Scott Fillmer » blogs

Your Blog’s Uniqueness Rests With Your Story

Scott Fillmer — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 14:35:49 +0000

What makes your blog (or Facebook page for those who don’t blog) unique, and therefore something someone else might want to read, learn from, or connect with on a personal level?

I’m always looking for ways to make my blog more “authentic” more “unique” for lack of a better phrase. If you blog for any length of time at all you will start to develop your own style and patterns, but you also start to put up barriers to your own writing without even knowing it. Those barriers for me end up being mechanical and personal.

Barriers To Writing, Blogging, or Social Networking

Mechanically, it has to look perfect, be grammatically correct, have a photo sized properly, with a searchable title, tags, and links. This just comes from blogging for almost 10 years, I do this almost without thinking, but it takes time, and it limits what I end up posting. If I just posted whatever I wanted without worrying about the mechanical functionality of the site I would probably post twice as much. Maybe that is a good thing after all.

Personally, I struggle with how much I say or don’t say with each post. It’s strange because Deborah who is far less personal in real life is sometimes more personal on her own blog and its vice-versa for me. I split up my own blog into basically four sections, one of those sections, called the Journal Category where I try to put my ongoing story or walk. Sometimes this works sometimes it doesn’t.

You are What’s Unique About Your Story

All that to say what makes blog articles or even posts to Facebook and Twitter unique is you, your story. It’s like no other. There is only one you and your experiences are different from everyone else. When I write an article about a new piece of technology or a review about a book I read, someone has inevitably already done that. It’s unique in my own way because my experience with that computer or book is different from someone else, but there is something different about posts from the heart about important issues that go on in their life. I love that. It’s authentic, it’s genuine, and it’s somewhat less filtered than anything I write.

I hope those bloggers below take this as a compliment and not a cut down but I have a very short, small list of blogs on my rss feed reader in a group that that I call my “a-list” (which purposely doesn’t include anyone I work with). These bloggers write straight from their hearts to the page. No fancy photos much of the time, no special SEO keywords for titles or content, traffic or stats to them seem basically unimportant, and for the most part design and platform are secondary concerns (although I will say the guys for some reason are far more concerned about design than the woman). I haven’t asked any of them this of course, it’s just a guess.

Somehow they have each individually captured my attention with the genuine manner in which they talk about their life. Funny most of them are woman. Seems that most men don’t want to talk about their personal life too much. The majority of my rss feeds are from the guys, but when it comes to being genuine and personal, the ladies do a far better job than we do.

So each time they do a blog post, I get to learn from them how to be a better blogger and writer, and hopefully how to better connect with other people. A great example of this is a post today that looks at the struggles of deep we get involved in the social networking of today instead of getting involved in people face to face. It’s a great look at why we blog, post on Facebook, and everything else that goes with being alive today, but it’s real.

So I say thanks to them here for helping me to continue to develop my blog and writing in a way that is real, genuine, and hopefully in a way that will connect with other people in a real way. I hope you might take a few minutes to scan through their blogs as well. The list below is their main blog address and their latest post.

Deborah Fillmer - Week Thirteen – Hurry Up and Wait
Andrea Collette – To twit or not to twit
Amy Fisher – While we wait…
Sailing Bo – Perfection is overrated and how you shouldn’t be afraid to live an interesting life on purpose. (that’s a really long title Bo, haha, but I like it)
Biscuet – Ray’s House

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Using Worpress Next Random Blog Feature in Admin Page

Scott's Misc — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:09:48 +0000

How many features and options have you used on Worpress? There are a lot of options and features that WordPress has put into the program and I try to go as deep into the code and options as I can, without really messing something up, to get to know the ins and outs of WordPress. I came across one I sometimes forget is there, but it is great fun. Have you ever used the Worpress next function? It is very similar to Blogger’s next blog feature where you click the button and it pulls from a random blog in their system. I actually didn’t know that Worpress had a similar feature, located at http://wordpress.com/next/, where it redirects to a random WordPress blog, until I looked at my stats page one day.

This feature is located in your blog admin pages, on the dashboard, then the stats page (be sure you are logged into your WordPress account). There in the upper right corner you will find a link to the random blog. Once you click on the random blog it redirects to the url above with a tool bar where you can view the next random blog, view a random post from the blog you are viewing, and a few other options.

There are several different sites that do this kind of random find, StumbleUpon being one, and MyBlogLog is a good one too. MyBlogLog is not really a random blog finder but you can really chase a rabbit by using the recent readers widget so I consider it to be close to a random find. Be sure to join my community while you are looking over the MyBlogLog readers, then just follow the links in the readers widget and see where it takes you.

When you need some time just to relax, give it a try, you never know what you are going to find. The number of blogs that are completely off the topics we normally read are incredible and I find it interesting to see what others are interested in as well.

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Find New Blogs Using RSS Search Feeds Readers

Scott's Misc — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:49:48 +0000

I have read several blog posts here and there that suggest that there aren’t many good ham radio blogs (or insert specific topic here), and certainly not many that are updated very frequently. This may be the case, the old 80%/20% rule where 80% of the blogs on the Internet are just junk not worth your time need help, and 20% actually have good, updated content.

I thought this was the case until I started utilizing my feed reader in a search format, then I found out that it wasn’t that there were no blogs that had good content, it was that I couldn’t find them. Of course some good SEO would help, but that is a topic for a different post. I am sure everyone has their own list of blogs that they look at, but this is a good way to find those blogs that don’t have such high traffic ratings that everyone can find them, (perhaps because it is a new blog on a new topic [like this one] and it just hasn’t built up a subscriber list yet), one ones that could be just slightly off topic of what you normally read, (and there are tons of those) in any subject or combinations of subjects.

If you look at the screen shots shown here it gives you an idea of a search feed on a reader. I used Google Reader here just because that is the one I happen to use but I have seen other examples of this search function being used and might post some others when I get a chance.

If you are not familiar with a feed reader, or an RSS feed, (also called an ATOM feed) you can visit the Google Reader link above for an explanation. What is different about a search feed than just a normal rss feed you would get off a website or blog is that you would normally subscribe to a specific blog’s url not a search string. For example, this blogs url for the rss feed is http://www.scottfillmer.com/feed (you can also just type in the main address line url and paste it into your reader as well and that usually works).

In stead of a specific url, you subscribe to the search term, and the results are all blogs you haven’t subscribed to before and many you probably haven’t even seen.

Here is a short step by step below using Google’s reader and blog search function as an example.

Get Google Reader if you don’t have it and subscribe to a few feeds from various blogs using the add subscription link on the left side
Go to Google’s Blog Search and put in a search term of interest (like ham radio <—- see results from link)
Do not use the term blog in the search, it will narrow the results to far
If you like the results scroll to the bottom of the screen (if not start over)
At the bottom, click on the link that says “Subscribe to a blog search feed for [ham radio] in Google Reader“
It will then take you to your Google Reader with the option to subscribe.
It is a good idea to create a folder for the search feeds to keep them separated from your other feeds too.

If you look at the two screen shots here, they show the link at the bottom by the red arrow, and the other highlights the top results where it says related blogs. The red arrow is where you want to subscribe to that feed search term. The results at the top are good blogs to start with if you want to check out the results of the search term before adding it to your reader, but you can always removed it at a later date.

I hope that helps explain how to subscribe to a blog search term in your reader. There is much more to the blog search and I will try to highlight some more features in upcoming posts.