I’ve gained a lot of experience running and working with bulletin boards in my day, although most of my experience has been based on numerous mistakes. In 2004 and 2005, I established a number of communities, but most of them wound up being unsuccessful for a number of reasons, and that’s pretty much how I learned NOT to run a community.

Well, a few weeks ago, Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com fame, as well as a number of other communities and websites), released a brand new book called Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. Patrick was on phpBB Weekly #050 back in February, and in addition to talking about phpBBHacks.com on that episode, he gave us an early preview of his book. Since then, he sent copies to both myself and David Lewis for us to read and review. (Plus, we’ll be giving away an autographed copy on phpBB Weekly #061 on May 10th!) I recently finished the book, and am quite excited to have the opportunity to review it.
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Tags: administrators, book, communities, forums, guide, guidelines, management, Managing Online Forums, marketing, Patrick O'Keefe, phpBB, review, staff, tips

Junior year is the year of the standardized test. It’s the year of PSAT, ACT, SAT, AP, and many other jumbled non-acronymic letters that float around there, and I’ve had (and still have yet) to go through every single one of them. I took the PSAT last October, the SAT on March 1st, and the ACT today. I have SAT Subject Tests coming on May 3rd and another SAT run-through this fall. I took one AP test last year and have two more coming up in May, as well as one more during senior year.

However, there’s definitely one thing about all this that I’ve learned that I would have flat out refused to accept this time a year ago. Doing well on one of these tests doesn’t just depend on you knowing the academics, it requires you to learn how to take the test. Doesn’t that kind of sound like those video games where the only way to win is to buy the book that tells you how to win? Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
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Tags: ACT, Advanced Placement, AP US History, article, colleges, Kaplan, preparation, PSAT, SAT, standardized, testing, The Princeton Review, thoughts, tips

The following article was written by blogging about blogging extraordinaire, Lorelle VanFossen. She has one of the oldest personal blogs in existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, which began in 1994. She is also the author of the awesome book “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. She and I talked quite a bit about personal blogging back in September on PreviewCast #044, and so I asked her to contribute some more thoughts on the importance of personal blogging. Enjoy! –Douglas

The Art of Personal Blogging

When I started my first website - an online journal back then - it was a combination of technical articles and stories about our life as we prepared to quit our jobs and take off six months to a year to travel full-time around North American. Fourteen years later, and still living on the road, such a site is called a blog - a personal blog.

A personal blog is the story of your journey. No matter where it takes you.

There are a lot of names and purposes a personal blog can have. It can be about your day-to-day life, a sort of online diary. It can be a place where you can rant and rage without censors. It can be a place to tell your stories. It can be an online classroom where you share your knowledge and expertise.

Which makes it hard to define a personal blog as it can be anything and everything.

However, there is an art to personal blogging that makes it work for you and be the success that you want it to be. It begins by defining what personal success is for you and your personal blog.
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Tags: Blogging, content, goals, guest blog, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, personal blogging, style, tips

Macworld has put together a very interesting video of ten Leopard tips that you may not have known about, special for Thanksgiving, and indeed, most of these tips are ones that I didn’t know about before and look really useful. I’m particularly excited about the keyboard shortcuts tip, which addresses one of my qualms from my Safari review.

Anyway, if you want to learn some new power tips for Leopard, I highly recommend checking out the video.

UPDATE: Fixed link to video. Had a copy and paste error.

Tags: Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, Thanksgiving, tips, Video

You know that WordPress is really getting popular when government uses it. Indeed, the elections office for my own San Mateo County recently (as in a few months ago) launched a blog right on WordPress.com, called Inside Elections: The Blog Behind the San Mateo County Vote, which offers a number of insights behind everything that happens behind the scenes before voting day (which was today, by the way; the polls just closed a few minutes ago). Want to get inside tips on how those new eSlate voting machines work? Want to learn how all those sample ballots and voter by mail ballots are processed? Did you know that if you’re voting by mail, you can track & confirm the receipt and processing of your ballot, or that in San Mateo County, you could have voted on Saturdays October 27 and November 3 as well as today?

Bravo to our County Elections Office for adopting blogging, which can help us, as citizens, understand the process better. It’s one of those things that makes me more proud to be from San Mateo. Now I’m off to start tracking the election results…

Tags: ballots, Blogging, elections, eSlate, Mail, San Mateo County, tips, voting, WordPress

WordPress superstar Lorelle VanFossen is spending the months of August and September featuring guest bloggers on her blog to celebrate the 2 year anniversary of her blog and of WordPress.com. (By the way, you might see me do an entry on there later on this month…) Today’s guest-blogged article is a very interesting article by Edrei Zahari all about personal blogging, including how personal blogging has been under-appreciated, along with tips for what really makes a personal blog one that readers would be interested in. He really emphasizes how it’s a blog about yourself and your personal life, but it’s written with an audience in mind–not so that you cater your posts to what the audience wants, but that you write in a style that the audience can relate to. This article really strikes a chord with many of the philosophies that I’ve had behind the production of this blog, and it’s really good to see my ideas written down in this article. I highly recommend that you go check it out.

Tags: article, Blogging, Connections, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, tips, WordPress