The Blog of Chris Stott

World Simpliest Blog Theme

Experimenting with what is perhaps the world’s simpliest blog theme http://demo.plaintxt.org/.

Hosted

I’ve finally got my self in to gear and sorted out web hosting. I’ve been having fun therefore most of the afternoon rapidly learning about FTP, WP themes, wigets and all manner of blog / hosting information.

What really is great is just how quick and easy it is to set up a wordpress based site. It takes just a few seconds. It’s really impressive and the number of widgets, themes and add-ons out there for Wordpress is truly overwhelming.

Plans

So I’ve set up this blog now and that is with a free theme and moved from my wordpress.com site. I have also set up another site in a sub directory just to test out a few design things. Looks like I am going to have to learn a bit of CSS to get Lifestyle Project site to look how I want. I have also started planning what I want Lifestyle Project to look like. I think I want to focus on a magazine style theme. These admittedly seem to be getting increasigly popular and I just need to find the right theme that clicks with what I want to achieve.

I also need to spend the time setting up enough good content to warrant a re-launch. On launch I plan to try and build my traffic rapidly, mainly by working hard on decent content but also through commenting on other sites and looking for some guest posting spots.

Keeping Social Media Simple

Image on DBarefoot on Flickr via Creative Commons

Seems like not a day goes by without a new social media application launching. I’m a relatively late adopter of social media, and also a reluctant adopter. Whilst I like to try out the applications and latest technology, I’m quite concious of the amount of time social media can take up and on some days I’m concerned about the “social media footprint” that I could leave.

Anyway, I’m reviewing my social media options and at the moment I use the following:

• Twitter (for Web 2.0 geekery and blog promotion)
• Delicious (personal bookmarking at the moment)
• Facebook (for school and close social circle friends)
• Last.fm (for music discovery)
• Tumblr (for it’s simplicity for posting links)
• Stubleupon (new to me for blog promotion)
• Wordpress (as my blogging platform)
• Flickr (for sharing and backing-up photos)

So in designing my personal blog for the reasons mentioned before, I am analysing what social media to use and why. I want to use what I will get the most benfit out of, but without having a massive overhead on my time or social media footprint (you’ve only got to look at the image above to see how massive the list of social media is – that’s Schoble’s list by the way). So I’ve set up my “Friend Me” section and will review it over time.

What I’ll Blog About

Image by retro traveler on Flickr via Creative Commons

I’ll blog about anything that interests me really. The initial list I have drawn up of likely categories are:

Reviews

I think I’ll write quite a lot of reviews but only of things that I am genuinely interested in (otherwise I want be motivated to do the writing anyway), and I am only likely to recommend things that I would put my own name on. Reviews are likely to be of books, music, gigs, restaurants, products and anything else that can be reviewed I suppose.

Fitness

I am in to my fitness and absorb information about health and fitness like a sponge. Certainly things that I am trying or I am interested in exploring more I will look to blog about.

Guitar

I love music and I love to play the guitar. I have some things to say about guitar (mainly tips for learning). I love to encourage people to take up the guitar.

Technology, Web and Social Media

Deep down I am a major geek. I am a big gadget fan and a missive information junkie. I love trying out new software and I am rapidly learning about social media. Whilst at work all this kind of stuff saps a lot of my time, but at least I’m getting paid for it .

Blogging

Obviously I am learning a lot about blogging at the moment. I am very interest in this, I think that it is my biggest ‘project’ at the moment. I am learning more and more each day and have lots of information to share in this area.

Travel

I love to travel. I would travel as a job if I could (and I do aim to have a go at this at some point in the future). I would like to indulge my travel writer aspirations here.

Photography

I do enjoy photography and I particular like finding amazing images for my blog posts. Everyone seems to be an amateur photography nowadays, but this is great as it means there is an enormous amount of superb images around.

Learning

I love to learn and do it subconcioulsy a lot of the time. Whatever I am learning about at a given time I’m sure I’ll blog about.

Productivity

Whether it is productive or not I am defintely a major productivity hobbyist. I enjoy writing posts about productivity and have done a number of successful ones on my main blog. I do however want to focus these on my main blog to my niche, so here can be an outlet for other thoughts.

Lifestyle Design

My main blog is about this and I am currently defining my niche there (hence in part for starting this blog). I would like to post more about Lifestyle design, as essentially it is what I am trying to do!

Random Thoughts

I’ll keep my short ramdom thoughts to my Tumblr-log, but I do have opinions and thoughts on current affairs and a wide variety of topics. I think it will be great to explore these in more depth.

I’m sure that the above doesn’t capture all that I am interested in or will post about. I just wanted to give a flavour of what to expect going forward.

New Blog

Image by Gonzalo Barrientos on Flickr via Creative Commons

I’ve been blogging through my other sites for a while now and I think that the concepts are taking off. However, I have to admit that the most important part of blogging, content creation, is where I struggle most. I don’t have a problem coming up with ideas for posts, tweaking the designs, finding quotes, pictures or inspirational links but I do struggle with the task of churning out quality content. I think this issue is in part due to the fact that I have so many interests and topics that I want to write about that on any given day what I want to write about is different. I have identified the fact that I need to narrow down and focus my main blog to monteize and maximise it’s potential. However, this will leave a lot of topics that I am interested in not addressed. I think that the more content I create, the better I will get at creating it and the more positive experience I will be able to give on my main blog. That is why I have created this site. It will be a personal site where I can write about anything I want. It is mainly for my own purposes. If one day I want to write about a book I’ve just read that is fine, another day I might want to write about a great new Web 2.0 site or a great restaurant I’ve been to. I’ll just write about what I want, when I want. Obviously I can do this on my main site, but as I want to build a good quality resource on my niche and grow my readership I really need to focus my niche.

So that’s it. Look how easily I’ve created content for this site already. I think it’s going to be a great way at becoming a better writer. For things that aren’t really ‘quality content’ type posts I’ll use a Tumblr account as my outlet for that.

Here goes…