Trial and Error

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By Administrator | April 9, 2009

Well, this post is more of a test than anything so the content will be flimsy at best.

You see, I’m trying to hook my Squidoo lens and two blogs and other social networks together so I only have to post in one place and it will be updated in the other places. This is what happens when you take the “shotgun approach” like I did.

I started with a blog, then people said “Oh you have to have Squidoo” then “Twitter” then “you still need a blog at Wordpress.com in addition to your own” and “you need something at <insert your favorite here>”.

So I got these things, then I realized that I had spread myself out too thin. The idea was to spend a lot of time in the beginning setting things up then go into a “maintenence” mode where I, oddly enough, maintain things. Instead I ended up with a whole heap of “stuff” that should be less of a “heap” and more of a “streamlined machine”.

Yeah right.

So now as I said, I’m trying to hook it all together. But there’s a few things I didn’t know, like that Wordpress.com doesn’t allow plugins. So I can’t just RSS feed from my main blog at http://www.bloglikeacelebrity.com to Wordpress.com. I have to do it the other way around, which I don’t really want to do, because I have plugins that I happen to want to use…such as the guest authors one.

I don’t know what brought you to me for blogging advice. Was it curiosity? A desire to set up your own blog? Wanting to improve your blog? Are you blogging for business or a hobby blog or just your own spot on the internet to publicly rant and rave?

No matter, just follow these steps: Do one thing at a time. Get the one thing working, get it set up the way you want, then and only then add the next thing and integrate them together. Do a little research first. I may have gone to Blogger.com instead of Wordpress.com or just skipped both of these altogether. I already had my blog on one of my websites so these are just “extra”.

And can anyone explain to me what the heck I need Feedburner for? I have an autoresponder, so what can Feedburner do for me?

It is said that “The wisest man who ever lived realized just how little he actually knew”

I don’t care for the claims of “I’m an expert blogger and I’ll show you how”. Now that person may or may not be really smart, that’s not my point, my point is that I don’t like the claim. I much rather like the claims of “this is what worked for me, let me show you how I did it” Albert Einstein, you know the “E=MC squared” world famous physicist? He said that he was “engaged in the study of physics”. In other words, he didn’t claim to be an expert (not at that moment anyway), he claimed that he was still studying it.

The point I’m making is, I don’t know it all. I know more than some, less than others. My video series is great for the new person, or maybe even for the person who isn’t quite new but doesn’t quite have it all. I didn’t create the videos, but I found them useful even though I knew most of it already.

I don’t stop learning and I don’t want to stop learning. What’s the point of knowing it all? That’s like having nothing left to live for. Okay, that’s a bit extreme but I hope you see the point. There’s always something new, something to add or pass up or drop, something to learn how to do better or set up more effeciently. So on and so forth.

For example, I have a bunch of plugins, many of them were recommended to me. Do they work? Sort of, I think. I have some that work great, some that I think work, some that I can’t tell if they do anything at all, and some I don’t know how to use. I add that last part only because I recently found out that I was using a plugin wrong so it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.

Some of them are “activate and ignore” some are “activate, set settings, and ignore” and some of them are “activate, set up, use for each post”. I dislike those last ones, I don’t care how good they are, I don’t want my blog to be a full time job, I want it to be something I enjoy, something that helps others and something that makes me a little extra cash…in that order.

In any case, it doesn’t matter how long or how much you know about blogging, there’s always a new plug in, not neccessarily a better one, just another one, some of them are pretty straight forward, some less so.

Well, my test post has turned into combining two or three real posts and being rather “scatter brained” about the whole thing. Sigh.

If this works, then this post will be out into a few places all automatically, if not, well, back to figuring out the mess I got myself into because I didn’t follow my own advice.

- Jeffery

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Topics: Blogging Tips and Tricks, blogging, social networking, squidoo, twitter | No Comments »