September 12, 2003

Last Day of Seybold SF

Christian Crumlish

Well, I realize that my tutorial from 1 PM to 4:30 PM today may be only for the diehards to stay at conferences through the final afternoon of the final day and risk their weekends to squeeze out some extra drops o' learning. I'm hoping to put on a good show. I realized from Bill Humphries example that I can plug my Mac into the ethernet cable on the dias and then use my Airport card to turn my laptop into a software base station, broadcasting a wireless network signal into the room for my students. I think I'll bring my Thinkpad and maybe set it up as a little kiosk so that if people didn't bring a laptop or don't have a wifi card they can take turns posting to the Still Blogging dummy weblog with blogger.

It looks like Scot Hacker may be attending my class as a ringer and for moral support. That should be cool. If the Internet access is flaky, then we're in for 3.5 hours of me yakking. Fun for me (if not my throat), maybe less fun for the tired Friday afternoon conference attendee.

I'm going to ask the class to briefly introduce themselves and discuss why they came and what they're hoping to learn today, and then fine-tune my li'l syllabus to meet the needs of the class. Here's a partial list of the topics I'm prepared to discuss:

  • Weblog acronyms and jargon
  • Getting beyond the hype
  • Do weblogs matter?
  • What makes a blog a blog?
  • Anatomy of a weblog
  • Anatomy of a weblog entry
  • Permalinks (and not-so-permalinks)
  • Multiauthor blogs
  • Authentic voice
  • Why blog?
  • Professional blogging
  • What blogs are not
  • When not to blog
  • Choosing and setting up a blog tool
  • Design templates
  • Starting a blog
  • Naming your blog
  • Push-button publishing
  • Posting with a bookmarklet
  • Posting from an application
  • Posting from an aggregator
  • Designing a weblog
  • Templates are mostly HTML
  • Integrating a blog into an existing site
  • When to go public
  • Promoting your blog
  • Maximizing the impact of your weblog
  • Respect your readers
  • Encourage feedback
  • Knowledge capture and retrieval
  • Making a blog searchable
  • Stockpiling links
  • The Power of syndication
  • Syndication decisions
  • RSS resources
  • Tracking your own link cosmos
  • Creating a multiauthor blog
  • Blogs within blogs (sideblogs)
  • Category tricks
  • Mastering your domain
  • Further weblog reading

That's just the map. I'm ready to go off-road at any point if that's what the class wants.

Posted by xian at September 12, 2003 9:45 AM
Comments

Great list, xian. But wouldn't it be even better if everyone brought their PC, and you stepped them through setting up their blog right in the class, so that there'd be a whole room of new bloggers at the end of the day?

Posted by: Dave Pollard at September 12, 2003 9:29 PM

Yes, please, I would like to see where the chapter breaks go. It may be true what you have been told about the success of a book on weblogging. That doesn't seem to stop people from writing them and publishers publishing them, cf. http://www.rebeccablood.net/handbook/index.html

Posted by: Jonathan Smith at September 22, 2003 5:53 AM
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