Web Publishing for Artists, Writers, Business

Are you a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker? Do you need to be the master of your business destiny and make full use of all those internet tools you have heard will give you a presence online, an extra edge and ensure that you can be found by those who now micromanage using their iphones, ipads and computers.

If you need to launch yourself online this is the course for you. We will work together to determine which tools are going to benefit you and your business. We will use the easily managed WordPress, blogging technology to establish an interactive web site that connects you to Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Pinterest or whatever other programs meet your specific needs.

Your six week journey, using your own computer, connected to our WiFi will take you on an adventure using WordPress. WordPress is an Open Source software system used by millions of people around the world to create beautiful websites and blogs. Originally WordPress was blogging software but since its creation a lot has changed. Today it is used by almost everyone looking to build a website, and has no real limit as to what can be done with a bit of learning. It is completely customisable by the use of themes and plugins; which can be easily downloaded from the WordPress site or from hundreds of other places around the web.

By the end of the course you will have:

• been guided, step by step, to set up a blog that is easy to administer and individualistically customize.
• made use of post and pages
• learned how to use widgets
• developed link-building Strategies
• discovered that you can have multiple users posting on your site
• come to understand safe cyber practices
• developed content writing skills
• learned how to create a digital portfolio
• discovered diverse, imaginative web applications to meet individual needs
• understood how to monetize your blog and promote your business
• learned about building niche communities and online groups
• helped to grow a Continuing Ed WordPress Community
• know more about Social Media Optimization
• And much more…

Aside from coming away with a greater understanding of the potentiality of web applications you will have skills that could be applied, working as, amongst other things, a publicist, freelance blog writer, a digital skills trainer, writing tech news for a company or as a web designer

This course suits a diverse range of individuals. Aside from butchers, bakers and candlestick makers this course will suit a range of visual artists seeking to establish an online gallery presence. It will also be ideal for hobbyists and those wanted to reach out and connect and  build niche communities.

Article: Potentiate Using Blogging
Blog Weaver As Mage

Digital Footprints

One morning long before
Grown ups had raised a blind
I crept down to the shore
To see what I could find

The tide must never sleep
Because, during the dark
It rises up to sweep
The beach of every mark

There before me lay
Shells in an endless line
And all along the bay
No footprints showed but mine

Sometimes they vanished when
I walked into the sea,
And then appeared again,
Most mysteriously,

As if I were the first to land
On an undiscovered shore,
Which my footprints on the sand
Captured without a war.
by Geoffrey Dutton

Leaving Digital Footprints and Having Digital Tatoos

The world has changed radically since this poem was written. As Jaun Enriquez points out in this video we need to be careful how we walk and stop to consider how we are identifying ourselves and leaving permanent traces behind.

Stop to contemplate your current footprints in cyber space. To really demonstrate the weight of your print try the following exercise.

Make a footprint take off your shoes and socks and put your foot on your journal page. Trace your foot and then carefully draw in the toenails. OR Use the template provided!

Meditate upon your footprint and consider some of the digital footprints that you have left behind, the things that people will find out about you if they ‘Google’ your name. Take a moment and Google yourself!

On each toe, write an impression that you have made, a footprint that you have left behind.

Choose one toe and circle it. On the sole of your foot write more information about this particular event and why it stands out.

Now consider the footprints you are knowingly prepared to leave behind.

Sherry Turtle Connected but not Alone

Sherry Turkle challenges us to keep things in perspective and make sure that technology is not changing our lives in ways which we will come to regret.

Have a conversation about where our infatuation with technology is taking us and, after having that conversation with another participant, collectively add a comment in the comment section.

And while you are at it! Following on from last week! Consider just what information our iphones are freely providing.

Content and Connectivity

Creative Use of Pinterest

It has always been the potential of web software that I have found most exciting. This page highlights a creative application of Pinterest.

Despite having been written in 2007 the Wild Garden Advent Calendar still provides lots of ideas about how to use freeware imaginatively.

Creative Goldfields Blogging

Heather Blakey is currently in the process of creating a hub to preserve and showcase the work of Continuing Education, Castlemaine, and in particular the Art Pathways Course.

Creative Goldfields Blogging is a platform for showcasing the diverse work that can be done using blogging technology.

Heather has been working with blogging technology since 1999. To discuss unique, highly individual ways of applying blogging technology and social media applications you can contact Heather via heatherblakey at fastmail dot net.

Beware Googling Health Issues

I Googled the dangers of using Google to learn about health issues and sure enough, up popped a whole lot of warnings about how it might be hazardous to health.

One witty article cuts to the chase with the opening  “Since I’m a hypochondriac, every minor pain I suffer is invariably life threatening.  Every headache is a brain tumor. Every bout of indigestion is either stomach cancer or angina.  Every sore throat means I’ll need to have my larynx removed and wear one of those gizmos that’ll make me sound like Stephen Hawking, only it won’t make me any smarter.”

Then I found an article about the perils of googling when you are pregnant

“Pregnant? Did you know that loud concerts could damage your baby’s hearing? That some eye-drops could lead to birth defects? Or that long periods spent at high altitude could reduce your baby’s birth weight?

And don’t stress, as even mild levels of stress can affect foetal brain development.

How do I know all this? Because ever since the appearance of the blue line on the home pregnancy test, I have suffered from a common but poorly understood prenatal condition: Gestational Googlemania. It is a debilitating illness, characterised by the compulsive need to ask the internet about every conceivable pregnancy danger.”

rest of article

Sometimes a quick look at Google can save you from bundling the kids into the mini van for a trip to the Emergency Centre but generally it is wise to be cautious and protect your health by not looking up too much.

The Benefit of Boredom

For all the wonderful ways that smartphones make life easier and information more accessible, they’re also adding a whole lot of unnecessary distraction to our lives. After all, why walk, sit or simply wait when you could be tweeting or surfing Pinterest at the same time? But the truth is, we’re not programmed to be constantly in “go” mode, and this overstimulation can have some seriously negative health impacts, including higher stress levels, lack of focus and creativity, and technology addiction. Our solution? Good old-fashioned boredom.

Continue reading this article

“Who would have thought being bored can be so productive? Slowing down and turning off all of the technology in our lives can be a great thing! Sometimes when we turn off our phones, computers and tv’s, we can actually feel ourselves turn off or wind down.”

Do you ever give yourself time to be bored? Do you find that slowing down helps you feel less stressed? What do you think are the benefits of putting down the iphone for more than a few hours a day?

Wise to Remember

Lori Gloyd Shares the Love

With great enthusiasm I respond to today’s prompt from the Daily Post: “Tell us about another blogger who has influenced your own online journey.“

Without reservation I say that Heather Blakey through her work at the Soul Food Cafe launched me on the road to daily writing and navigating the realm of the blogosphere.

Prior to 2006 I was plugging away at writing on my own static website. No one in my world knew diddly-squat about these things called “blogs” and certainly no one was reading my website. Then one day I fell into Heather’s magic Chocolate Box and started writing. One turn in her labyrinth led to another and then another and I ended up blogging on a regular basis with a delightful group of women (and a few men).

I have moved on to my own work here at the Perch, but I still keep in contact with many of my SFC buddies. Many of them are actively engaged in their own writing projects. I urge you to take a click on the links in my Blogroll on the left and see the handiwork of these wildly creative individuals.

According to the SFC website, the group is now closed, but Heather is currently working at Just Nous and Creative Foraging. Go there. Take a look around. Be inspired by Heather.

I was, and still am.

Lori Gloyd

A Pilgrimage Affirmed

It has been some time since I have worked collaborative blogs at the Soul Food Cafe but the material is all still there, documenting a rich, creative period applying blogging technology to build a community well before social networking had become so popular. Tania Pryputniewicz found some of the work and has written about it. It feels like she is describing another life that I have lived in another time, another space.

“You’ll remember that Chaucer’s group of traveling pilgrims–including among others the Knight, the Miller, the Cook, the Wife of Bath and the Parson–compete to recount the best tale in hopes of winning a free meal at the journey’s end. Chaucer’s question to us: Who tells the best tale? The pilgrimage becomes incidental; in fact, the tale in some ways becomes secondary to what the tale reveals about each storyteller.

For our purposes here, notice Chaucer uses pilgrimage as a frame as a way to feed us tales from the point of view of multiple pilgrims traveling the same road. Someone who has taken this concept into blog-land with far-reaching and beautiful scope is Heather Blakey, through her project at Soul Food Café , where in part, anonymity of participants fosters sanctuary over competition and allows for blossoming across forms (blogging, artwork, collage, etc., all while playing with available technologies that interface with the internet).

Through the sublime timing and hopscotch of connection the blogosphere invites, I just now stumbled upon Heather Blakey through Edith O. Naullain, a writer who blogs at In A Room of My Own. I am in awe of Blakey’s project and skill as moderator–she has been working with bloggers for years—if nothing else, read Zen and the Art of Team Blogging for direct testimonials of Blakey’s online node like this one: “She gives me a place to open up along side others who may journey for different reasons. We journey together in a virtual world that allows us freedom to dream.” (Luna Eternally).

One page that exemplifies what I mean here by creative frame and delivery or reinterpretation of pilgrimage is a page called “the Rookery.” You, in your role as visitor, are greeted by an image of a tree, branches weighted by the bodies of rooks, trunk base circled by a few standing rooks on the ground and a few wheeling midflight. Not a single word appears other than the title, the Rookery, each letter etched white across a blue sky.To enter the space, you must select a bird, and thus are transported/winged to another page. Each bird represents a view, a voice.”

by Tania Pryputniewicz

Social Networking Mentor

Heather Blakey has had over fifteen years experience building online communities using web based technologies. She first began to blog in 1999 when she was a columnist for Cathy Atherton’s Prairie Den and went on to demonstrate the potential of blogging. She wrote articles such as Zen and the Art of Team Blogging and worked in schools across Victoria, Australia, promoting the use of blogs to engage students and enable them to meet and be heard by people with similar interests. Global 2 is phase two of Global Teacher/Global Student, a pioneering blogging environment built by Heather Blakey, for the Victorian Education Department, in 2006.

The Wild Garden Advent Calendar, created in 2007, explored the use of web based technology and amazingly, much of it is very current. The creative work of women who Heather Blakey has mentored and guided reveals just what can be birthed in this environment.

Perhaps you still don’t know what a blog is. Maybe you don’t know a tweet from a widget or how to link to others. It could be that you simply need the hand of a creative midwife to help you realize your creative potentiality. It so happens that Heather is offering private mentoring for those who want to use blogging for educational, artistic or business purposes. You can work with Heather and become familiar with all those tools people are using. You can learn about

• Basic blog construction using WordPress
• Creating digital portfolios
• Discover diverse, imaginative web applications to meet individual needs
• Monetizing Your Blog and promoting business
• News-gathering and Research Methodology
• Building niche communities and online groups
• Link-building Strategies
• Social Media Optimization
• And much more…
• Contact heatherblakey at fastmail dot fm for more information

Optimise Pinterest

10 Ways to Optimise Pinterest accounts and promote your business.

Send out Professional Messages

Social Maximizer is a site that provides excellent material on maximizing your online presence in a professional way. Many professionals who are sending out messages that do nothing to add to their credibility would do well to use some of these ideas.

Essential to Manage Twitter

Twitter has cemented its influence in business as companies capitalise on feedback and leads from customers, suppliers and prospects among the site’s 140 million active users.

But who do you entrust your company Twitter image to? Both Waller Realty and Warren Hughes, two businesses in Castlemaine, have a manager looking after their Twitter posts. This is just a matter of nous.