RickyCadden.com

Checking Out The Nokia WordPress App

// November 8th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // blogging, symbian

I’ve used Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones for years and one thing I always wished for was a proper blogging app. There were a few here and there that tried to offer a proper blogging experience, but they always seemed to be missing something. Fortunately, about 2 years ago, a team of folks decided to get serious about it and build a proper application.
The WordPress for Nokia app is built with QT, which supposedly is what makes it so awesome. It’s definitely a smooth experience and it works extremely well on the Nokia N8, which is powered by the new Symbian^3 platform. It’s a lightweight app with a very minimalistic UI – not too unlike the WordPress backend itself. The application allows you to manage comments and posts, which is awesome, and also includes statistics, so you can keep tabs on how your blog is doing.
The post creation screen is well laid out and allows you to enter your title and then compose your post right off the bat. Even better is the few buttons directly below the post body input field that allow you to make quick work of simple HTML such as bold, italics, and hyperlinks.
Below that are helpful buttons for uploading images and videos with your post. Of course there are limited editing functions, but its nice to have even primitive support for a photo or two.
The WordPress for Nokia app also supports tags and categories, along with location tagging, which I found rather interesting. You can save blog posts as drafts, which is handy if you like to edit your content, and then of course you can publish your post directly to your blog, like I did with this post. I wrote this post entirely using the WordPress for Nokia application on my Nokia N8 in about 15 minutes – not bad, really. This app is really going to shine on the upcoming Nokia E7, with its hardware keyboard and larger display.
You can download WordPress for Nokia oh the Ovi Store or you can visit http://dev.nokia.wordpress.org .

Day 6: A Retreat

// September 26th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // pc-free

Six days in and I’ve already broken, sort of. While I’m still doing quite well at keeping my personal Internet use limited to my Nexus One, I’ve come across a few instances that simply must be done from my computer.

1. Organizing Flickr photos – while the Flickr Mobile site is refreshingly awesome, it’s still limited. There is no option to organize your photos (at least that I have found), which is rather important if I’m going to keep things from getting out of control. Yes, of course, I could simply load the desktop version of the Flickr site up on my phone, but with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, that’s an exercise in frustration. Going forward, I’ll likely use this on my desktop only a few times a week.

2. Keeping track of new Twitter followers - I recently discovered that Tweetdeck has the option to add a column which shows your new Twitter followers. I try to keep up with this, and have found several valuable new contributors to my stream using this method. I haven’t yet found a similar view in any mobile Twitter clients, and when I loaded Tweetdeck up this weekend, I found that I had gained quite a few new followers. Going forward, I might pull this up one or two days a week, to keep my original plan.

3. Blogging – Yes, of course I can blog from my Nexus One, and I intend to force myself to do so at least once or twice per week. However, the onscreen keyboard and limited features of the WordPress for Android client make this incredibly difficult. This is particularly true when I’m wanting to blog about something such as a link from one of my friends, or about something that will be a longer form, such as this. Unfortunately, the WordPress app doesn’t make it easy to add links, especially from multiple sources and such.

All in all, I’ve really been enjoying the time away from my computer. It’s quite refreshing, actually. I am, however, seeing a bigger drain on my phone’s battery (obviously). This is something I expected, but didn’t really consider. Of course, for me, at work at a desk, this isn’t much of a factor.

Do you think you could cut back to only using your phone for the Internet, and not your computer? What limitations do you think you might face?

A Return To Mobile Blogging

// July 4th, 2010 // 14 Comments » // android, blogging, Mobile

A long while ago, I was really obsessed with mobile blogging – that is, blogging from a mobile device. I kept trying from my Symbian-powered smartphones, but kept coming up short. Unfortunately, software was the main limiting factor. There simply are not any great solutions for blogging from a Symbian-powered smartphone, in my experience. Yes, there’s an official WordPress app, but due to the small storage, I was unable to use it on my Nokia N97. My new Nexus One, however, runs the official Android WordPress app like a champ, so here I am.

I hope to start blogging from my phone more going forward. It’s incredibly convenient, since I always have it with me and I don’t have to wait for it to boot up or anything. I’ll also be exploring other things that I can do from my phone. I believe that we’re incredibly close to having an entire generation of humans who are connected, but have never used a computer – they’ve always relied solely on their smartphone. I’m anxious to try to see what their experience might be with today’s technology, to see areas in which it could be improved.

Are you one of those? Do you still use your computer primarily, or has your phone yet taken over as your primary connected device?

Back To Blogging Basics – Comments

// August 8th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // blogging

The next step to getting back to blogging basics, for Symbian-Guru.com, was to eliminate the forum bridge that allowed us to use vBulletin as our comment engine. It was not an easy decision – I had paid $200 for the lifetime vBulletin license, and knew that disconnecting the blog from the forum would eventually leave the forum to slowly die. However, there were too many other factors to consider with the bridge.

For starters, we did not close the forum – we simply disconnected it from the blog, so that new blog posts were not automatically published as threads in the forum, and comments posted on the blog posts are not copied to the forum, or vice versa. Users can still login and have conversations with one another, and to a small degree, are doing just that.

The biggest downfall of the vBulletin Bridge plugin was that it did not properly show the correct author. On a blog such as Symbian-Guru.com, with 3 authors (and likely more in the future), it is vital that readers are able to easily know who wrote a specific post. Not only does this eliminate confusion on differing viewpoints, but it allows readers to build a relationship with a specific author, which encourages readers to interact via comments.

Another major issue was that the forum bridge broke the XMLRPC protocol, which is how 3rd party applications such as Windows Live Writer and Wordmobi are able to connect to your blog to create new posts and such. This is a major issue for us, as I use Windows Live Writer on my netbook incessantly, and Wordmobi is really convenient in certain situations. XMLRPC support was pulled when the bridge developer updated it to support scheduled posting (another major necessity).

Since disconnecting the forum, and reverting back to the default WordPress comments engine, we have actually seen a massive increase in the number of comments, which is awesome. A blog is nothing if it doesn’t have readers, and I would prefer 10 readers who interact with you to 1000 readers who simply open the page and then close it later. As I work towards simplifying Symbian-Guru for the benefit of both me and my readers, disconnecting the forum has proven to make a huge difference.

Back To Blogging Basics – Intro

// July 6th, 2009 // 10 Comments » // blogging

If you don’t already know, I’m the Community Manager behind Symbian-Guru.com. I started the site in November 2006, and with the help of 2 other authors (and a few who have come and gone), built it to be one of the top Symbian-related blogs on the Internet. Unfortunately, along the way, the site itself has gotten a bit complex, and the backend is now rather messy. In order to create and publish a post, you *must* use FTP, Photoshop (or some other slightly-more complex photo editing tool), and an actual computer. Blogging from our phones is not possible, and even if it were, the process would be so complex that it wouldn’t be realistically feasible.

Currently, Symbian-Guru is hosted with WordPress 2.8, using Justin Tadlock’s Structure theme (which has since been discontinued, annoyingly). Our forums are powered by vBulletin v3.8.3, using a hacked up vBulletin bridge that you can check out here. With three authors (and the need to bring on at least one more), it’s become imperative that we slim things down quite a bit. I’m sure that there are some of you out there who have either already started blogging and are in a similar position as I am, or are looking to start blogging, and want to avoid the same mistakes I have in letting the blog management get completely out of control.

As I gather the resources I need to do this, I have some starting advice that I’ve already learned. Here’s 5 mistakes that I made when starting Symbian-Guru.com:

1. Buy a domain – this is crucial, even for small-time bloggers that never intend to be ‘huge’. When I started Symbian-Guru, I had no idea it would go where it has, and moving from symbianguru.typepad.com to Symbian-Guru.com was a *huge* pain, and something I wish I could have avoided. You can buy a domain for less than $10/year, and hosting can be just as cheap.

2. Choose your blogging platform carefully – WordPress is typically the default, but choose wisely. Do your research and explore at least 2-3 options, even if you think you know what you want. When I was setting up the forum, I just assumed I should go with vBulletin, without first checking out if there was a proper WordPress bridge (there’s not, really), and now I’m wishing I’d done a bit more research.

3. Don’t make sacrifices for ‘coolness’ – When choosing the theme for Symbian-Guru.com, I discovered that I would have to manually create at least 2 images for each post, FTP them over, and then insert them in the post. Whereas that seemed small at the time, after nearly 2 years with this layout, it’s getting *really* old. Make sure you aren’t negatively impacting the posting process when you choose a theme.

4. Setup analytics as soon as possible – There are several stats services available, such as Google Analytics. The sooner you set these up, the better picture you’ll have of your traffic. While you may not think you care, it’s a good idea to have an idea of when, where, and how your traffic gets to your site, even if you just glance at it every couple of days.

5. Don’t use services that you don’t control for your blog – For a period of several months, I used Flickr to host my images. At the time, I thought it would be a good way to reduce the load on my hosting servers. However, when I stopped using Flickr for my personal photos and let my Pro account go un-renewed, it also hosed all my photos, so I now have a bunch of posts with empty photo placeholders.

Partially Successfully Moved To A New Hosting Account

// June 10th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // annoying, blogging

If you’re seeing this message, it means that I’m 1/3 of the way successful in moving my Symbian-Guru.com and RickyCadden.com sites from a Shared Hosting account at GoDaddy to their new WordPress Hosting account. It’s been a long, jacked up road, but the move should allow Symbian-Guru.com more room to grow with less headache on our high-traffic days. Poor RickyCadden.com just got to go along for the ride.

If you ever have the idea that you should change hosting accounts, or move hosts entirely, don’t. If you have to, pay someone else to move it all for you. Trust me, it’s well worth it (assuming they know what they’re doing). If you came here to get info about Symbian-Guru.com, rest assured the site is not completely under. At this point, we’re really just waiting for the DNS change to take effect (I hope).

DotMobi’s Got A New WordPress Mobile Plugin

// April 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Mobile

One of my favorite sites for keeping up with things on the mobile web is WapReview.com, written by Dennis Bournique. This guy has a knack for finding cool mobile-friendly websites and services, and is always in the know. Today, Dennis brought news of a new WordPress plugin from DotMobi. I’m currently using Alex King’s WP-Mobile plugin here on RickyCadden.com for you guys, and am using WPhone for mobile access to the backend of things. WPhone sucks, though, since the developers decided to ignore all phones other than the iPhone and cease development, which is uber-lame.

In any case, this new plugin from DotMobi does the same thing that WP-Mobile does, though it seems to add a few more options here and there. The main features that attract me are the built-in ability to redirect mobile browsers to an mdot URL, as well as the widget support and QR Code generator.

I don’t particularly care for DotMobi, normally, as I think that while the idea of .mobi websites is good, convincing the world that they need to purchase yet another domain for a mobile version of their site is ridiculous. As I stated previously, consumers shouldn’t need to care whether they type in m.rickycadden.com, rickycadden.mobi, or even rickycadden.com/iwanttoseethisonmyphone – they should automatically get your content, formatted in the best way for their specific device, without having to do anything.

That being said, I’ll be testing out this new WordPress Mobile Pack from DotMobi over the weekend, and will let you know when you can give it a test drive.

Also, it seems as though this plugin offers some mobilization for the WordPress backend, a feature that is sorely missing. WPhone still works, but it’s incredibly crude, and doesn’t work 100% of the time. I’d like to see either WordPress, Alex King, or I suppose DotMobi stepping up in this arena. It shouldn’t be too hard, really. If it’s Alex or DotMobi, hopefully they’ll mobilize the administration side of vBulletin, too, while they’re at it.

Notes From Geek To Peak At SXSWi

// April 9th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // blogging

One of the better panels that I attended at SXSWi was called ‘Geek to Peak’, and centered around increasing and building my business as a consultant or freelancer. I found it really interesting, and ended up with a ton of notes. One thing that I’m currently working on is moving from saying ‘I am the Symbian-Guru’ to ‘I built Symbian-Guru, and I can do that for you.’ Don’t get me wrong, if there are any Symbian-Guru.com readers here. I’ll never sell the site, or shut it down. However, I think it’s better kept as a hobby than as a full-on business, for several reasons.

Either way, in 2 years, I’ve successfully built my own website, learned a lot about WordPress, both in how to set it up and use it, and in how to manipulate it to how I want it to work. I’ve taught myself how to edit CSS, PHP, and HTML, and have customized my own theme a few times. I have also installed, customized, and managed a vBulletin community, complete with integration into the WordPress community I had already built. I’ve learned plenty about SEO, advertising, and writing in general.

I’ve also now spent 2 years being a blogger, and a connected one, at that. I have seen a handful of companies that really did blogger relations ‘right’, and have seen more than a handful do it completely wrong.While I still enjoy blogging, I’m starting now to branch out a bit. Geek to Peak encouraged me as I’m moving to offering my services and knowledge to other companies. I know how to build a community, but more importantly, I know how to maintain it, and what it takes to really do well with it.