Zen and the art of blogging

Some of my co-workers are beginning to participate in our internal k-log pilot. Here are my tips for new bloggers based on my experiences thus far…

1. The blog is primarily for you. It is your backup brain. To think that you have “nothing important to say” is a natural reaction when starting out. When you realize the primary audience of your blog is you, it frees you from the burden of trying to be interesting, entertaining, or even particularly informative. Our ability to harvest the knowledge captured in everyone’s backup brain by indexing all of the k-logs in our company with a search engine is a great side-benefit.

2. Let the focus of your blog happen naturally. If you don’t already know what you’ll focus on, don’t worry and don’t push it. Eventually, the content will speak for itself.

3. Use categories from the beginning to organize your posts. Don’t worry about setting up a perfect personal taxonomy right off the bat. When you start to notice a trend in your posts, create a category. I haven’t found a convenient way to categorize or re-categorize old posts. I’ve seen some discussion around it and it does not seem straightforward.

4. Promote your blog internally. If you used to send links and/or commentary to co-workers via email, post those instead to your blog. Until adoption becomes widespread you may need to continue to send email. Instead of sending the primary links, though, send permalinks to the relevant blog post. The goal is to train people to refer to your blog for the type of information you used to send to their inbox, and, maybe you’ll spark some interest in the blog pilot.

5. Update your blog often, but do not force a post just because you haven’t posted in a while. It is important to incorporate scanning the aggregator and making posts into your daily routine. If a post isn’t forthcoming, spend the time looking for interesting news feeds you haven’t subscribed to yet or surfing content outside of the scope of your aggregator.

6. Mix business with pleasure. Your blog is obviously a great way to share your subject matter expertise with your colleagues or other interested parties. Don’t be afraid to incorporate personal content. In our company, we spend so much time with clients that we run the risk of losing touch with our co-workers. Mixing business and personal content can be a good way to stay in touch with co-workers and it makes the blog more interesting. Use common sense about what to post based on your company culture.

From my co-worker, Patrick Dawson, via email:
 
I think the following article is very helpful to anyone who is trying to learn about how to write custom Java methods to be used with Documentum workflows.  It’s also interesting because its sample code transforms an XML source document dropped into a workflow package.  Finally, the sample code uses the source document’s keywords to pass parameter values into the Java code.  The parameter discussed in the example indicates whether the XSLT transformation output should be stored as a rendition, as an improted object in the docbase, or on the local file system.
 

Good Sailing on Good Friday

Dad and I took Wendy out today. We spent an hour or so rummaging around on the boat. It’s amazing what collects over the course of 34 years. Dad put it best when he said, “Essentially, this boat is a floating Winnebago that a couple of old folks owned for thirty years.”

The wind was really howling but Wendy handled it with ease. It had shifted direction about 90 degrees from where it was two weekends ago which made getting in and out of the slip much easier. The last time we went out I put I pretty good gash in the bow thanks to a strong headwind and an inexperienced helmsman (me). This time we had no similar incident.

We’re ready to take the fam out next.