Blogging | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Beginning Blog Migration to Self-Hosted WordPress!

As I tweeted just a few minutes ago, my static IP address from GoDaddy became active tonight (a little over 24 hours into the 1-72 hour window I had been promised.) So I think this is the last post I will be writing on WordPress.com before we move to our new servers. Hopefully within 24-48 hours you’ll be seeing a new look for SMUG.

I’ll be tweeting the progress on the @SMUG_U account and also some on @LeeAase. So if you follow those, or set search.twitter.com to follow the #smug or #blogmigration hashtags, you’ll be able to participate vicariously. I expect that I may have questions along the way and will be tweeting them, so if you have tips or answers to offer, I’d appreciate you chiming in.

RAQ – Related Posts

In the comments about my post on Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Peggy Hoffman asks:

Question (and yes great book) can you share with us how-tos on the related post widget you are using here that produces automatically generated material.

It’s really easy. In your WordPress dashboard (and I’m glad I’ve waited until WordPress 2.7 was released before I did my overview of the dashboard for Blogging 111; that’s coming soon), you click on the Appearance link on the left side:

picture-14

And then choose Extras:

picture-15

At which point you will see a set of options like this:

picture-131

All you need to do is make sure the last option, “Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other blogs or get traffic that way” is unchecked.

So, on WordPress.com, having the automatically related links is the default option, I believe. You can decide you don’t want to have it, but as Peggy points out, it can be really helpful to your readers.

They are automatically generated, so they aren’t guaranteed to be related, but on balance I think this is a good option. I’m sure some SMUGgles found their way to our University originally because of a possibly related link on someone else’s WordPress.com blog.

If that’s your story, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please let us know if the automatically related links helped you discover SMUG. That will help our fellow SMUGgles see the value of this feature as well.

While I was doing this post I saw another feature that has no useful point, but I’m turning it on just for effect. Let me know what you think of the falling snow. Only available on WordPress.com, and only until 1/4/09.

Yammer 110: File Sharing with Yammer

In Yammer 104 I wrote about how Yammer can be an all-purpose GTD reference filing system, and not just for individuals but for a company. You can write relatively brief posts about a topic, and can include hyperlinks to external Web sites or to intranet pages.

But what if the information you want to share is in the form of a document, not a Web site URL?

After my return from the Thanksgiving weekend, and as I was posting something to my personal journal in Yammer, I noticed an interesting feature that provides a great answer to this question:

An “Attach File” icon was at the lower left of the text box! So I decided to upload a document to another group I’ve formed, for our Social Media Team. And here’s what that Yammer post looks like:

So my team members can just click the link to the attachment and download the PDF I posted. I don’t need to send the PDF as an email attachment, but my team members know the document is there to be reviewed if they want to download it.

This is a really well-done feature, with an interface that matches the conventions we’ve come to expect for uploading files. And it makes a significant step toward making Yammer the all-purpose knowledge-sharing service for the enterprise.

The updated version of Yammer’s iPhone application supports viewing the attachments that are included in Yammer posts. That’s well integrated, too, although I couldn’t view Word documents as I can within the iPhone Mail application. But for viewing PDFs it was fine.

I uploaded a few different file types as a test: PDF, Word (.doc) and even a couple of mp3 files. The largest file I tried was 18 MB, and it worked flawlessly. Maybe the Yammer team can fill us in on the file types that are supported, and any size limitations.

But meanwhile, if you haven’t yet tried Yammer, I’d encourage you to explore it, and the SMUG Yammer curriculum can be your step-by-step guide. I’m impressed at the way Yammer is continually improving its product and adding important and useful features.

200 SMUGgles Learning Social Media Together

With the exception of composing my annual Thanksgiving letter/post, I was pretty much unplugged from the Web over this long holiday weekend. It was a great time with family and working on some projects, like hanging our outdoor Christmas lights and insulating the North Annex.

But I did check in briefly Saturday morning and saw that our SMUG student union (a.k.a. Facebook group) had 201 members, which meant that we had 200 SMUGgles besides me. And as I check this morning, we’re up to 204, with members from most U.S. states and every continent except Antarctica.

How cool is that?

Actually, that number probably understates the true number of SMUGgles, because we have well over 200 subscribers to our RSS feed and nearly 400 who are following my Tweets. There may be some overlap among the three groups, but we likely have some unique members in each.

Thanks to everyone who has enrolled in Social Media University, Global to learn about social media together. Unlike traditional models of education, in which a low student/teacher ratio is considered beneficial, with SMUG we all gain by having more people participating. I may be the Chancellor, but in reality we’re all SMUGgles (with apologies to J.K. Rowling): ordinary humans who possess no wizard-like powers, but who want to do magical things using social media tools. More about tools in a future post.

If you’ve found our coursework helpful, I hope you’ll take a moment to share SMUG with your friends, co-workers or members of your non-profit volunteer organizations. You will not only help them by introducing social media tools like blogging, podcasting, Facebook and Twitter that they can use (or you can use together with them on joint projects), but you’ll also make SMUG stronger, as we will have more people sharing and contributing, and we can learn from each other.

For instance, Norway’s Jan Husdal, who became our first SMUG associate professor, taught me how to embed the social sharing toolbar on posts in WordPress.com. Our student body name, the SMUGgles, came from Jim Streed of Green Bay, Wisc. And I think we may be welcoming another associate professor soon.

I hope you’ll use the toolbar below to share this post with your Facebook friends, either by posting it to your profile or singling out some particular friends by sending directly to them as a message. Or feel free to use any of the other sharing buttons (or tweet about it on Twitter) to otherwise spread the word.

If you’re not yet a SMUGgle, you can enroll in Social Media University, Global through one of the options on this page.

Blogging 119: Managing Multiple Blog Contributors

For many people, blogging is a solo effort; an exercise in self-expression.

But if you’re considering blogging for a business or organization (like our Mayo Clinic News Blog or Podcast Blog, or a global university like SMUG 😉 ) you probably don’t want to have the entire responsibility resting on one person.

You’ll want to get multiple contributors involved.

One way to significantly increase the number of voices represented in your company blog is to, well…capture their voices. And their pictures. Using a video camera. Like the Flip. That’s going to be covered in Blogging 130: Video Blogging.

WordPress (and its hosted service, wordpress.com) is ideally suited to enable lots of people to contribute text for a blog, while still enabling the blog manager (or the management group), to exercise final control.

It does this through its hierarchy of user levels:

Contributors can write posts, but they don’t have authority to hit the “Publish” button. When they are finished, their posts are in the “Pending Review” status, until a higher-level user reviews and approves for publishing. If you were to use WordPress to publish and online newspaper/newsblog, for instance, and wanted to maintain an editorial process that would have articles go through review by an editor, you could have most of your “reporters” be Contributors, so that it would be impossible for one of their posts to be published without that review. Associate Professors at SMUG are in the Contributor role.
Authors have the authority to publish a post and upload files, and can edit their own posts…but not anyone else’s. They can also save their posts as “Pending Review” but if you want to have that two-step process, you should have most users be Contributors. As an author, someone will inevitably hit “Publish” instead of “Save” and have a post published before it has been reviewed. But if you have a blog in which all of the authors are relatively equal and its just a forum for them to publish their thoughts, Author level access is appropriate.
Editors have access to publish, edit or delete any post, page or comment. They can do almost everything an Administrator can do in terms of the day-to-day blog operation, but they can’t add or remove users, for instance.
Administrators have complete control over the blog, including the ability to delete it. When you start your own wordpress.com blog you become its administrator. But you could add me or any other wordpress.com user as a contributor, author or editor. And if you want to become a SMUG Associate Professor, I can add you.

It’s really easy to add new users in different roles. Just click the Users link on the right side of your blog’s dashboard:

And then, at the bottom, add the email address of someone you want to add as a user:

If that address already belongs to a WordPress.com user, he or she will be added in the role you specify.
If not, you’ll be prompted to send an invitation for that person to create a wordpress.com account.

When you click “Invite your Friend” you have an opportunity to tailor the personal message before clicking “Send Invite”

Be sure to check the “Add user to my blog as a contributor” box, and then when that user joins he or she will be in the Contributor role on your blog. You can always promote to a higher level (Author or Editor) once that’s done

It’s that simple. And on WordPress.com, it’s free. On Typepad, you have to pay at least $149.50 a year for similar functionality.

The WordPress.com FAQ offers some further illumination on user roles.

Assignments:

If you haven’t started your WordPress.com blog, do it today. Then, if you need or want to have multiple contributors, go through the steps above to add them.
If you would like to become a SMUG Associate Professor, leave a comment below, and I will add you as a Contributor.