St. Louis WordCamp

WordCamp St. Louis

Saturday was spent at the second annual WordCamp St. Louis, which was held on the really pretty campus of Maryville University. Designed for anyone who runs a blog/website on the WordPress platform, the day was broken down into four categories: Content, Design, Development and Campfire. (The theme of this WordCamp was "Get S'More Skills", thus the reference to campfires.) So essentially each hour there was a choice of four topics, which was hard because there were always two that I wanted to attend. I stayed in the Content section all day since I felt like it was geared more towards beginners.

Even though myhousehistory.net has been around since April of 2008, I really don't have a good grasp on what makes WordPress tick. Certainly I can do all the basic stuff like post, add photos and work with plugins, but whenever it comes to anything more complicated than that, I have to ask someone else for help. While it is true that I certainly am not interested in learning how to change the HTML coding, I would like to be a little more in control of my website.

The opening session by Ed Morrissey covered the evolution of WordPress. What struck home with me is that there are currently 56 million WordPress sites! That is amazing! Certainly there must be a whole lot of folks who can help me when I get stuck, right? There is even a St. Louis user group that meets monthly, so this is definitely something I need to look into.

At each of the sessions throughout the day I learned something new. It was fun to see a handful of St. Louis Publishers Association members at the meeting, and I saw some old faces from Show Me the Blog St. Louis and met some new bloggers as well. But the best part of the day was my stop at the Happiness Desk, where one of the friendly volunteers (Jonathan Goldford of wiredimpact.com) assured me that the way myhousehistory.net was constructed was indeed favorable for the search engines to find new content. He also recommended a SEO plugin to help the spiders crawl over to my site. That information alone was well worth the price of admission. I will keep my eyes open for WordCamp 2013, and highly recommend the event to anyone using WordPress for their blogs/websites.

Blogging for Authors

On September 8, 2012 from 9:30-11:30 a.m. Linda Austin and I will be doing a workshop at the Brentwood Community Center entitled Blogging for Authors. The purpose of the meeting is to help authors understand the purpose and importance of a blog, discuss different blogging platforms, give examples of blogging topics, and illustrate how to attract an audience. Originally Linda and I were going to offer a workshop on Twitter, as a lot of the attendees at a recent social media event held by the St. Louis Publishers Association seemed to be perplexed by the topic. But then it seemed to make more sense to begin at the beginning. When someone is interested in you on Twitter, they want to be able to check out your blog. If you have no blog, well...they just go away.

So we are starting with blogging and will see how it goes. We are limiting the workshop to 15 attendees, and they must be members of the St. Louis Publishers Association to attend. The cost is $15 to cover the room rental and miscellaneous expenses. I believe we have 7 or so folks signed up already, and the email regarding the event just went out on Monday. The timing on this is pretty good as there is a WordCamp coming to St. Louis later in September. If any of our attendees decide to go with the Wordpress platform for their blog, this would be a great followup meeting for them.

Blogging Bootcamp

As writers and/or publishers, at some point we all need to hop with both feet into social media. Blogging is a great way to start to build a following for your book, and a lot of people begin with blogger.com. This blog as well as my personal blog are both on the blogger.com platform. It is very user friendly, proving in my case that you can teach an old dog new tricks. However when it came time to develop a blog for my passion of researching house history, I elected to go with WordPress.org. I chose WP for a couple of reasons: 1) it looks more like a website, containing static pages as well as the pages you update more frequently, such as your blog pages; and 2) you can make sales on WP, which was important to me as I was just completing my book "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Researching a St. Louis County, Missouri Home".

WordPress is not as friendly for newbies as blogger.com, however. So when I learned that Show Me the Blog St. Louis (SMBSTL) was hosting a WordPress Blogging Bootcamp last weekend, I jumped at the chance to participate. Having attended two other workshops put on by Danyelle Little of SMBSTL, I knew my time would be well spent. More than 20 eager bloggers crammed the conference room at Nebula Coworking on South Jefferson. My head is STILL spinning from all that I learned, but I will try and summarize the points that struck home with me the most.

The first part of the workshop was conducted by Kesha Brown, founder of XD Web Solutions. Check out Kesha's website at http://xdwebsolutions.com. First of all, you can set up your blog on either WordPress.com or Wordpress.org. With the .com site you have limited storage space, you cannot accept ads (a source of revenue for many bloggers), and you will have a long domain name. The .org site allows you to have ads, make sales, and own your web content. Both sites are free. Check out the WordPress.org site for lots of helpful articles. It is recommended that you grab the domain names that are pertinent to your business, such as yourname.com and yourname.net. You will also want the .com and .net domain names of your business or the name of your book, for example.

Kesha then set us up on a WordPress blog so that we could all follow along as she went through the features offered by WordPress. This workshop was really hands-on, as we had been instructed to bring our laptops or tablets with us. It was so helpful to be able to actually do the steps as she was explaining them to us. Kesha finished up by going over her favorite plugins for WordPress.

Danyelle conducted the second part of the workshop, talking more specifically about blogging. Her suggestions for how you can get content for your blogs are as follows:
- pose questions on social media
- ask for guest bloggers
- blog on other people's sites
She also talked about using other forms of social media to increase your web presence. Twitter Tools is a plugin that will automatically upload your WordPress post to your Twitter account. Using Facebook and LinkedIn will also help build your social media rankings.

Following the workshop, I came home and made some changes to myhousehistory.net, incorporating my new-found knowledge. I still have things that need to be addressed on my WordPress site, but attending the blogging bootcamp gave me the confidence I need to not be intimidated by my own website!

This fall Show Me the Blog St. Louis will be offering a two day blogging workshop in St. Louis. You can find the details here. I highly recommend attending this extremely reasonable event. You won't be disappointed!

My House History Website

I have been remiss in not mentioning that the myhousehistory.net website is up and running again. Cyber Peggy finally came through with setting up a new email address for me, which I then used to request a temporary password. I was finally able to get in to axspace, change to a new password and pay the bill. Voila - ready to go for another 12 months.

As I have previously discussed, this website was built on a WordPress platform, and I have never installed any of the WordPress updates on it. My philosophy is if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I am afraid if I do an upgrade, everything will get screwed up. But I recently read that Google somehow knows when you don't update the site and stops listing you in the web searches. So apparently I will have to bite the bullet and update. Before I do that, however, I have signed up for a workshop called Blogging Bootcamp, which takes place on June 11th. It is specifically for bloggers who use WordPress, so it should be great. If nothing else, I hope to meet someone that might be available to hire when I need to be bailed out. Hopefully for less than the $150 per hour my original consultant charges.