31 Day Challenge

Building  a Better Blog

Carole McCulloch’s reflections on the 31 Day Challenges

Pre-Challenge Prep: a notification in Twitter first alerted me to this new 31 day challenge and I quickly made my way to the new wiki set up by Sue Waters.
a. Check out what is required of me and what I will learn – a quick jump over to the Steve Dembo site and then consider what it was I needed to do.
b. I had been trying to think of a way to begin my blog entries for 2009 and this gave me an ideal opportunity to get underway with some time available during the hot summer months.
c. Set myself some goals (one of which was to record the tasks done in my new Notebook diary) – this I had already set as a new years resolution to make an entry in my personal diary every day of January – so far I’m certainly doing that. The 31 day challenge now gives me another entry.

Day 1 – Email a New Reader
This was something I had on my list of things to do ever since I started getting some comments in my blog – although I’d been keeping my blog for sometime – it did not really seem to be attracting comment. Something I learned to do last year during my travels was to notify via Twitter of updates in my blog – that worked. (Note: I have a new year goal in my Twitter account too – to gather 250 followers – already at 135 with a great influx yesterday after some help from my friends. – thanks Sue-)
Jenny Wood was the recipient of my email today and I was delighted to see that Jenny was also participating in the 31 day challenge. I needed to find a solution to the difficulties of commenting on my blog and the use of live links – prompted by a comment from Jenny – and this led me to teach myself a few more of the admin tools that I had not really paid much attention to before: pages, comments, appearance/widgets, settings/discussion, privacy.
So some new learning about admin in my WordPress blog was the first thing I’d like to mention.
This lead me to tidying up the widgets, pages and posts in my blog – the second thing I’d like to mention.
Then I realised that I could use my blog as my ‘professional webpage’ as a better bit of marketing for myself – so have now created a ‘Professional Services’ page.
If you’d care to comment please visit: http://coachcarole.wordpress.com/ – I am now more confident to invite ‘new readers’.

Day 2 – Run a first time audit

Okay getting ready to ask for a couple of auditors I learned something else – I wasn’t willing to let them loose on my blog until I had done some further tidying up of previous posts – strange that I am seeking perfection in my view before I hear about their view.
I needed to choose someone who is computer savvy (but not blog savvy – and someone who is likely to spend the computer time on it) – so I emailed a friend to do the first audit. I just asked her to visit and have a look around and that I would send some questions later.
I need someone to be a ‘critical friend’ now – someone with blog experience and know-how, so I think that one of my colleagues in Victoria could fulfil that role. I will now ask her to provide some feedback to the set of questions provided for this audit. This time, I think it would be quicker to send the questions to her in a document, and ask her to fill those out with responses as she audits my blog. Then this document can come back to me and I can save it for future reference and print it as instructions on what to do to my blog next.
This task won’t be completed within a day of course, as I must await my selected critical friends comments and feedback, which may take a day or two.
Well I was wrong – my ‘critical friend’ gave me her feedback today and I now have some very valuable observations and suggestions for improvement.
Some of her observations in response to the questions in this task were very valuable in respect to some basic information that I have yet to add to my blog about my experiences and networking. Okay, two down and 29 to go…..

Day 3: Search for and Join Forums on Your Blog’s Topic

Now this one is really easy – I already have a wealth of these that I have joined, created or subscribed to. Mostly I look for those focussed on elearning matters like Clasroom 2.0 at: http://www.classroom20.com/ These ning networks are really great. Another one of these that I joined late last year is proving to be very useful for connections with others who are interested in elearning professional services: http://e-learning-project-connect.ning.com/

However, just for something different I have recently joined this one to participate in yet another challenge; this one is all about Birth Order and its first challenge is find out the birth order for all of its members – now that’s a really great strategy to get a group of like-minded people to find out more about each other and establish a steady pattern of communication in a short amount of time. You can find this one at: http://digifolios.ning.com/

Once upon a time I would be thoroughly engaged with threaded conversations in a variety of forums, but nowadays I’m more likely to have time to just dip into places like Twitter and Diigo to get some new elearning leads, links and friends. Plaxo and Pulse also offer some notified activities among those I have as friends there. During my ementoring projects I would probably be linking in to forums that those I mentor have established – in whatever format they are – to provide a guiding presence.
Note: I was one of the facilitators at the recently archived EdNA Network Community that Sue Waters mentioned here in the 31 day tasks and I suspect that one of the reasons for its demise was the lack of time for elearning practitioners to spend any effort on threaded conversations that were initiated by others.

Current practices among many of my peers indicate that it is the short sharp any time web space connections that they are seeking, using and frequenting.

Day 4: Interlinking Posts

Now this was a strategic task to complete today – I feel like I know the administration functionality of WordPress so much better now. Nothing like a bit of repetitive editing, categorising and exploring to get more organised. I was able to include some of the suggested improvements from my blog audit buddy during the process and I like the way it is shaping up. (Note: a surpise – I discovered a comment on an old post that I was not even aware of and made contact with that person by way of follow up. This prompted me to add the Recent comments function on the r/h nav bar.

I have added some new categories and attached these to posts – editing of posts using a Bulk Action tool was pretty easy – this allowed me to add a category to several posts at once. I have also added some new links on the r/h nav bar to those areas that I think my readers may wish to go – keeping these as strategic links to national and state based elearning websites; my other places in wetpaint wikis and ning networks; and groups of my latest networks and social bookmarking sites.

To help my readers and myself in accessing the 31 day challenge postings, I will now prepare a separate page in the blog to display my summaries. I have decided that I will do a ’summary’ blog post on the 31 day challenge – as I find the time to complete the tasks, add a comment here and update the blog a bit too time consuming in any one day. Having a separate page with the summaries will make it easier to access and reflect on. My learning takes another step forward – it really has helped me to work with my blog each day – I will now set myself some timelines for the other tasks as my project work tasks take priority this week.

Day 5: Conduct an About Page Audit

I learned from my auditor the things that should be included in the About Me page and today I’ve made some changes to its content. I have included some further personal details and some work related roles. I will ask a previous reader (TAsk 6) to come back and visit to give me some feedback on that page now.

Day 6: Email an Old Timer Reader 
At first, when I read this topic, I thought it meant an ‘older’ reader – doh! As my blog did not have many commenters it was fairly easy to find someone who had posted a comment last year, so I was able to make contact with him, and make it pertinent to his comment. He probably thought I had taken a very long time to answer – if it didn’t notify me in my email, then I didn’t know about it – but I though he would be okay with that.
The learning I took from this was to work out strategies for notifying me of comments in my blog directly to my email. So I have a question for the team, how do I do that?

Day 7: Plan your next week’s postings

This is a really good thing to do on a Friday or Saturday and I got started on that after reading some of the hints from the comments over at ProBlogger.
Some of my blog could be planned in a general way – but often it needs to be flexible and to enable me to reflect on what’s happening in elearning environments in Australia and some of that is not plannable. e.g. Last week the notifications about the Industry Integration of Elearning funding came across my desk, and others will appear in weeks ahead. So one thing I can do is to have some rough ideas on the subject matter of my posts for the weeks ahead, not just one week, but the month of …. This I chose to do in PowerPoint, my favourite tool for composing and displaying ideas these days, and I could see how my planned posts might look to my readers. So putting in the dot points, selecting themes and images, and thinking of titles work well in this tool.Comment on a blog you’ve never commented on before

Day 8:

This is an easy one to do – but who’s blog will I choose? I think this is the main part of the learning here, to seek out other blogs on my themes and topics and make contact. My choice of process was to go to WordPress.com and seek out bloggers who travel. My upcoming plans for travel to Tuscany was the catalyst for selecting such bloggers and by visiting their blogs I hope to pick up some tips for planning our trip this year. So ‘killing two birds with one stone’ – travel information and a chance to explore how other wordpress sites are constructed. The first one I chose for this was: http://joeduck.com/2008/05/12/tuscany-travel/ which lead me to this website: http://www.talktuscany.com/ – now I know what sort of comment I can make to Joe Duck in his ‘Have blog will travel’ blog. The next one I chose was http://blog.vacapedia.com/2007/10/01/tuscany-italy/ – another interesting blog name and in this one some great pictures of Tuscany and a link to the Vacapedia website – now I know what to say in this commercial blog.

Day 9: My Choice # 1 - Add a Scheduled Events page

In this page I am experimenting with the use of a Trumba calendar which will send readers to some scheduled online events I will be running soon in Wiziq. I have organised to deliver a series of Innovate and Integrate workshops online in this virtual classroom environment with the help of the team at Wiziq. I first learned about this from a new network friend in the http://innovate-ideagora.ning.com/ network. First I registered for a free trial period with Trumba, and made contact with their help desk, experimented with the too – did have some experience using it last year for the Knowledge Bank Online Events, so was a smooth transition. Next I applied for a trial with Wiziq and arranged for a demonstration session with the owner/developers (Indian based company) for Friday 4th February. After that I will schedule some of these live workshops and organised a registration process and add that to my blog page. Stay tuned.

Day 10 : Declutter your side bar

Right did that today too – the tip about making the archives a drop down was a great one – I didn’t know you could do that. Makes sense, if readers need to go back into the archives its still easy to do so and the left hand nav bar is freed up considerably. Now I have room to move the Tag cloud over to the left and unclutter the right hand nav bar. All in a snap – as they say. I’ll keep the ‘recent comments’ going for a while though as it is a good reminder for me.

Sue thanks for your comments above – they are, as always, supportive and helpful.

Day 11 – Dig into Your Blog’s Statistics
Make time to read my post on Google Analytics – I can not stress how important learning to manage your statistic is! – Says Sue Water, well I pause and listen, if Sue says its important, then its important. So without any fuss I made my way over to the Blog Stats section of my blog – often looked at it in the past and saw nothing of note. Tonight I see that in the month of January 2009, my hits have shot through the roof – just shows you what a difference is made when you focus on improving the blog and getting the word out there that readers should have a look.Introduce Yourself to another Blogger

In the past I’ve added analytics plugins to provide some feedback on the use of sites I’ve set up for other people, but had not considered it for my own blog – now of course I note that WordPress offers its own Blog stats. An interesting link found there was to a comment I’d made in the Writers Village some years back, and it was linked to my blog. I cannot really remember doing that – the linking part – and I was intrigued with this flashback. See if you can find me on:
http://writersvillage.com/preview/member-quotes.shtml

Note: an unexpected find when checking the stats was a link to the WordPress.TV at: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/tune-in-to-wordpresstv/ Now this I need to investigate further.

Day 12 -

Okay now this is a really easy one and something I should have done ages ago – it just hasn’t been on my radar. I really wish to visit another blogger who is in the challenge so that will be my next focus. Earlier on I noticed that not many had added a link to their blog, I hope they have now.
Right after a random selection of another’s page here in this wiki, I found Jeanette’s blog URL at: http://jeanettem.edublogs.org/
This was a bit of serendipity as I found that Jeanette is a member of the OZ/NZ Educators network too. So some things in common that might well prove to be a useful piece of connectivity in the near future.

INTERLUDE  -   a little time lapse here in the tasks as I travel to Melbourne to await birth of grandchild no. 4 (one week later, still nothing happening there so return home to await a phone call) probably better that this child stays in situ rather than be born into this heat wave we’re having.

Day 13: My Choice # 2: Create a Powerful Learning Practices tag

This new way of creating a supportive mentoring/coaching environment for new Web 2.0 learners intrigued me so much I wanted to create a tag for relevant postings. I will, once I know more of the PLP theory and practice, create a PLP page in my blog.

Day 14 – Analyze Your Blog’s Competition
Delay this one until I can master some of the attributes of WordPress before placing my blog on the frontline.

Day 15 – Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky

Placed an RSS link directly below the latest post of Funding – to encourage more footsteps to my blog and to contact me for help in applying for funds.

Day 16 – Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog

Hmmm, no Heatmap that I can see – did not want to pay for Crazy Egg, so explored the widgets in WordPress. Used the Top Clicks at bottom of main navigation bar.

Day 18 – Create a Sneeze Page and Propel Readers Deep Within Your Blog

Easiest way to do this, less time consuming also, was to create a page called ‘What did I say?’ and to base it on a two column archives template.

Day 19 – Respond to Comments on Your Blog

I find Jeanette again as a commenter and respond to that and also visit her blog and leave a comment there. I find that I”m drawn to other WordPress blogs as I can see how their style might be emulated in mine. I loved the page that Jeanette constructed for the 31 day challenge – that’s a great idea.

There my challenge stops – nothing in the list from task 20 to 31 inspires or works towards my end goal. What  I need now is to provide an ongoing process of updating my blog and making it interesting to readers who may be following my lead.