Tag: Blogging

SMUG Speed Solution (I Think)

In an earlier post I lamented some issues we had been having with the SMUG service, in that pages were taking inordinately long to load: sometimes as long as 45 seconds, and occasionally even having some “timeouts.” Not the kind of timeouts modern parents give their children in lieu of spankings, but the kind that made me want to spank my hosting service provider.

Bill Ferris (@billfer) offered some good pointers in response, and suggested that I call my hosting provider to see if we could clarify the problem. But then, having applied some of his tips (and deactivating a couple of plug-ins), the response times seemed to get somewhat better.

So, like the typical male who cancels the doctor appointment when he starts feeling a little better, or who just learns to live with a little nagging health concern instead of getting to the root of the problem, I let the situation continue.

Yesterday, though, I had the blog equivalent of an out-of-hospital-cardiac arrest. When I tried to visit SMUG I got an “unable to create database connection error” message, and got a similar message when I tried to access my WordPress dashboard. The WordPress error message suggested I might want to contact my hosting service.

So I called GoDaddy, and as often happens the problem went away while I was on hold. But the friendly customer service guy checked into it further with those on the technical side, and apparently there had been some problems with the server on which SMUG is hosted, and they were in the process of solving them.

When I Tweeted about the issue, @paulacassin said:

@LeeAase YES! It’s not blindingly fast, but 3-4secs. Much better than before. 🙂 Looks like they tweaked something the right way

…and Monty Flinsch (@mflinsch) echoed the assessment.

So it appears we may have solved the problem. To confirm it, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment indicating the approximate page load time you’re experiencing, and what kind of Internet service you have (i.e. T1, cable, dial-up, etc.)

I hope it’s not blindingly fast, because I would hate to be responsible for vision loss, but it would be nice if it could be just a little blurry, like Michael Johnson in the 200 meters.

SMUGgle Testimonials

It’s immensely satisfying for me when SMUGgles take the plunge and start a blog or a podcast, or launch a Facebook page for their organizations. Makes it all worthwhile.

And when they decide to say nice things about SMUG in one of their first posts, it’s even better!

In My Social Media Communications Compendium, which she started on Saturday, Nancy Pricer says she’s “feeling SMUG,” and here’s an excerpt.

For years I have been an active participant in several listservs relating to my job. Last fall an e-mail sent out by Roger Johnson of Newswise mentioned Lee Aase, the manager for Syndications and Social Media at Mayo Clinic.

In the e-mail, he promoted a place for PR folks to learn the social media landscape. Lee had created his own university, Social Media University, Global (SMUG), and named himself the chancellor. Students are called SMUGgles.

For months I had been trying to get a handle of the social media landscape, but was overwhelmed by various outlets, technologies, my full time job (and commute), two teenagers (they are really very good though), a loving husband, housework–you get the idea. I could not seem to take a chunk of time all at once and break the learning down piece by piece.

When I went to the SMUG Web site, I was impressed with the organization. Lee breaks it down in to categories like, Blogging 101, Blogging 102, Twitter 101, etc.

It was just what I needed to get going.

I’m  not exactly fishing for compliments, but I certainly appreciate them. If you, like Nancy, would like to help spread the word about SMUG, you could:

  1. Write a blog post about your experience (and maybe even start a blog so you have a place to do it!)
  2. Pass along some of your favorite courses to your friends using the ShareThis button at the bottom of each post. You may, for instance, decide to send the SMUG Super Bowl ad to your friends or Tweet about it.
  3. Write a recommendation on LinkedIn.
  4. Tell your SMUG story in the comments on this post.

OK, so maybe I am fishing for compliments.

But I’ll at least rationalize it somewhat by pointing out that Nancy is happily blogging today and has established a Facebook fan page for the university where she works (a real-life one, not a virtual university like SMUG) because Roger Johnson took the time to recommend SMUG to those on his email listserv.

If you know people who might appreciate the opportunity to systematically learn about social media tools like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, podcasting, YouTube and whatever comes next, I hope you’ll do like Roger (and now Nancy) and turn them on to SMUG.

SMUG Super Bowl Ad and Social Media ROI

Here’s the Super Bowl Ad you didn’t see on NBC:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_WIBoEf730]

Among the reasons for this omission:

  • The ad 34 seconds long, instead of the customary 30;
  • I was about $2.6 million short of the cash required to pay for the airtime; and
  • I created it during the Super Bowl today.

One of the ironies of social media is that everyone asks about the ROI, or return on investment. It’s an understandable question, but one of the points I make in presentations is that as I (investment) approaches zero, ROI approaches infinity, because it is calculated as follows:

ROI = benefits/costs

My cost of producing this stellar Super Bowl ad wasn’t exactly zero, but it was zero out-of-pocket. I already had invested $150 in the Flip video camera used to record it, and the production took a bit of my time and attention as I enjoyed the game .

I expect the benefits to be non-monetary as well, measured mainly in the satisfaction of getting more people involved in exploring social media. I hope you will use the ShareThis tool below to pass this post (with its embedded ad) along to your friends and co-workers who might benefit from becoming a SMUGgle, and invite them to enroll. I think it captures the essence of SMUG in a brief video snippet (but how did I manage to leave Blogging out?!)

Then we’ll see what happens to the SMUG enrollment, currently at 261 members of our Facebook group.

Updated: I originally had embedded the ad in the Facebook player, but I’m wondering whether that might be responsible for a SMUG slowdown, so I took that version down, at least for now. But you can see the higher-resolution Facebook version in the SMUG Facebook group.

Updated 2/3/09: Here’s the same video in a Blip.TV player. Another post coming on the topic of video players soon:

Blogging 123: Customizing Your WordPress Profile

When you create your username in WordPress or WordPress.com, it has to be all lowercase letters (or numbers) with no spaces. That doesn’t look very professional when you username is associated with a post or a comment on your blog or someone else’s. 

Fortunately, you can customize how you want your name to appear on WordPress (or WordPress.com) blogs, and the screencast below shows you how. It also shows you the process for uploading a photo (or Gravatar) to also be connected to your WordPress comments (or posts, if your WordPress theme includes Gravatars on posts.)

There are several other customization options to which I briefly allude in this screencast, but the two I’ve listed are the most important, in my opinion.

Update: You can view the screencast in the SMUG group in Facebook.

Blogging 122: Special Characters in WordPress Easy as π

When I did the post about the µAudio Player plug-in for WordPress, it reminded me of a WordPress feature that SMUGgles might find helpful.

You don’t need to use this very often, but then again that’s why they’re called “special” characters. But occasionally you might need to insert one of them, like 

  • ©
  • ®
  • ™
  • or even ∞

You access the special characters by clicking the Omega (Ω) symbol in the Visual editor when you’re writing a post. Like this:

Continue reading “Blogging 122: Special Characters in WordPress Easy as π”