WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social Media
As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.
Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli
Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.
However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.
Automating your blogging and social media activity
A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?
This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.
And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:
WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants
Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008
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WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company
Category: News & Views
Mir,
Kol HaKavod!!!! I’m always so proud of you and the work you do. So professional! May you be rich and famous (but famous only if you want that).
Hi Miriam, So happy to see your excellent presentations and it confirms for me that I was sitting in the wrong room most of the day. Hope those recordings get posted this year.
Just a small correction about domain mapping on COM. It’s $10 a year (not month) and I believe if you choose to buy your domain through WordPress.com, the two together are $15 a year. Of course you have to renew each year, but you’d have to do that with another domain registrar as well.
There’s also a great social bookmarking tool (not plug-in) for PC users on COM. Its called “Get Social” and was created by Hillel Stoler. You can see it in action on my own two blog posts about WordCamp.
(And I found this post by following the link from your Posted Items in Facebook.)
[...] Miriam Schwab of WordPressGarage, israelplug and Illuminea gave a half-hour presentation on using WordPress.com and the Hebrew Blogli as a blogging platform, but I didn’t hear her, yet. (See my note above [...]
@jennifer: I almost didn’t make it my own presentation at one point due to the confusion. The organizers told me I was moved to 1:15, so I entered the room at 1 and waited patiently for the previous guy to end. Suddenly, one of the organizers noticed me sitting there and chastises me: “Why are you just sitting there? Get up here! You’ve lost half your session.” Turns out I was at 1, not 1:15, but nobody bothered to tell me. So up I go like a dutiful girl, only to find out that the projector wasn’t working properly. Instead of waiting for someone to fix it and lose the other half of my time, I just started talking and trying to explain to the people in the room what they would be seeing if the projector actually worked. Then, while I’m talking, all these guys start fiddling with the remote, the cables, etc. until finally, after 10 minutes or so, they get it working.
In short, an experience.
Re the domain mapping: I actually meant $10 a year, but I wrote this post too late. Thanks for catching that. I’ll fix it.
Re the bookmarking tool: That’s amazing that someone came up with a way to add bookmarking icons to WordPress.com! I have to make a note of that.
Your review of WordCamp is excellent, by the way. I’m going to send it to the organizers.
Great write up, thanks!
Just one comment about the first presentation, Blogli does run an older version of WordPress MU but the version available for download at mu.blogli.co.il is kept more updated (currently ver. 2.6.2).
[...] was over, it was fun browsing other people’s summaries and reviews of the event. Many of the presenters have already put up their slideshows on their sites and it’s good to at last catch up on part [...]
Thanks for this. It’s incredible how much more social networking is becoming necessary to be successful online.
I don’t comment on here much, but I love this site and I was wondering if you happened to read the recent article about hot job skills for 2008 that features WordPress. In fact, it shows <a href=”http://www.odesk.com/blog/2009/01/top-growth-tech-skills-in-2008/>wordpress trends</a> as having increased by 4 times from that of the previous year. I found this encouraging (and figured I’d share) because in this economy, it’s good to be a part of something that is actually in demand.
Looking forward to your next post.
Hi there, thanks for the link.
any chance to update the link you gave to me with something other then ?????????
?
Do you know how to type Hebrew words on a blog and have the words display in Hebrew (without installing the complete localized version of Hebrew)?