Welcome to Smuggle Me

Last night I had a second to start reading through a bunch of content. I realized as I did this that it had been a while since I’d really spent a good amount of time just consuming interesting content. I think I’ve been spending too much time creating content and not enough time consuming content.

This isn’t completely true. I think I’ve done a decent job of keeping up with content on So You Think You Can Dance and electronic medical records. I kind of have to in order to maintain those blogs. However, even there there’s so much content out there that I only have so much time in a day.

There in lies the problem. How to prioritize your time between the creating and the consuming of content. Creating content is how you make money on a blog. However, I sincerely believe that the more content you consume the better content you create (old school people say “To be a great writer you have to be a great reader.”)

However, even more than the above is that I probably need to spend a little more time consuming content just because it’s enjoyable. I love reading about the progress of WordPress. I love reading the various venture capital or entrepreneur blogs out there. I enjoy me a bit of techcrunch talking about startups, etc, etc, etc.

Of course, it still goes back to having enough time in a day to do everything. All in all, I have no complaints. I love my life. I just can’t help but wonder if I’d love it even more if I tweaked my balance in consuming versus creating content.

One thing is certain. I love blogging!!

I must admit that I’m really excited to be able to attend WordCamp Las Vegas this Saturday. I won’t be attending Sunday, because it’s Sunday but I think I’ll get a ton of value out of even just the first day of the conference.

I’ve lived in Las Vegas for almost 4 years now and I’ve never been to Palace Station, so that should be cool to see. The speakers that I’m most excited to see at WordCamp Las Vegas is Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, online whipping boy Jim Kukral and Social Media legend Chris Brogan. A pretty amazing lineup if it was just those 3 speakers.

Even more exciting than the speakers is that it will be fun to meet other people from Las Vegas that use Wordpress. I think I only know 2 bloggers from Las Vegas that use Wordpress. We’ll see who we meet on Saturday. Should be interesting.

I also must admit that I feel a little embarrassed that this is the blog I listed on the registration page. This is really kind of my play blog. The problem is that I have so many blogs, that I didn’t know which one to choose on the list and just chose this one. It just doesn’t represent my use of Wordpress at all. Just take a look at the blogs in my Pure TV blog network to see what I mean:
Something For Nothing – TV and Reality TV Blog
Pure TV Freaks Blog – Blogging TV Freaks
Pure Dancing with the Stars – Blogging Dancing with the Stars on ABC
Pure Amazing Race – Blogging Amazing Race on CBS
Pure So You Think You Can Dance – Blogging So You Think You Can Dance on Fox
Pure Fringe – Blogging Fringe on Fox
Pure America’s Got Talent – Blogging America’s Got Talent
Pure TV Sports – Blogging Sports

Also, I can’t forget to thank my sponsor for WordCamp Las Vegas: Izea. I was the 61st blogger to sign up for Izea (then PayPerPost). The CEO, Ted Murphy, is a freakin rockstar and being a part of the Izea community has been key to many of the things I’ve learned and done with blogging.

I’d love to hear from others going to WordCamp Las Vegas. See you there.

One of the nice things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates and changes that enhance the blogging platform. One of the bad things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates. That means you have to go and update all of your blogs. Which in my case is far too many. Take a look at the list of blogs that I maintain:

Blogs
Smuggle Me
EMR and HIPAA
Lynn Family Blog
Something for Nothing
Fundraising
BYU Sports
Spoil On

Pure TV Network Blogs
TV Freaks
Dancing with the Stars
So You Think You Can Dance
Fringe
Amazing Race
AGT
TV Sports

Other People’s Blogs
Crowdsource This
True Life Relationships
Take Flight Blog

Blogs I Don’t Write To Anymore, But Don’t Want to Take Down Yet
Cambrian House
miaMessage Blog

Ok, so I’m too lazy to link all of them. A bunch of them are new blogs since I’m splitting Something for Nothing into a TV Blog network. So far it’s doing pretty good, but it’s a good thing that I’m not blogging all of them myself. I have 4 other people helping me to update them with content.

Now if I can just automate the Wordpress update we’ll be all good. At least I’ve standardized the plugins I used so I don’t have to test nearly as much.

I’ve searched high and low for a way to move just one blog category from an existing blog into a new blog. I found tons of ways and great documentation on how to move an entire blog to a new domain, but I couldn’t find anything that showed how to take one Wordpress blog category and create a new blog using that category.

I found an old plugin/import that should have done the job, but hadn’t been kept updated with the latest version of Wordpress and so it didn’t work for me. I also found a ton of people on the Wordpress forums interested in doing the same thing, but no one offering an answer. The best they could offer was importing just the RSS feed for that category. Problem there is that then you lose all the comments, categories and tags for those posts. Comments being the real kicker for me.

Therefore, I decided to go it alone and figure out a way to do it using the only option given in the Wordpress Export which was the user that created the post. My goal was:
-Export All the posts, categories, comments, tags for just one category of my blog
-Create a list of those posts that I could use to redirect traffic/google to the new location

There might be easier ways (and hopefully they’ll make this an option in the Import), but this worked for me. Also, I wouldn’t try this method unless you’re pretty good at find and replace, executing SQL queries and editing themes.

Overview of Process:
*Export Blog to Test Server
*Change Theme to Get list of Blog Post IDs/Posts for Category
*Change Author of Each Post ID to a new author
*Export posts for new author
*Import into new blog
*Create list of 301 Redirects on old blog
*Clean Up new blog DB

Read more…

Email is still the most used application by internet users. I don’t know many people that are online that don’t pretty much go straight to their email when their online. Checking your email for new messages is an addiction for many (including myself). It’s my connection with my social life and it connects me to other things happening around the internet. In fact, one of the first things that new users of the internet do is get an email address.

Since email is so ubiquitous, then it only makes sense that getting your blog posts in people’s email box is one of the best way to drive traffic to your blog and encourage comments from users interested in what you’re posting to your blog. In fact, my wife has a friend that would manually send out an email to everyone telling them that she created a new blog post. That’s how much people like the idea of using email to “promote” their blog.

The crazy thing is that these people were sending out their blogs posts manually. What a pain in the butt. Plus, there might be some blog readers that aren’t on your personal email list.

If you’re manually doing it, then stop it and start using Zookoda. It’s a free service that basically turns your blog into a newsletter. Here’s a short list of features.

-Manage email newsletter subscribers.
-Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms.
-Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design.
-Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month.
-View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports.
-Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format.

Did I mention it’s free? Trust me, that’s a good deal. I had personally worked on projects like PHPList to do the same things, and it was a pain in the butt. A hosted email newsletter service like this is so much better.

When I was reading my twitter feed today I found Jules and blm03 talking about using TwitterFeed to publish when you do new blog posts. I think this might be a good idea. Definitely better to be able to automate the posting of your blog feed. I’m thinking that I might try it. I just wonder how many people it will annoy on twitter. Considering the number of posts I’m doing right now I don’t think I should be too worried.

11 posts in one sitting. That was pretty fun. It’s nice to have a bunch of content available to you and just to post really quickly your thoughts about it. Does it add value to anyone else. I’m not sure, but I am sure that it’s a fun and rewarding exercise for me to go through. I still have 51 more drafts waiting, so I’m sure I’ll be doing this again.

This one has just been sitting here for a while too, but it still rings true for those interested in starting to blog.

Yes, I’m a blogger and I’m addicted.

I decided to clean out my long list of draft posts. This is definitely going to involve deleting a lot of posts and will probably consist of me writing a whole bunch of content.

The thing is that when I find something interesting that I might want to blog about I just start a post for it. So, I have like 85 posts to go through. We’ll see how many I get through tonight.

A little while back Ted asked the PayPerPost community if their blog sucks? I actually avoided saying much at the time. However, I think that it’s pretty clear what’s happened to the PPP blog. They stopped announcing almost anything!

There has been months and months of marketing hype over Argus which turned out to be Izea and SocialSpark. That’s the best way to kill a corporate blog. Spend months and months and making only superficial changes and not announce anything that significant.

When PayPerPost first launched the blog was hoping with new features and exciting announcements. In fact, I seem to remember someone even sarcastically complaining that it had gone 3 days since a major announcement. It was really exciting to be apart of a dynamic organization that was changing weekly.

It amazes me that this all occurred almost a year and a half ago. Well, times have changed. PayPerPost has an incredibly large community and too many employees to keep track of them all. No more videos of stressed out employees getting vitamin water. No more $10 million funding announcements. However, most significantly very few feature releases in MONTHS!!

The worst part of it all is that the Argus announcement at PostieCon was a big disappointment. Not because the changes weren’t good. The quick information that was given at Postie Con has potential. However, no one would ever know it, because nothing has been released. No one has access to argus Social Spark. The PPP community was left waiting for months for the holy grail they called Argus only to receive a rushed announcement and now over a month of waiting (and no end in sight) for the actual release.

I’m sure that someone will come and say that the release of Social Spark was delayed because of the release of RealRank. This argument misses my point that PayPerPost has released very few interesting features in months.

This isn’t to say that PayPerPost isn’t thriving and that it isn’t going to be huge. I’m just saying that’s why the PayPerPost blog sucks and has definitely affected the community around it. It may have been the best corporate decision for PayPerPost to take these months and rebuild PayPerPost from the ground up. However, I think you could make a good argument about why it would have been better for PayPerPost to release features early and often. Wordpress learned this lesson which they took from Ubuntu.

I think it’s also worth mentioning Christopher Herot’s recent post explaining how he wasted much of his now failed startups time discussing and implementing features that users didn’t care about. Sure makes a compelling argument for an agile development environment with frequent releases of features. I guess we’ll see if the months of rebuilding PayPerPost and adding new features suffers the same unneeded feature fate that Christopher Herot experienced.

I hope this post isn’t seen as complaining. PayPerPost is welcome to do whatever they want with their product. I couldn’t care much either way. Although, I do appreciate them offering me a front row seat as I watch and learn from their experience building their company.