss my old blog roll. If you are out there, I am looking for you … again.

Update (6:00PM Saturday night) – I did find a February 2008 backup of an SQL dump that contains my total blogroll – assembled from 2006 to 2008, so no one is missing — and I’m adding those blog links back on my blogroll.

As long as I’m restoring and refactoring my blogroll, I’ll compare it to the list at WebLog Tool Collection called The 25 Most Valuable Blogs, and see if I should add anything new to my list.

Here is an example showing the keywords python, ruby, and wordpress (time-line is the past 6 months). Looks like the WordPress spike is beginning to fade, and I wonder what that means?

Here is another BlogPulse trend chart showing what everyone was talking about last week. Keywords/Phrases : Virginia Tech, Cho, gun control.

Now that we are on this topic, let me say that my deepest sympathy goes out to all the families affected by this horrific tragedy (mass murder, suicide); my prayers for peace and love continue unto God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, and I recommend that everyone read and meditate on Psalm 4 and Psalm 23 this week.

God gave us two ears and one mouth, to remind us to listen more than we talk. My blog roll is full of links to many people that I have never met-in-person. I may disagree with some of the things they write, but I love and respect them all.

So, I was talking about various rules you might use — to know when to delete blogs from your list. Is there a book on blogroll refactoring? How do you know when to delete a link from your blogroll?

I also recalled reading about another Image Rotator and Randomizer that I had stumbled across — over at Photo Matt (Matthew Mullenweg’s) a while back. Matt’s Random Image script is here. Not sure what the differences are between these various scripts, but one day when I get a chance to read the source code for each, I’ll see if there is any big diff.

Some people enjoy things you don’t like very much. People are different. A wise man once said “It’s a good thing everyone does not like the same thing. If everyone liked the same movie, you would go to watch it and the line would be 69 miles long to get into the movie (cinema) theatre.”

There have been flame wars over using TinyURL (or why you should not), and now there is TinyPic. I love it.

TinyPic.com is cool because…

• It’s free (for now).
• You can quickly upload and store pictures and videos.
• It has short URL’s, even if the images or videos are big files
• Seems to be very fast and zippy (at this point).
• Yet another place to host your photos and videos.

I’ll be trying it out for a while. Let me know what you think.

Let’s start off with a few questions…

How do you manage your blog roll? Do you use your blog roll as a daily reading list? Do you call it “Blog Roll” Blogroll, or BlogRoll? What is a blog roll, and how or why should you manage it? [Note: Here is a Wikipedia article on the blogroll concept.]

Definition: A “blog roll” is list of links on your blog that refers to other blogs (weblogs by bloggers you know); a list of other people that write interesting blogs; or a list of blogs you enjoy reading each day; or a list of well known or popular authors (or editors) of a blog.

Etymology of the word or phrase? Who ever thought of the word “blogroll” anyway? Seems to draw up some images of middle school or the military “morning roll call”. For instance: Did you ever have a “roll call” in school where the teacker takes attendance records? Or have you ever seen a “roll call” in the military (Marines, Navy, etc.) — where everyone has to wake up early in the morning, polish their shoes, look sharp, stand up straight, and pay attention while the officer in charge calls out the names and you say “yes sir”. The military analogy is actually a pretty good one — if you want to keep your blog roll looking spit-polished.

But if someone really wanted to really be good about managing their blog roll, what would they do? Basically you add links, delete links, and change or revise links. But what links should you add? How often should you add new links, and when should you delete old links? Start by asking yourself these questions:

• What is the purpose of blog roll?
• Why is a blog roll important?
• What is a blog roll good for?
• Why bother messing with a blog roll?
• What authors should I add to my blog roll?

If you understand the purpose for a blog roll — then you are half-way to understanding how to “manage your blog roll”.

Perhaps you can start by talking to your self about what you want your blog roll be like:

• I want my blog roll to be full of interesting blogs and blog writers who write cool and interesting articles every week (or day).
• I want my blog roll to be focused on a couple topics that I am interested in
• My blog roll will have links only to other bloggers who write about my niche-market of java-widgets.
• I will review (check the links) the blogs in my blog roll every month or week.
• I will only add active blogs to my blog roll – from experienced and active writers — and dead blogs will be deleted quickly.
• Or to be cautious — I will only add blogs to my blog roll that I have read for several months.

Or maybe you want to state the negative things about blogs you don’t like and blogs to eliminate from your blog roll.

• I will delete all blogs from my blog roll — from blogs that appear to be dead for more than 2 months.
• I will delete blogs from my blog roll that spew hateful ideas, profanity and promote un-godly philosophies and/or pornography.
• Or something as simple as deleting links when you get more than 49 links in your blog roll

Getting started. This is how I do it — but you may have a better way. Please add your comments if you have some better ideas.

1. Add new links to your blog roll as you encounter great new blogs.
2. Read the blogs in your blog roll once a day, or week, or once a month — but at least once a month. Click on the links and see what the other guy or gal wrote about recently.
3. If the person gets boring, they stop writing and the blog goes dead, or you get tired of them — delete the link.
4. Prioritize the list of blogs you are reading frequently — Who is the best? Who is red hot? Is someone writing great material consistently or did they write only 3 great articles and then everything fizzeled out…

A few words about the physical steps — which may vary depending on what type of blogging software or blogging service you use…

Since I use WordPress 2.0 for my blog – the physical steps to adding links in my “blog roll” is as simple as this:

1. Login as admin.
2. Click on “links”.
3. Add a link with author’s name or name of the blog — and the URL for the blog.
4. Make sure the link type is “blog roll”.

Other blogging tools have other tools for maintaining your links.