Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
Publishing / Web Design / Social Media
Blogging Web Design
Client projects and tech blog posts about Blogging
Tags: Attention, Beth Kantor, Buzz, Collaboration, Conference, Google, Live Tweeting, Noise, Nonprofit, Press Conference, Real-Time, Social Media, Social Web, Talking Points, Twitter, Ustream, Web 2.0, Youtube | Edit
I started building websites in 1995 with an award-winning Nonviolence.org hub site and was a social media pioneer when I redesigned its homepage to a blog format three years later. Before going independent as MartinKelley.com in 2006, I served on the staff of Friends General Conference (site) for eight years, where I worked in the FGC Quaker bookstore and built the Quakerfinder, FGC Gathering and youth ministry sites. I also worked for Friends Journal (site) for two years, putting select articles from their Quaker magazine online every month. Since then I've been privileged to work with Quaker organizations such as Friends World Committee for Consultation (site), Friends Council on Education (site) and Haverford Friends Meeting (site). I've done some exciting media work with the Philadelphia Penn Charter School (site) and built personal sites for well known Friends. I bring our testimony of integrity to every business transaction and when I address topics such as search engine optimization or pricing philosophy, I try to do so from a Friends perspective.
Web Design Specialties:
adwords,
aggregators,
analytics,
blog,
blogging,
budget,
church,
consultant,
content,
content
management system,
css,
delicious,
design,
direct mail,
dreamweaver,
drupal,
education,
email,
facebook,
firefox,
flash,
flickr,
friends,
google,
google maps,
hebrew,
hittail,
javascript,
movable type,
music,
nonviolence,
paypal,
personal blog,
photo sharing,
quaker,
school,
seo,
small business,
south jersey,
video,
web,
wikipedia,
wordpress,
yahoo,
youtube.
Continue reading Quaker.
Categories:
quaker
|
Edit
The NYTimes has a piece by an IBM employee who has largely freed himself from email by consciously using whatever social networking tool would be better at moving the conversation forward, whether it's IM, wikis, or even (gasp!) the telephone. This line stood out for me:
Categories:
Practical 2.0
I have had continuing support from my management in this effort, because I've been able to prove how much more I can accomplish by answering a question, and posting it on a blog, for example, than I can by answering the same question over and over. I still help people, but in a more open and collaborative fashion. Other people can join in the discussions -- maybe they will have a better idea than mine.This is exactly how I try to describe the blogging philosophy in the business world. Don't think of the blog as another chore that needs to be added to your already overwhelmed to-do list. Instead, think about it as another communication tool so it becomes a seamless part of your ongoing work. This will no only help work flow, but help give your blog an honesty and approachability it wouldn't have if you thought of it as simply another marketing piece.
Tags: Blog, Business, Email, Nytimes, Telephone | Edit
Martin has given workshops and panel presentations on tech issues and on renewal movements in the Religious Society of Friends.
Biographies
TECH:
Martin Kelley is a Philadelphia area web designer who has been building online communities since 1995. An early adopter of user-created media, he was blogging in 1997 and picks up every social media service. In 2008 O'Reilly Media published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators," his first published tech publication. A professional web developer and consultant, he builds sites and writes about tech issues on MartinKelley.com.
QUAKER:
Martin Kelley is a Philadelphia-area Friend with a love out of outreach and ministry and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. He is editor of Friends Journal, a monthly Quaker magazine, and publisher of the online community site, QuakerQuaker.org. An early adopter of user-created media, Martin has been building online communities since 1995; in 2008 O'Reilly Media published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators." He writes about tech issues on MartinKelley.com and spirituality at QuakerRanter.org.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements:
Past Workshops and Presentations
2011:
Speaker, Abington Friends Meeting, "Lessons on Vocal Ministry from Early Friends," talk given at First-day school adult class. Jenkintown, Pa., November 6, 2011.
Class guest, Earlham School of Religion. "Writing for Today's Media Market" taught by J Brent Bill. May 24, 2011. Richmond, Ind. via video.
Panelist, Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting, "Simplicity, Integrity, Clarity: What is Plain Speech Today?" Washington State via video. April 16, 2011.
2010:
Speaker, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, "Finding Fellowship Between Friends Through the Internet," part of the "Friends 2.0: New Tools for Our Faith" speaker series. Arch Street Meetinghouse following Interim Meeting sessions, Philadelphia, Pa. September 11, 2010.
Panel Speaker, Writer's Conference sponsored by Quakers Uniting in Publications. Richmond, Ind., via video. April 2010.
Associate Teacher, Pendle Hill, for a weekend workshop "Convergent Friends and the New Monastics." Pendle Hill Conference Center. Wallingford, Pa. May 2010.
2009:
Speaker, "An Introduction to Convergent Friends." Salem Quarter Meeting. Greenwich, N.J. September 13, 2009.
Facilitator, "Friends Testimonies, What Canst Thou Say?" Two-part session. Young Friends Summer Gathering (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting). Camp Onas, Ottsville, Pa. August 25, 2009.
Co-leader, "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism." Weekend workshop. Ben Lomond Friends Center. Ben Lomond, Calif. February 2009.
Presenter, "Friends Schools and Web 2.0" (video). Panel discussion for Friends Council on Education. At Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, Pa.. January 2009.
2007:
Presenter, Religion and Technology Teachers Peer Network (Friends Council on Education). Center City Philadelphia, Pa., December 2007. Also available as Google Slideshow Presentation
Co-presenter, with C Wess Daniels, for a panel on the Convergent Friends movement. Ohio Yearly Meeting annual sessions. Barnesville, Ohio, August 2007.
2006:
Teacher, "Quakerism 101". four-session course for Moorestown Friends Meeting. Moorestown, N.J. October -November 8, 2006.
Co-faciliator, On Fire: Renewing Quakerism Through a Covergence of Friends. Interest group, FGC Gathering. Tacoma, Wash., July 3, 2006.
Invited Guest, Quakerism classes, William Penn Charter School. Philadelphia, Pa.. April 2006.
Leader, Food for Fire weekend workshop, New York Yearly Meeting's Powell House conference center. Old Chatham, N.Y. February 2006.
2005:
Co-leader, Strangers to the Covenant (five sessions), workshop for high-school Friends, FGC Gathering. Normal, Ill., July 2005.
2004:
Teacher, Quakerism 101 (six sessions), Medford Friends Meeting. Medford, N.J. September-November, 2004.
2003:
Teacher, "Living in the Light" Quakerism 101 course (one session), Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting. Philadelphia, Pa. March 2003.
See also: Publications and Media List
Contact
Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123
Blog by an American couple living in Vietnam and advocating for greater motorbike safety. The technical aspects are pretty straight-forward but the neat part about it was watching the client learn about blogging and online photo
sharing as we worked on the site: I introduced her to Flicrk, Picasa
and Gmail! She took to it like a fish to water and the site is full of great
photos taken by her husband David. Read more about their
work doing physical therapy in Vietnam and their posts about life in Da Nang.
. Technology: Movable Type, Flickr. Visit Site.
Tags: Buddhist, Head Injuries, Hopeless Situation, Husband David, Medical Care, Middle Aged, Middle Class Americans, Plight, Program Directors, Quaker, Saddened | Edit
Whenever
I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes
up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course,
that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than
your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have
tried to game the search engine results.
Categories:
Beyond SEO
I've always thought such tricks were pathetic and bound to lose over the long term. Search engines want to feature good sites. It's in their best interest to make sure the sites listed are the ones people want to see. A search engine that returns unsatisfactory results quickly becomes a has-been in the search engine competition. So as soon as a site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skewing the rankings they tweak their secret search algorithm to fix the SEO loophole.
Just Give Google the Content It Loves
In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.
I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google.
Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.
Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat
When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!
I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).
Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.
Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.
Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.
Mix up your content: Tag Your Site
Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.
Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.
Tags: Google Yahoo, Loophole, Search Algorithm, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Results, Search Engines, Seo, Yahoo | Edit
Every
web designer under the sun talks about search engine optimization
(SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic principles are ignored.
I'm in-between jobs right now, which means I'm spending a lot of time
looking at potential employers' websites. I've decided to start a
series of posts on SEO myths and realities that will talk about designing for maximum visibility.
Categories:
Analytics
,
Beyond SEO
I'm not going to focus on any of the underhanded tricks to fool search engines into listing an inappropriate page. Google hates this kind of tactic and so do I. You get visits for having good content. Good search rankings are based on good content and the best way to boost your content is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the content they want. Part one is on website analysis and tracking.
Don't assume that your website is easy to navigate. One of the neatest things about the web is that we have instant feedback on use. With just a little tracking we can see what pages people are looking at, how they're finding our site and what they're doing once they're here.
Javascript Trackers:
My most advanced sites are currently using four different tracking methods. Most utilize javascript "bugs," tiny snippets of code that send individual results to an advanced software tracking system. I put the code inside a Moveable Type "Modules Template" which is automatically imported to all pages. Installing a new system is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Template and rebuilding the site.
AXS Visitors Tracking System
This software installs on your server but don't let that scare you: this is one of the easiest installations I've ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can narrow it specific pages on your site, or even particular search engines or search phrases.There's also a option to view the lastest traffic by visitor. I love watching this! You can see how individuals are using the site and where they're navigating. I've been able to identify different types of visitors this way and understand the complexity of the audience.
It doesn't seem like AXS is not being developed anymore. The latest stable version came out over two years go, which is a shame.
HitTail
This service watches search-engine links and makes recommendations for new keywords. I wrote about this service yesterday in Blogging for the Long Tail.Reeferss.com
This is a simple simple bit of software. Like every other tracking system it keeps track of referrers: search engines and websites that bring traffic to your site. But unlike the others that's all it does. Why care then? It provides a real-time RSS feed of these visitors. I bring the feed into my "Netvibes" page (a customized start page, see below) and scan the results multiple times a day.Google Analytics
The internet's gatekeeper bought the Urchin analytics company in April 2005 and relaunched the product as Google Analytics shortly thereafter. This is becoming an essential tracker. It's free and it's powerful, though I haven't been as impressed by it as others have. See its Wiki page for more.
Internet Trackers:
It's easy to find out what people are saying about you online.
Technorati
This service tracks blogs but you don't need to have a blog to use it, for Technorati will tell you where blogs are linking. Give it your URLs (or those of your competitors!) and you'll know whenever a blogger puts in a link to you. You can also give it keywords and find out when a blog uses them.Google Blog Search
Google can also let you follow blog references or keyword mentions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type "site:www.yourdomain.com" into the main Google search page and you'll see who's linking to your site (or to the competition). There are lots of other services that track blogs and mentions--Sphere, Bloglines, etc. They all have different strengths so try them and see what you think.Feedburner
The best RSS massager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They've recently introduced page tracking software too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it's as good as Feedburner's other offerings.
Keeping on top of this flow of data:
It's easy to get overwhelmed by all of this information. Most of the tracking services provide RSS feeds (See The Wonders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a customized start page, to pull these all together into a single page that I can scan every morning. Here's a screenshot of part of my Netvibes tracking page--the full page currently shows fourteen tracking feeds on one screen:
So why is tracking important to SEO?
With tracking you find out what people are looking for on the internet. This helps you create pages and services that people will want to find. You might be surprised to see what they're already finding on your site. Some examples:
- Analyzing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bringing in high Google traffic. I looked at these pages again and realized they did a good job of describing the company's mission. I consequently redesigned the site homepage to feature them and I made sure that those pages contained direct links to its most important services.
- When I started work for another client I looked at their site and suspected that they're most important articles were not being seen--visitors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of tracking confirmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to convince the executive director that we made some small modifications to the design. Having this strong content linked right off the homepage helped bring in Google traffic.
Tags: Design, Google, Maximum Visibility, Myths And Realities, Search Engine Optimization, Seo | Edit
One of the neatest observations to gain popularity in the last few years is that of The Long Tail, first coined a few years ago by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson (here's the original article).
He noticed that the internet had opened up access to niches--that
searches and national distribution networks had given new markets to
obscure and small-market products. The classic example is Netflix, the
direct-mail movie rental service, that has a huge catalog of titles,
the great majority of which are so obscure that no local video rental
store could afford to carry them. But Netflix actually rents them all
and if you add all these low-volume rentals together you'll find the
total volume exceeds that season's blockbusters.
I
learned just how strong the long tail can be a few years ago when I
worked on Quakerfinder.org, a meeting/church look-up service. For the
first year, the site got moderate traffic from search engines. Google
wasn't able to index the actual church listings because users were
required to type towns and postal codes in to get results. The only
search engine visitors we got came in on very generic phrases like
"find quaker meetings."
Suspecting
we were losing a large potential audience, I redesigned the site so
Google could index each and every meeting (adding a few tricks so each
listing traded links with half-a-dozen other listings). Once the change
was in effect (help from our programmer), those old generic search
phrases were still the most popular. But now we got small numbers of
visits on thousands of terms which we hadn't hit before: "Quakers
Poughkeepsie" and "Quaker Churches in San Francisco," etc. This was the
long tail in effect. Our visits jumped fourfold within a few months
(see chart). The long tail made us much more visible. (More on the Googlization effort in that year's analytic report.)
A great new traffic analysis service is called HitTail. Like many other programs it tells you what search phrases have brought traffic to your site. But what's cool is that it gives suggestions--keywords it thinks will bring even more visitors in. Some of the suggestions are funny. For example, it thinks I should post about "traditional sweat lodge songs," "ticklish armpits" and "how to dress with personality" over on Quaker Ranter. But it also thinks I might consider posting on "small church local outreach ideas," "new online magazines" and "christian quakers."
If all one was worried about was sheer traffic volume, then a post on each keyword might be in order. But this would bring a lot of random traffic and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of traffic on a particular non-typical post that I wrote partly as an SEO experiment). My guess is you should go through the HitTail suggestions list to find topics that match your site's focus but do so in language that you might not normally use.
I might try some experimental posts on my personal blog soon. I'll definitely report back about them here on the MartinKelley.com design blog. In the meantime, check out HitTail's blog, which has some good links.
Categories:
Beyond SEO
Suspecting
we were losing a large potential audience, I redesigned the site so
Google could index each and every meeting (adding a few tricks so each
listing traded links with half-a-dozen other listings). Once the change
was in effect (help from our programmer), those old generic search
phrases were still the most popular. But now we got small numbers of
visits on thousands of terms which we hadn't hit before: "Quakers
Poughkeepsie" and "Quaker Churches in San Francisco," etc. This was the
long tail in effect. Our visits jumped fourfold within a few months
(see chart). The long tail made us much more visible. (More on the Googlization effort in that year's analytic report.)A great new traffic analysis service is called HitTail. Like many other programs it tells you what search phrases have brought traffic to your site. But what's cool is that it gives suggestions--keywords it thinks will bring even more visitors in. Some of the suggestions are funny. For example, it thinks I should post about "traditional sweat lodge songs," "ticklish armpits" and "how to dress with personality" over on Quaker Ranter. But it also thinks I might consider posting on "small church local outreach ideas," "new online magazines" and "christian quakers."
If all one was worried about was sheer traffic volume, then a post on each keyword might be in order. But this would bring a lot of random traffic and dilute any focus the blog might have (I already get a lot of traffic on a particular non-typical post that I wrote partly as an SEO experiment). My guess is you should go through the HitTail suggestions list to find topics that match your site's focus but do so in language that you might not normally use.
I might try some experimental posts on my personal blog soon. I'll definitely report back about them here on the MartinKelley.com design blog. In the meantime, check out HitTail's blog, which has some good links.
Tags: Direct Mail, Moderate Traffic, Netflix, Niches, Original Article, Rents, Search Engines Google | Edit
Interesting article over the Moveabletype blog. Anil Dash interviews George Johnson Jr of Hyperlocal Media, who's using MT as a content system to build hyperlocal community sites that can compete against local newspapers (see their very-cool looking BuffaloRising site).
Categories:
Drupal
,
Practical 2.0
Here's some of what Johnson has to say:
Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.
It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.
Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.
It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.
There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.
Tags: Blog, Blogging, Content, Content Management System, Local Newspapers, Local Players, Movable, Moveable Type | Edit
RSS
Syndication feeds are small web files that summarize the latest posts
to a particular blog or news site. They're a central repository of
basic information: title, author, post date, a summary of the post and
sometimes the whole post itself. You can open these files directly (here's the raw file for this blog) but you'll see there's a hierarchy of coding that makes it visually uninteresting.
Categories:
Practical 2.0
,
RSS Syndication
Syndication feeds are the lingua franca powering all the cool new websites. It doesn't matter what blogging platform you use or what operating system you're on: if your software provides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in content to my site.
Examples 1: Photographs: I email all of my adorable kid pictures to the photo sharing site Flickr, which then provides a syndication feed ("here"). I use a little fancy patch of coding on my website to pull in the information about the latest photos (location, caption, etc) so that I can display them on my homepage. Whenever you go to my Theo age you'll see the latest Flickr photos of him.
Example 2: Bookmarks. I also use the "social bookmarking" system with the odd name of del.icio.us. When I find a page I want to bookmark, I click a Delicious button in my browser, which opens a pop-up window. I write a description, pick a category or two and hit save. Deliciouis then provides an RSS syndication feed which I can use to pull together a list of my latest bookmarks and display it on my website. Wave a few magic wands of complication (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!) and you have the main trick behind Quakerquaker.org.
I've simplified both examples a bit but you probably get the point. Syndication feeds are the secret behind blog readers like Bloglines and email subscription services like the one's I provide for quakerquaker.org.
New to me is the concepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Donahue "The layman's premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will have drill-down feeds - a top level feed, item specific feeds, and so on." What this means is that you don't just have one single RSS feed on a site (your latest ten posts) but RSS feeds on everything. Every category get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about web design) and every post gets its own unique feed tracking its comments (e.g., this feed of comments from my "Introducing MartinKelley.com" post). It certainly seems a bit like overkill but computers are doing all the work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to pull all sorts of neat things together.
Tags: Adorable Kid, Blog, Blogging, Caption, Email, Flickr, Hierarchy, Lingua Franca, Mix And Match, News Site, Operating System, Photo Sharing, Raw File, Rss Syndication, Web | Edit
An
early description of my using the Movable Type blogging platform as a
content management system (CMS) for an entire website. I've used these
techniques to build websites which clients can easily manipulate and
update.
Categories:
MartinKelley.com
,
Movable Type
Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT on Brad Choate's site, I started experimenting today with putting the whole Nonviolence.org site into Movable Type. At first I thought it was just a trial experiment but I'm hooked. I especially love how much cleaner the entry for the links page now looks and I might actually be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I've also integrated Choate's MT-Textile which makes a big difference in keeping entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related SmartyPants which makes the site more typographically elegant with easy M-dashes and curly quotes).
So here's what I'm doing: there are three Movable Type blogs interacting with one another (not including this personal blog):
- One is the more-or-less standard one that is powering the main homepage blog of Nonviolence.org.
- The second I call "NV:Static" which holds my static pages, much as Brad outlines. I put my desired URL path into the Title field (i.e., "info/index") and then put the page's real title into the Keywords field (i.e., "About Nonviolence.org") and have that give the data for the title field and the first headline of the page. It might seem backwards to use Title for URL and then use Keywords for Title, but this means that when I'm in MT looking to edit a particular file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
- The third blog is my "NV:Design Elements." This contains the block of graphics on the top and left of every page. I know I'll have to redesign this all soon and I can do it from wherever. This blog outputs to HTML. All the other pages on the site are PHP and its a simple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.
Oh yes, I'm also thinking of incorporating guest blogs in the near future and all of these elements should make that much easier.
Here's another site to check out, about how someone integrated Movable Type into their church website using some interesting techniques.
Tags: Blogging, Content Management System, Love, Movable Type, Nonviolence, Quotes | Edit
 |
| An early edition of "Nonviolence Web Upfront," which debuted December 29, 1997. |
Here's the email announcement that coincided with Upfront's debut:
NONVIOLENCE WEB NEWS, by Martin Kelley Week of December 29, 1997
CONTENTS
Introducing "Nonviolence Web Upfront"
New Procedures
New Website #1: SERPAJ
New Website #2: Stop the Cassini Flyby
Two Awards
Numbers Available Upon Request
Weekly Visitor Counts
With my travelling and holiday schedule, it's been hard to keep regular NVWeb News updates coming along, but it's been a great month and there's a lot. I'm especially proud of the continuing evolution of what I'm now calling "Nonviolence Web Upfront," seen by 1800-2200 people a month!
----------
INTRODUCING "NONVIOLENCE WEB UPFRONT"
The new magazine format of the NVWeb's
homepage has been needing a name. It needed to mentioned the
"Nonviolence Web" and I wanted it to imply that it was the site's
homepage (sometimes referred to as a "frontpage") and that it contained
material taken from the sites of the NVWeb.
So the name is "Nonviolence Web Upfront" and a trip to http://www.nonviolence.org will see that spelled out big on top of the weekly-updated articles.
There's also an archive of the weekly installments found at the bottom of NVWeb Upfront. It's quite a good collection already!
Now that this is moving forward, I encourage everyone to think about how they might contribute articles. If you write an interesting opinion piece, essay, or story that you think would fit, send it along to me. For example, "War Toys: Re-Action-ist Figures" FOR's Vincent Romano's piece from the Nov. 27 edition, was an essay he had already written and made a good complimentary piece for the YouthPeace Week special. But don't worry about themes: NVWeb Upfront is meant not only to be timely but to show the breadth of the nonviolence movement, so send your pieces along!
Tags: Cassini, Interesting Articles, Martin Kelley, Member Groups, Nonviolence Web, Org Web, Pax Christi Usa, Peace Movement, Quaker, Web, Wikipedia | Edit
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Beth Kantor's nonprofit blog has an good article asking about the possibilities for real-time web interaction and asks whether it's possible for the web to let someone be in two places at the same time:
For me, the eye-opening moment of real-time collaboration came last winter when I was planning a conference with two friends. The three of us knew each other pretty well and we had all met each other one-on-one but we had never been in the same room together (this wouldn't happen until the first evening of the conference we were co-leading!). A month to go we scheduled a conference call to hash out details.
I got on Skype from my New Jersey home and called Robin on her Bay Area landline and Wess on his cellphone in Los Angeles. The mixed telephony was fun enough, but the amazing part came when we brought our computers into the conversation. Within minutes we had opened up a shared Google Doc file and started cutting and pasting agenda items. Someone made a reference to a video, found it on Youtube and sent it to the other two by Twitter. Wess had a secondary wiki going, we were bookmarking resources on Delicious and sending links by instant messenger.
This is qualitatively different from the two-places-at-once scenario that Beth Kantor was imagining because we were using real-time web tools to be more present with one another. Our attention was more focused on the work at hand.
I'm more skeptical about nonprofits engaging in the live tweeting phenomenon--fast-pace, real-time updates on Twitter and other "micro-blogging" services. These tend to be so much useless noise. How useful can we be if our attention is so divided?
Last week a nonprofit I follow used Twitter to cover a press conference. I'm sorry to say that the flood of tweets amounted to a lot of useless trivia. So what that the politician you invited actually showed up in the room? That he actually walked to the podium? That he actually started talking? That he ticked through your talking points? These are all things we knew would happen when the press conference was announced. There was no NEWs in this and no take-away that could get me more involved.
What would have been useful were links to background issues, a five-things-you-do list, and a five minute wrap-up video released within an hour of the event's end. They could have been coordinated in such a way to ramp up the real time buzz: if they had posted an Twitter update every half hour or so w/one selected highlight and a link to a live Ustream.tv link I probably would have checked it out. The difference is that I would have chosen to have my workday interrupted by all of this extra activity. In the online economy, attention is the currency and any unusual activity is a kind of mugging.
When I talk to clients, I invariably tell that "social media" is inherently social, which is to say that it's about people communicating. The excitement we bring to our everyday communication and the judgment we show in shaping the message is much more important than the Web 2.0 tool de jour.