Category: Blogging

  • Citizen Journalism cuts out the middleman

    Over at the Future Shop Techb­log I pos­ted this item about the dif­fer­ence between journ­al­ism 40years ago (when we were land­ing on the moon) and today. The upshot is that the Tech is cut­ting out the middle­man, and mak­ing journ­al­ism more access­ible to everyone. But is it qual­ity journ­al­ism? Does hav­ing a J‑school sheep­skin really…

  • Me? A Professional Blogger? Yep, somewhat.

    Today I became a pro­fes­sion­al blog­ger for Future Shop, the Cana­dian tech­no­logy retail­er. Pro­fes­sion­al as in ‘com­pensated’ for my writ­ing. No, I’ll not be leav­ing my most excel­lent day job, I’d need a bunch more of these to make blog­ging my sole source of income 🙂 and I’m not that prolific 🙂 You’ll find me (and…

  • Simple update adds iPhone style to your blog

    Yes­ter­day I installed the WPTouch plu­gin on this blog. Basic­ally it’s a Word­Press theme that reformats your blog so it’s much more read­able on mobile devices (Android, iPhone, iPod Touch). Full list of fea­tures here. More than just a plu­gin, WPtouch is an entire theme pack­age for your Word­Press web­site. Modeled after Apple’s app store…

  • The reasons why people follow me on Twitter

    In the pre­vi­ous post, I star­ted to answer the ques­tion “Why people fol­low me on Twit­ter.” I went through some back­ground, reviewed my tweet his­tory, and wrote a bit about my exper­i­ence using Twit­ter­’s Dir­ect Mes­sage (DM) to ask the question. This fol­low-on post gets into the actu­al reas­ons and numbers. Over the three months…

  • Organized: A great thing to be when guest editing at someone else’ blog

    Last week I had the hon­our of cur­at­ing One Degree’s Week in Review. My con­tri­bu­tion: Melt­downs, Mon­it­izaton and Monks. The week in review: Fri­day the 13th edi­tion, Feb­ru­ary 2009 Quick back­ground: OneDegree.ca is one of Canada’s lead­ing online pub­lic­a­tions about digit­al mar­ket­ing, online com­mu­nic­a­tions and social media — penned by some of Canada’s most insight­ful and…

  • What to know when changing website hosts

    A couple of weeks ago I found the fol­low­ing in an email from my webhost: Your web host­ing account for bradgrier.com has been deac­tiv­ated (reas­on: site caus­ing per­form­ance problems). Although your web site has been dis­abled, your data may still be avail­able for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted. After a quick call…

  • A fast and fun way to mockup almost anything

    Online Mockups…easy! Part of the reg­u­lar web devel­op­ment cycle is the user inter­face mockup. I’ve worked with many dif­fer­ent tools includ­ing Google Sketch­up and Adobe Pho­toshop to build rep­res­ent­a­tions for clients. But noth­ing has been as quick, easy, and fun as Bal­samiq Mockup, and online (and desktop/offline) user inter­face mockup tool for PC, Mac and Linux.…

  • Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

    Well it’s been just over a year since this post was writ­ten, and Google’s Gmail is down again in a most sig­ni­fic­ant way. Looks like folks on Twit­ter are pretty vocal about it this time too! And it seems that this post is still rel­ev­ant, sadly. I’ve re-opened the com­ments on this one as some…

  • Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

    Your ISP may be vulnurable to the Multi-Vendor DNS Issue. Here's how to tell, and a simple fix you can do to protect yourself.

  • Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

    photo cred­it: Kev­in Steele A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regard­ing mer­ging two cor­por­ate domains. Two organ­iz­a­tions, with sim­il­ar or com­pli­ment­ary lines of busi­ness are now one. What to do about the left-over web­sites. A quandary. Below I’ve out­lined 6 areas to con­sider, but I’m get­ting ahead of myself. I guess…

  • WordPress 2.6 is out — and you’re using it now.

    photo cred­it: purple­lime It was a fairly pain­less update (thanks to the Word­Press Auto­mat­ic Upgrade plu­gin), but there were a few quirks I’ve had to address: Avatars. WP 2.6 has much bet­ter sup­port for Avatars (images used to identi­fy authors of com­ments). But, my theme does­n’t nat­ively sup­port them so I’ve had to main­tain use…

  • How to *really* know your blog is successful (or not)

    Hey! How’ya doin’!There are many ways to define your blo­g’s suc­cess; Hits, Links, Track­backs, Com­ments, PageR­ank, Sub­scribers, etc. These are all good indic­at­ors of activ­ity. Your blog is busy. You’re get­ting a lot of pageviews. People are hit­ting and read­ing and crawl­ing the pages and posts of your blog. All is good, accord­ing to the…