Category: blogging

Mining blog ideas from your Twitpics

As I discussed in my post, What to blog about, I’ve always got a list of topics queued up that I would like to write about.

But not everyone does…

Stir up blogging ideas from your own photos

If you’re one of those people that is looking for inspiration or searching for a topic to blog about, why not take a look at your own Twitpics? If the image was interesting enough to share on Twitter, it might be interesting enough to warrant it’s own blog post.

I do this all the time.

drink-coffee-poster-US-Egg-p

The photo above is a poster on the wall at a US Egg restaurant, which I shared via Twitpic. This poster pic could’ve inspired a blog post on why coffee is good or bad, a post asking whether or not coffee makes you do stupid things, a post about coffee alternatives or whatever else you can come up with.

Twitter is a constant stream of updates and only a small percentage of your followers will actually see your Twitpics or photos. Blogging about those images will get them out to a larger audience.

Don’t stop there

Take a look at all of your online activity. Anything you do can turn into food for your next blog post. A great photo on Flickr, a great conversation on Twitter, a comment you made on another site, just about anything…

Use your own momentum, use your own activity and the posts will keep on flowing.

My blogging history

Today, I decided to take a look back at my online history over the years and how I got started with creating content in this crazy online world of the interwebz.

My first website

One of my first, if not the first, site that I put online, was a webpage at Glendale Community College (GCC). At the time, I was the proud owner borrower of the not-so-sexy address gecko.gc.maricopa.edu/~wanovack/index.htm. This was sometime in early 2001.

maricopa-wanovack-500

Screenshot via archive.org

The image above only shows the final iteration of what that site looked like and unfortunately, archive.org doesn’t have any of the previous versions preserved.

I had some text, hyperlinks, background color and even an image (fancy) on the right. The image is unavailable as it wasn’t archived.

Judging from the screenshot, it looks like I was primarily interested in comedy and skateboarding at the time.

But, as you can see from the unnecessarily huge text located top-center, this page was no longer relevant as I began using Geocities as my primary web space.

Moving into the Geocity

Geocities-Wesociety-OG-500

By April of 2001, I had setup my very own Geocities site. Ahhh, the drag and drop of Geocities’ Java based “Page Builder” app. Quite buggy, but it worked adequately enough.

My first blog

My Geocities website was my first blog. I actually had a “News” page where I would write updates about my life, with the date stamp manually entered above each entry. The URL was distributed to my friends and family, who would visit my site, read my updates occasionally and leave comments on my guestbook.

Over the years, my Geocities page changed a bit, but it kept the main features of a News page, photos, a guestbook and links to external sites that interested me.

Below is a screenshot of the final iteration of my Geocities site, before Yahoo decommissioned Geocities in October 2009.

Geocities-Wesociety-Final-500

The age of the Content Management System

After abandoning my Geocities sites, I moved on to bigger and better things, grabbing my own domain name and setting up a website running on Postnuke.

Eventually, I transitioned to WordPress, which I now use as the primary platform on the majority of the sites that I own, including WesleyTech, PhoenixNorthgate, this site and a few others.

How did you get started blogging?