Whenever I get through a week or so without posting, as for example I have done this week past – other than for a couple of my del.icio.us links – I think of the standard advice for bloggers, to have a number of blog posts in reserve.
Right.
Next time.
But that didn’t help me to get moving and post something today.
What did help was to notice a post by Irish blogger and social media wiz Damien Mulley on the made-to-order-for-me-today topic, Words don’t come easy – What to blog about?
The post has several good, practical suggestions, including what not to blog about:
At MulleyWorld we’ll make sure that all your needs are catered for. Our well-trained staff. Blah de blah. No brochure crap please. No advertorials about how you guys rock. Stop. Remember it’s a conversation and it is meant to engage with people.
Well said.
Riff on your comments
One of the more positive suggestions which appealed especially to me was to use the comments you post on others’ blogs to generate a post of your own, by expanding on your own comment. A kind of a riff on a riff.
I reflected that often, even though I may have let couple of days or more go by without a blog post – as in this week past – I have found time to share some of my thoughts with others via a comment or comments on others’ blogs.
What a good idea, then, to take the basic idea of your comment and extend it into a longer piece in the form of a blog post.
So, for example, I had commented on Damien’s post, suggesting that another way to generate a blog post was to exercise some reciprocity: in other words, notice when another blogger links to you and repay the favor by incorporating in a post of your own a link to their blog. As I’m doing now in a stream of actions that started when I noticed the other day that Damien had linked to a post on one of my blogs.
And while this post is not precisely about the reciprocity idea in my comment on Damien’s post, the process of thinking about, composing and posting the comment got my brain going in more of a blogging vein than had been the case half an hour or so earlier. I was able, in other words, to take something I had written and use it to beat the day’s instance of blogger’s block.
Implicit also in what I’ve written here is another suggestion for generating ideas for blog posts: Go Fishing – in your Google Reader, or FeedDemon or whatever feed reader you use. That’s what I do often, to get ideas for blog posts, and did today.
Which is how I came to notice Damien’s post.
Blogging as conversation. To and fro.
Disqus is for Conversing not for Throwing
Do you have a challenge keeping up with all social media tools? I certainly do. And maybe I need help.
Clearly I’m somewhat in overload, going by an experience this morning of trying to subscribe to one and finding I was already subscribed. In fact, when I got them to send me my password and then logged in, I found I had set up my profile there, with a photo and the usual “about me” stuff.
I also realised I didn’t have much more than a slight clue about what the service does or why I joined – other than the usual combination of fascination with bright, shiny things and a fear of missing out on the cool new app.
There was also the challenge of not knowing how to pronounce the name of the application, Disqus.
But no, it’s supposed to be pronounced like that thing that mature, consenting adults do, i.e. “discuss”.
So what does it do? What purpose does it serve?
Here is what the About page says:
So far, so good. But what does that really mean? What was I supposed to do with this tool and what benefits would it deliver?
I knew, mainly from what I’d read on Twitter, that several people I respect spoke positively about Disqus, so rather than spending time hunting around for a guide, I would work through what was on the site. Experiential learning. Or reckless experimenting, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, as a next step I went back and checked the website and found that I could apparently do two things:
I chose to add my website first, clicked on the install on the website link, provided the site URL (http://www.deswalsh.com), site name (Des Walsh dot Com)and a unique identifier (deswalsh) to form the Disqus URL deswalsh.disqus.com for my own home page on the Disqus site.
The next screen gave me a set of platform options: WordPress, MovableType, Typepad, Blogger and “generic”.
I had read positive things about the WordPress plugin, so clicked there and went through the usual processes of uploading, installing and configuring the plugin. There are a number of options, under the several headings/tabs of Moderate, Settings, Tools and Permissions. I’ve been through to do some basic configuration, including setting moderation permissions as on for all comments.
I’m wondering whether the moderation permission options are adequate for me, or retrogressive for this blog. The situation till now has been that once people have had a comment approved, subsequent comments from those people are not moderated automatically. But that option does not seem to be available with Disqus. As the screenshot below shows, the permission options are:
I’m not sure how Disqus could fix this, but I believe it would be in their interest to do so: I quite like the idea that people who have had a comment approved should be trusted to leave non-spammy, non-inappropriate comments in future, without their having to be moderated each time.
There is also a widget to highlight commenters: I’ve installed that. And a Seesmic configuration, which means that people can leave Seesmic-enabled video comments. Maybe even Loic would care to leave a video comment! That would be nice.
Back for a moment to that personal page on the Disqus site. I find it somewhat disconcerting that on that page now are displayed, in excerpt fashion, a bunch of posts from this blog from April this year then going back. Nothing more recent. Also the leading post is from what was meant to be a private page. Mysterious. Maybe there is a refresh coming up which will bring the data up to more recent postings.
I regard this installation as an experiment and my priority is for user convenience over other issues such as possible increased traffic. So I welcome feedback, positive or negative.
Update: I’ve de-activated Disqus, for the time being at least – see my comment below of August 28, 2008