Tag Archives: twitter

Putting Sechelt back where it belongs

Update! Google has fixed the location of Sechelt after Rebecca Bollwitt posted the problem and 40-ish retweeters! Thanks to all who helped out! It took Social Media one day to fix what a community has tried to do for over a year!

Thanks to Rebecca Mrs. 604 for writing this article on putting Sechelt back on the map.

I was first told about this Google Map mishap at WordCamp last week. Local web designer Robert Dall explained that over the last few years members of the community have tried pretty much everything to get their town listed. These efforts include hundreds of people reporting the issue to Google, tweeting about it @GoogleMaps on Twitter, and the Mayor of Sechelt, Darren Inkster, has even written an official letter to Google – all to no avail.

You can help out the cause by tweeting  @GoogleMaps with the tag #PutSecheltOnTheMap And hopefully we can get Sechelt, BC put back where it belongs.

Google Map Location of Sechelt BC
Sechelt is actually located where the black arrow is pointing.

Open letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook

Facebook
The Social Networking Site Facebook

I love you, ever since I joined your service a couple years ago. I have been able to reconnect with friends from Sydney, AZ to Yellowknife, NWT.

But Facebook we really need to talk… Your not Twitter, Nor do I want to be Twitter. See Facebook I joined your service to share my life with a close 200 friends, and I really try keeping up with all of them. Honestly, I have a personal twitter account, but I am not sure what to do with it because I already use this site, and that site, to voice my public views.

And, yes, before you privacy experts get your shirt in a knot. I know the privacy on Facebook is a basic one. And anyone with some savvy hacking skills could potentially see, copy, change any of my info on your site, and I am OK with that. I know the risk of what I post and have read more then one story about employees getting fired for posting stuff on Facebook. I also prefer to keep my business life and social life separate, so if I haven’t accepted your friend request. Isn’t not you it’s me. . .

Lets just call my Facebook friends an extended family for want of a better word. I’d be OK with telling them stuff I wouldn’t be comfortable tell a complete stranger, which quite frankly resembles the entire Internet.

If I did want to publicly rant and rave then I have half a dozen different services at my disposal, or I’d just make all of my post public. but I didn’t join Facebook to do that. Nor is Facebook something I want to use that for. I like Facebook for being Facebook it was the reason I joined and the reason I continue to log in each day.

Hope you had a great Christmas and I look forward to seeing you in the New Year.

regards

Robert

WordPress - Code Is Poetry

A WordPress Scene

When I first entered into web design from the world of the media– journalism and photography–the first course I had to take was on blogging. While I never had a blog and didn’t really want one, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take a course in essentially journalism, which was something I was really trying to distance myself from.

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But I took the writing for the web course in stride and had to sign up for a WordPress.com account. I decided to write on coffee as it was close to home, easy to write about and a popular topic. My class only required me to write 12 posts, but after those 12 posts I saw the power of blogging and had 1,200 unique page views and a number of comments about the blog.

So I really started to take the WordPress blog seriously about that time and got a domain name and style that fit and the readership continued to grow. WordPress was growing right along with my own blog, the two seem to feed off each other (no pun intended).

When I started to see other blogs link to mine in some authority I knew I was on to something. So what to do? Well the first thing was to make the blog self hosted and, well, that was the hardest part. But, it was also important to keep the blog looking the same. I picked the Freshy theme by Julien De Luca as it was one of the 16 different themes available to WordPress.com users at the time. While I could make a change when I moved the blog why change? As it works for me and the readers seem to like it. (p.s. the theme I am using here is a highly customized Orange Coffee We now run a child theme of Twenty Thirteen called R2D2 )

Change is a good thing…I think…

While WordPress had designed a way to take your content with you when I moved it wasn’t that easy. I had three issues with my content moving:

• I wanted to keep my old Freshy theme and while it was still available for download it wasn’t optimized for WordPress 2.7
• My old content from WordPress 2.1 didn’t format that well into WordPress 2.7 So if I wanted to edit any of my old content I essentially had to re-align the entire post.
• All of media, pictures and video had to be manually copied from the WordPress.com site and uploaded to the new server while persevering the perma-links.

Yeah this totally wasn’t that easy and I would never suggest trying to do it this way…  I am sure there are easier ways to go about this but I just didn’t know how or my server at that time wasn’t allowing the import as it was suggested by the codex.