Musings of a Marketing Maven

It’s been only a cou­ple of weeks since I decided to start this blog, and I’m amazed at all the things I’ve learned since then. And the deci­sions to be made. Blog­ging is not for the faint of heart.

Deci­sions

First there was the deci­sion of which blog­ging tool to use, which involved online research, look­ing at demos, talk­ing to friends, etc. I even­tu­ally set­tled on Word­Press, given its empha­sis on aes­thet­ics and rel­a­tive ease of use. So far it feels like a good decision.

Then there was the choice of host­ing part­ner. Much as I like Speakeasy, there are oth­ers who are more geared for blog­ging, with eas­ier instal­la­tions, attrac­tive pric­ing, etc. I ended up with AN Host­ing, and they’ve been a good ser­vice provider so far.

Not to men­tion which domain name to use, explor­ing URL avail­abil­ity, and so on. I was lucky enough to find my own name avail­able, as long as I added the suf­fix “-blog.”

It goes with­out say­ing that there are all sorts of edi­to­r­ial deci­sions: what to write about, what tone of voice, style, fre­quency, etc. Those deci­sions are unique to each blogger.

But what amazes me in ret­ro­spect is what I’ve learned since mid-October. In most cases I’m now at the level of pro­fi­ciency, but far from mastery.

Blog­ging Tools

Two weeks ago, I’d never tried any of these tools. Many I’d never even heard of:

• MAMP (to facil­i­tate the instal­la­tion of MySQL, Apache and Word­Press on my local Macintosh)
• MySQL and phpAd­min (for con­tent man­age­ment of blog post­ings, etc.)
• cPanel (to admin­is­ter the account at the host­ing provider)
• Fan­tas­tico (to install Word­Press on the host­ing provider’s Linux server)
• Word­Press (ver­sions 2.3 and 2.3.1, both of which required instal­la­tion and test­ing, first on the local machine and then on the remote host­ing site)
• Themes and tem­plates designed for WordPress
• Var­i­ous plug-ins to detect and quar­an­tine spam
• Wid­gets, such as the one that man­ages the ran­dom selec­tion of books from my pro­fes­sional book­shelf, Library­Thing, or the one that con­nects to my LinkedIn profile
• Win­dows Live Writer, for edit­ing local drafts on my PC

I’ve learned how to adapt tem­plates and themes to meet my design pref­er­ences or edi­to­r­ial require­ments. So far, so good.

Plat­form Differences

I’ve also exper­i­mented with UI and func­tional dif­fer­ences in the post­ing and admin tools for Word­Press: on Macs (Tiger and Leop­ard) and on PCs (Win­dows XP and Vista). I’ve learned that Word­Press’ post­ing capa­bil­i­ties dif­fer across browsers: Safari, Inter­net Explorer and Fire­fox v2.x.

Much as I pre­fer the Mac, right now the more capa­ble tools for writ­ing and post­ing — based on my expe­ri­ence so far — are avail­able on the PC.

Win­dows Live Writer appears to be very promis­ing, and is well inte­grated with the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press. Unfor­tu­nately, it runs only on Win­dows XP or Vista. It’s in beta, but has been quite stable.

Word­Press’ sup­port for a choice of “visual post­ing” or man­u­ally enter­ing HTML tags is only avail­able on the PC. It’s easy to post from a Mac, but it can take more HTML know-how to include graph­ics, style head­ings, and so on.

My Take

Few small busi­ness own­ers will have the time, curios­ity, tech­ni­cal back­ground or will­ing­ness to try all the things I’ve tack­led. So they’ll stick with sim­pler tools and a one-size-fits-all tem­plate based approach.

But I love learn­ing, so this was the right approach for me.

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