Bluelime Media - Interactive Solutions with a Twist

New Home for Your (not-so-)Old Tech & Office Stuff

While this might be a little off-topic, here’s a brief plug to check out the BC Crisis Centre’s Wishlist. In addition to office equipment, they could also use some kitchen equipment for their volunteer’s break room and a volunteer photographer.

Bluelime has been helping the Crisis Centre with their websites for years, and we’re looking forward to launching an updated version of their web-based youth hotline in the near future.

Look Out for Domain Renewal Scam

I received a very official looking Domain Name Expiration Notice a little while ago. It looked like the real thing and I might have fallen for it if I hadn’t been (a) wary that the notice was so far in advance of the actual expiry date; and (b) already aware of phantom invoice scams.

Back when I worked in big companies, it was a fairly regular occurrence to get an official-looking invoice for overdue payment that upon closer inspection was fraudulent. Sometimes it was for copier toner, other times for a directory listing or other common supplies. Now the scam has gone high tech.

I believe in knowing what I’m paying for (I prefer not to be described as “cheap” thank you) so I always looked into what I was signing off on. That’s how I uncovered the scam and learned just how persistent and unscrupulous these companies can be.

• The invoices are often to the attention of a former employee
• They always look very official
• There was always a sense of urgency
• The invoices keep coming even if you call the source and confront them

If I was like the many small business owners who do not keep close tabs on their domain name registrations and are too busy to read the fine print, I’d have paid over 4 times what I should have to renew those domain names AND I would have transferred them to a disreputable registrar.

Like spam, the phantom invoice scam must work or it wouldn’t keep appearing. I caution you to keep an eye on your domain names and pay attention to the details.

Inspiring Blog Designs

Smashing Magazine has published another great list for inspiration: 45 More Excellent Blog Designs. It’s a great illustration of how much variation there can be in blog design.

Perhaps the most interesting is Chris Contolini’s mash-up of Google maps with his blog.

I also enjoyed Ideate’s Television-styled YouTube player - even though the video was no longer available, it’s a nice treatment.

Northern Voice is a wrap

This year’s Northern Voice was my second. I thoroughly enjoyed both events and look forward to next year. I suspect that 2010 will prove to be a bit problematic due to another event happening at that time of year but, hey, that’s still a long way away.

Following last year’s conference I told all of my clients who were blogging that they needed to go next year. So as soon as NV08 was announced, I sent them all an email and encouraged them to register. I think that I sent the email to about a dozen or so of my clients. Only one came, Heidi, which is a shame, but a start. I got the chance to speak to her about the event and I think that she enjoyed it thoroughly and, like me, left the event with lots of ideas. 

Every year the organizers try to do something different and this year the Internet Bootcamp was on offer during the first day. I think that of all the talks that were given, this session was the most valuable for bloggers who are just dipping their toes in the blogosphere. As an educator Heidi is using the Web and social media to reach out to kids and teachers and help create a better educational systems. Heidi is already pretty tech savvy and has been blogging for a while, but these sessions were hopefully able to answers some of her questions.

I do hope that this session will return next year and encourage would-be bloggers to attend NV09.

See you next year. 

How to widgetize your blog or website

Susie Gardner from Hop Studios gave a pretty good demo of how to add widgets to your blog today at Northern Voice. Widgets, also called plugins or badges, are little apps which consist of bits of code that once added to your blog or website, pull in external information. They usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. These widgets could pull the latest news feed from a site such as Voxant, the latest Dilbert cartoon, a list of books you are reading or meaning to read, the weather, or a series of flickr photos.

These widgets can be a fun way to add content to your website. The only downside of adding these, is that you have to dabble in the code a bit which can be scary at first. Additionally if you’re blog is on a hosted platform such as WordPress.com or Typepad, you may not be able to add these.

So how do you go about adding a widget?
First let’s select a widget. Of all the widgets mentioned during the presentation, I found polldaddy.com the most interesting. As the name would suggest polldaddy allows you to create polls.

1. First you need to go to their site and sign up for an account. This is done very easily simply by filling your name and email. (Don’t you love people who don’t ask you for every possible detail?)
2. Next, hit create a poll.
3. Type in your questions.
4. Type in your answers,
5. Select the “look” of your poll.
6. Hit save and Voila!

You will then be sent to a new screen with code which may look scary, but here’s the catch. You don’t need to know how it works. Just copy and paste it. That’s it. And here’s the poll I just created:

Now, for this example, I’ve copied the poll in the body of my text. I don’t really want to clutter my sidebar with more stuff, but if I wanted to, I could have a permanent poll anywhere on my site. The beauty of this widget is that simply by login in to my polldaddy.com account and creating a new poll, the poll on my website is automatically updated.

I mentioned earlier that widgets usually appear in the sidebar of your blog. This is where dabbling in the code gets a bit tricky. If you’ve set up your own blog and have access to the presentation, you can go to the template editor, locate the sidebar.php and add the widget code in there. If you are like me and using WordPress which you’ve downloaded and customized, you can also use the widget editor, but be careful and make sure that you back up all of your files, just in case you mess things up.

I should also point out, that if you copy and paste code into the body of a post, like I just did, save the post and come back and edit it, chances are the code for your widget will need to be updated. The visual editor in WordPress seems to alter the code every time you save and edit. I’m not sure why, but it just does… So just add your code once you are happy with the post and no longer need to edit.

Have fun.