Starting a new website/blog
Categories
If there's one thing that I've been really crappy at over the years it is documentation - but it's definitely something that I'm getting better at! It's when I go back through all of the 1300 or so posts that I've written over these last few years that I realize what an unstructured gaggle of information I've created. Contrast the tangled web of data that I've created with other more valuable online resources such as Wikipedia and you soon get a good feel for the potential that lies behind information that is properly maintained and structured. The cool thing about Wiki's is their organic nature and how they tend to grow outwards. This gives you the ability to link articles in a manner which allows a reader to pivot around on a piece of information.
In addition to my growing admiration of wiki's I've also been giving a lot of thought to what I can do to improve the value of what I post online. This thinking has been greatly aided by the timely reading of the following two articles:
Scott Hanselman's 23 way's to keep your blog from sucking
The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs
All of this thinking has made me realize that I need a website which:
- Has articles that are maintained to always reflect my current views on topics of interest
- Is a better representation of my "brand" in the online community
- Has a nice usable theme
- Becomes the source of truth for all areas in which I have knowledge
- Serves as the basis for creating knowledge from scattered data - kind of like a knowledge factory
So I've decided that I'm going to start a new blog and start adding articles to it on a regular basis about a more narrow range of topics and with all of the rants removed (that's what this blog is for 
). I initially thought that I might start up a Subtext blog and host it on my server but then decided not to head down that path so that I'm forced to only focus on the content management and not on the technology.
Last night I started playing around with a few of the major online blogging providers to see how they work and to get a feel for them. Here's some screen shots of what I tried out - you can actually click through to see them for yourself if you like:
Squarespace
WordPress
Blogger
Squarespace is the blog provider that Grant uses and so far it's the one that I like best. I've set it up in such a way that my name is more prominent and it will use keywords, tags, and themes that better represent the types of topics that I'll be writing about. Hopefully over time this will pay dividends in the way of better Google page rankings.
I'm going to leave all of those blogs up and running, but if you are interested in my thoughts about Knowledge Worker topics then please subscribe to my Squarespace blog.
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Own blogging engine ;)
posted by
MR
on
6/4/2009 12:25:15 PM
:
Hey,
we are launching a new online auction project and we wanted to set up a blog as well, and finally decided to have our own blog engine, please check it out and say what you think:
http://blog.kiwisbid.co.nzIt was easier to implement the visual design than to a standard blogger/wordpress engine. But we might consider moving to WordPress as it's easier for SEO.