Beer and Blog Portland

Yesterday’s session on dashboards was by far the best beer and blog meet up yet! We had our largest turnout and half of them were fresh faces. I’ve had people tell me that the Friday time doesn’t work for them, so I think we’re going to continue to have Sunday meet ups once a month. I think it will be an every 3 weeks deal, but keep an eye on our calendar to the right or Upcoming for exact dates.

Those that showed up to this week’s beer and blog recieved a little gift—an invite code for the Ginger release of Netvibes. Attendance has its privileges.

Here’s the breakdown on what we discussed:

Dashboard vs. Reader

One of the first things we discussed was the pros and cons of a dashboard compared to a feed reader. Aaron shared that he tried using Newsgator’s syncing to allow him to use a reader on his desktop, laptop, and Blackberry, but ultimately went with Google Reader because the syncing didn’t live up to expectations. He also shared that he enjoyed the river of news approach he got from Google Reader. We concluded that using a dashboard didn’t exclude using a feed reader. For example, I use the email module on a tab I call my Message Center, and when I click on an email, it takes me to Gmail. Thus, Aaron could still read the river of news as a module in Netvibes, and then click on the module’s title if he wanted to see an expanded view of it in Google Reader.

The biggest advantage of a dashboard over a reader is that a dashboard isn’t limited to feeds. I can have widgets and full-on applications running side-by-side feeds for a truly remixed view of the Internet that matters to me.

Importance of Pipes to a dashboard approach

One thing we brought up was what happens when a person is monitoring hundreds of feeds, wouldn’t hundreds of modules be much harder to view than a river of news in a reader? The answer is yes, if you display feeds individually, they will be cumbersome to consume in a dashboard. But, that’s where Yahoo! Pipes comes in. If you consume your feeds regularly, then you don’t need to see 10 items per feed, because you probably saw 8 of them yesterday or earlier that day. I use Pipes to aggregate feeds of a feather to create a super feed, such as combining Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, etc. into a single feed called “Lead tech blogs”. I then run that whole feed through AideRSS to rank the posts based on their popularity, which I display as a smaller module on top of the full river of news from the Pipe.

If you’d like a brief introduction to Pipes, I wrote a five part series on Pipes.

Layout and configuration strategies

Your watched dataset will determine how you should aggregate and manipulate the data in Pipes before importing it into a dashboard, which also determines your layout. For example, if you only have four close friends whose blogs you read, then you probably don’t need to use Pipes. You could have one tab with each blog as it’s own column. If you have fifty friends, then you might want to consider using Pipes to pre-process your incoming data to make digestion easier.

Your watched dataset will also determine the layout of your dashboard. I’ve found that I prefer to have one tab per interest, such as a message tab, tech tab, rock band tab, popular web content tab, Portland tab, etc. If you are deep into a single subject, you may enjoy a tab for every high level topic for your area of interest.

Your layout also depends on the screen(s) you are consuming the dashboard from. People strictly using mobile will have to be more selective with their choices as you only get one column. People using laptops would likely prefer no more than 2 modules per column. People using a 32″ LCD on its side may be able to view 5 or 6 modules per column. I know that in the not too distant future, I want a whole wall of screens full of all of the data I need to stay on top of.

The three stages of participation

This is where the conversation started to get interesting. We began to discuss what appears to be three levels of participation that looks something like Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs. At the lowest level of participation a person is creating content. The next level up, is a person using focusing tools to bend the web’s data around them in order to direct their attention, which is what we’re doing with dashboards, feeds, Pipes, etc. Then, a person reaches the pinnacle of participation, which is the self-actualization for why they are participating, which includes topics like transparency, enlightenment, and non-violent communication. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, mostly because we didn’t do more than touch on it at our meet up. I can say that it was a killer discussion and you’ll see much more about this concept in the not too distant future.

Moving forward

Aaron Hockley has tweeted that he will be taking a methodical approach to building out his dashboard and plans to blog his progress. I’ll be keeping my eye on that project, and recommend you do as well. I may have piqued David Frey’s interest enough to build a killer feed reading module using the UWA standards to allow it to work on Netvibes, PageFlakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo!. I’ll also continue to experiment with my dashboard and the services that connect to it, which I’ll post about from time to time.

If you haven’t started using a dashboard, you should start now while it’s easy. If you still aren’t sure, post your doubts and concerns below and let’s all talk about them.

Some people have been asking me about what the group determined at the “Backup your blog” session, so as the ‘ol saying goes, better late than never. I’ll share what we determined below.

First, I pulled together a collection of resources that we referenced during our session, which I’ll post below. Most of the resources are Wordpress oriented, so I’m hoping someone could post helpful links geared at other CMSs, like Expression Engine, Movable Type, etc.

• 8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others) – This was by far the best resource providing eight different options for backing up a blog. It’s weighted toward Wordpress, but many of the options would work for other blog CMSs.
• 4 free tools for fool proof Wordpress backup – This share two ideas not covered in the above article. They’re ok, I’m mostly providing the link for historical reference to the session attendees.
• WP DB Backup – The official Wordpress page for the most popular database backup plugin.
• WP DB Backup – The project page for the most popular Wordpress database backup plugin.
• Wordpress Backups – Official Wordpress instructions for doing a manual backup. Good reference material.
• MySQL DB backup tutorial – A tutorial with screen shots for how to use PHPMyAdmin to backup a MySQL database. Works for an CMS that uses a MySQL database.
• Using a chron to automatically backup your MySQL DB – Explains how to set up a chron to backup files on your server, which include the database and the application files.

For Wordpress, a person needs to be able to back up two things: 1) The “wp-content” folder, which contains your theme, plugins, and any assets you’ve uploaded through Wordpress; and 2) The MySQL database. We found that the easiest solution was to install the WP DB Backup plugin for Wordpress. It took minutes and the plugin simply emails the database to you, which is much safer than storing on the same server you are backing up. The drawback to this approach is that plugin doesn’t backup your “wp-content” folder, which contains your theme, plugins, and uploads. Most people don’t update their theme and plugins much, so you can take care of a backup by simply keeping a local copy of the files you upload. Many people upload files quite frequently (like images for every post), but you can use the same strategy of maintaining a local copy of the uploaded files. No need to download a backup of what you uploaded in the first place, right? I know I never thought about it that way before, so now I just make sure to keep copies of everything I upload on my computer, which includes themes, plugins, and uploads.

Ideally, you would use a chron to automatically backup both the database and the “wp-content” folder. Unfortunately, almost no hosting companies will allow to set up a chron due to security issues. However, if you do own your server, then setting up a chron is the way to go. The MySQL database turns out not to be a very big file, especially if it has been g-zipped. It’s the uploads folder that grows into gigabytes after years of usage. If you were truly ninja, you would only backup the new additions from your last backup to save time and bandwidth, but I can’t help you with that level of optimization.

Finally, Dawn shared that her hosting company, GoDaddy, offered backup as part of the account’s features. If your eyes glazed over during any of this, you may want to look for a hosting company that takes care of the backup process for you.

Seriously, though, whatever you decide will be better than not doing anything. I can’t tell you how much it crushes a person to lose a year or more of work and contributions from readers when it could have been recovered from a backup. If you have any tips you’d like to add here, we would all appreciate it.

First, let me start by saying thank you to everyone that showed up to our first Blog and Beer. I think we had a very successful start, especially considering we didn’t announce this thing!

Our first meet up started with good conversation as people trickled in. I’m going to take on capturing notes from the meeting and will post them on this site before the next meeting. As we add presentations, we’ll attach assets like the slides or video. Here are a few things we talked about at the first meeting:

Comparing microblogging services

Mostly what we talked about here was how Twitter and Jaiku compare. Michael Richardson gave some analysis that Jaiku is more of a true microblogging service because people can leave comments on an entry. We all agreed that Twitter is more of a group IM with solid mobile compatibility. One advantage that Twitter has is a much larger user base. Jaiku also offers channels and lifestreaming.

BlogAds.com

Another nugget from Michael was a service that is popular in the political blog space known as BlogAds.com. This ad distribution service is not a CPC or PPC model, rather you dictate the ad contract arangement for your site and BlogAds handles the payment and campaign management. Seems pretty cool for folks unhappy with Kontera or AdSense .

Media mix

One thing I brought up was the idea of a media mix for your blog. The idea is that if you are looking to hit a particular volume of traffic, you’ll need to think about what sources you require to actually make those numbers. It brought into question whether or not it was even possible to hit high volume numbers for topics that may not appear to be niche on the surface. Out of that conversation Michael dropped yet another jewel that I’m not going to share. Just thought I’d make you regret not coming.

Meaningful vs. Popular traffic

Our media mix conversation lead us to discuss meaningful vs. popular traffic. Essentially, if you want to high volumes of traffic, you’ll have to discuss topics that are of interest to the populace at a level accessible to everyone. While that doesn’t necessarily exclude meaningful traffic, it certainly restricts the possibilities. I brought up that I wrote a post about coming to grips with what brings in high traffic. There were some great points made about why people blog and separating personal blogging from entrepreneurial blogging.

Next meet up

I think we’re going to need a lil bit of structure at our future meetings to coordinate that various folks. We can start with next week. We’ll start with an hour of free form help, which means people can ask anyone in the group for help on anything they are working on. I think it makes most sense to have that be the first hour or so because that’s when people are trickling from getting off of work. Then, starting at 5:30pm, we’ll have a presentation. It might be something like Scott Kveton explaining how to integrate Open ID with your blog commenting form (hint hint, nudge nudge). After that people can stick around as long as they like for Q&A with the presenter and/or get some more help from folks in the group.

Also, if you show up to the meeting, you can tag the Beer and Blog wall, which means you’ll make it onto our blogroll. It’s that easy.