Like It Is

Exposure is a Good Thing. Like It Is has been added to Blogs By Women . Nice.

As well as this being a really neat directory, it’s a great collection of blogs… no sploggers either, just plenty of interesting content. Hopefully many more child-free people will find out about the lively conversations we have on Like It Is. If you have a blog or want to discover more blogs, consider registering yours with Blogs By Women.

Here’s a snapshot for me to relish being on the front page for a while. The link above goes to my blog on BBW.

And… look, here’s me at the bottom!

One year ago today I set up my first blog. So on my first blogging anniversary I can’t think of a better time to reflect on what a great year it has been for this formerly “accidental blogger” and share some of my successes so far.

First off, I want to thank all my regular commentators – your comments make for such great conversations and debates we have here. I enjoy sharing my take on life with you all.

And thanks to readers and commentators who send me links and articles they feel I’ll be interested in, and who contribute links in your comments. I appreciate it.

So, apart from enjoying blogging, and sharing great conversations and great comments what else do I see as my high points? What else do I want to be able to do on Like It Is? Read the rest of this entry »

Not a lot gets by Timethief that’s for sure! She’s the first to notice the new comment additions.

I’ve found yet another cool WordPress plugin that I hope commentators will find useful. Now you can edit your comments before you post! If you’re like me, there are times when the key is just to get the thoughts down, or you’re in a hurry and your fingers are flying across your keyboard. You read back over your comment and it looks ok. You hit Submit Comment. Of course only THEN (cue Psycho music!) do you notice the typo you’re positive wasn’t there before. Arrrrgh!

But what to do? Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: WordPress plugin

Did you know?

An off-blog reader’s comment made me think I perhaps needed to tell you about my neat social bookmarking plugin:

Share This by Alex King. Share This is a very popular Wordpress plugin that lets you share any post/page with others by posting to social bookmarking sites.

You can also email posts or pages to friends, or in fact to anyone with whom you’d like to share them.

Share This was one of the plugins I installed in February, as a tidier approach to social bookmarking, which means that though I still have them, I deactivated my string of pretty social bookmarks and replaced it with just the one.

Until you click on the Share This icon, however, you may be unaware that all those social bookmarking icons are neatly tucked away underneath it until you want to use them.

Screen Captures

Here’s the Share This icon:

And here’s how it looks when you click the Share This icon. Clicking on E-mail will allow you to send the post/page you are on.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, Share This, Wordpress, plugin

Imagine how it must feel to be sacked for blogging. Not because you mentioned the company in which you worked, either. Just because the company feels they own your thoughts and activities outside work… because they think that the company “can be identified” through your blogging.

I remember, as I’m sure everyone does, when Petite anglaise was sacked for having a blog and blogging, back in July last year.

She wrote about it on her blog of course, and although I didn’t follow it avidly, I did keep my ears open for the result. And here it is. I’m surprised that it didn’t make the front page of mainstream newspapers, but let’s not dwell on that right now. It was mentioned in the The Times, India Knight’s column, which was good, because she’s pretty widely read. And congratulatory comments on petite anglaise’s blog are well in the 200’s and climbing.

Every blogger should be cheering about this (and if you’d like to do so on your blog, feel free to link to this article).

Congratulations are in order, so hearty congratulations to her. Shame on the employer who sacked her in the first place.

Blogging is here to stay and while I would still say bloggers should use judgment on what they blog about (like if you’ve a beef about work, try and deal with it within work before blogging to the world about it,) employers should really wake up to the fact that their employees have blogs and find ways of living with it. Bloggers aren’t going away. Bloggers meanwhile, get a disclaimer!! It may not keep the world at bay, but it does indicate your intentions right up front.

Meanwhile, Bravo Petite Anglaise!! Hats off to you for hanging in there.

Here is the text from India Knight’s column, in case readers don’t want to read the first half of the article about Martin Sorrell.

“Meanwhile, in Paris, an English girl sacked for bringing her employers into disrepute by writing an anonymous (very good) blog called petite anglaise was awarded £30,000 for wrongful dismissal last week. A tribunal decided that Catherine Sanderson, 34, had been dismissed “without real and serious causes”.

Her former employer Dixon Wilson, the British accountancy firm, had justified her dismissal by claiming that although the blog never mentioned Sanderson’s place of work, it featured photographs of her and therefore associated her with the firm. Its lawyer also claimed that she had wasted time by blogging from work, that an entry about meeting a lover implied she might have bunked off work, and that she had endangered the company’s reputation by writing about her professional life.”

“I find the idea that a company should believe it owns every aspect of your life and thoughts peculiar, to put it mildly, and it is good news that this test case turned out the way it did. “I won,” Sanderson blogged last week. “A year’s salary, plus costs. I will only get this compensation if my ex-employer does not lodge an appeal . . . but right now, the principle is enough for me. Round one to petite anglaise!”

Couldn’t agree more. Let’s hope they won’t add to their silliness by appealing and in future let sleeping blogs lie.

Technorati Tags: sacked for blogging, Blogging, Petite Anglaise

I enjoyed everyone’s responses so much that I thought they were worth a post in themselves. So, I’ve done a summary, if you like, of what we feel are the top components of a good blog.

To see who said what and why…well read the article’s comments! In the meantime here’s what a great blog has:

1. Quality content – interesting, well organised, well written, well presented
2. Clear, intuitive navigation – don’t make me think!
3. Good spelling, grammar, and sentence syntax – the odd typo is o.k…
4. Proper formatting (paragraphs, effective use of white space, scaled photos etc.)
5. Imagination, creativity and talent and talent
6. A Contact Me link or form – Do not pass Go without it!
7. Regularly updated posts
8. Usability
9. Easy access to past articles (archives, related posts, site-map…)
10. Lets the personality of the blogger shine through
11. A consistent and true “voice” – show your passion and feeling!
12. Overall blog presentation – make visitors want to stay
13. Good use of linking services, e.g Techorati
14. Clean and fast loading pages
15. Few or no ads. Discretely placed ads that don’t obscure the content

Great stuff folks!

Technorati Tags: blog, content, linking services, Techorati

We all have blogs we like and read regularly and so what makes a good blog is entirely personal to each one of us. Here are a few things that matter to me in terms of what I feel makes a good blog:

• Quality content

This has to be the top for me. “Quality content” may be an overused term when it comes to content, but to me it’s content that’s shows that thought has gone into producing it and it’s well written. I’m not so much talking grammatical accuracy – although for me that is also important to me from both a reading and writing perspective. Though I know some things still slip by me in my posts, (and I hate it when they do) I am pretty anal about my own presentation. I like to read blogs that the writers enjoy writing – when they do, it really comes across. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one where I really hope you’ll share how you get ideas…. Joy already mentioned StumbleUpon.

Ideas. Without them, there’s no blog, no visitors and most certainly no comments!

The fact is, I’m not entirely sure how I get ideas, because I get them in very different ways and inspiration can come from almost anywhere – and at any time. Sometimes an idea just pops into my head – usually when I am thinking about or doing something completely unrelated to blogging, or for that matter, writing. Usually when I have no writing tools to hand either. Because I can be quite forgetful absent-minded I’ve had to learn to grab potential ideas and write them down along with a few thoughts of my own at the time they appear – whenever I can. I may not use them in the end, but at least that way I have the option to use them or not.

Several ideas come from my experiences and I’ll expand them, from stuff I know and am interested in, (my Childfree articles are one example). Or I’ll be reading or listening to something and I’ll think - “That would be interesting to blog about…must find out more.” Read the rest of this entry »

So which blogging tools do I use?

Simply…

My Moleskine – In my opinion the most wonderful offline tool there is. I have several and I always have one with me. I use it to jot down my ideas as soon as I get them… particularly when I’m travelling. I may be in the middle of writing a business case or brief at work and suddenly get a whisper of an idea. I immediately jot it down in my Moleskine. I find if I don’t do that the idea can be gone in a flash, and I’d never remember it. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Moleskine

This is very simple. My biggest blogging challenge is time. Finding time to blog.

O.K. What’s my next biggest? Time.

That may sound a little strange seeing that I post fairly frequently. However, blogging when you have a full time job is far from easy. Particularly when you’re an early starter, like I am.

I’m usually at work by 7.30 am and generally leave around 5pm. Yes, it’s a long day, and I’m busy from the time I get in to the time I leave. Complaints about my job – none.

I don’t blog at work and don’t read blogs at work, Read the rest of this entry »