computers – Page 15 – The PolyBlog

Windows 10, networks and printers

January 24 2016

I’m not usually against free upgrades, but Windows 10 has been a costly one, albeit only partly in money. Awhile back, I ran into a problem with printers after the initial Win 10 setup and it took me 2 hours of trial and error, and a sudden inspiration / brain fart to try something that worked. The simple explanation is I have a router, 3 computers, and 3 printers. Two were running Win10, 1 was running Win7. No big deal, except the printers are all wired to 1 computer. If that sounds odd, it shouldn’t — one was an old laser printer that only had a parallel port style connector, one was a newer colour model but couldn’t connect to my old router by USB or Ethernet (the router didn’t support it), and a label maker that works best when directly connected to a single PC.

With the upgrade, all hell broke loose. I could get the 3 PCs to talk to one another, and for awhile the main PC could print, but nothing else could. Then the others could, but not to the laser printer, just the ones connected by USB (that should have been a bigger clue). After fiddling for 2 hours, I was about to throw in the towel when I realized if the printer wasn’t the problem, and the printer driver wasn’t the problem, could there be a problem with the PORT driver? Not usually, that’s a pretty basic driver of input and output, but I searched in the bowels of my setup, found the problem and voila! My parallel printer started printing, and everyone could print. Great!

Then after another Windows update in early December, I lost my laser printer again. No problem, I thought, I knew how to fix it. Three clicks later, I found out that everything was still already set properly. Another hour or two, no more success. I couldn’t print to that printer no matter what. Didn’t help Andrea was in the middle of finishing her courses, but we muddled through and I was trying to figure out what to do.

One of the “saving” graces when I upgraded to Win 10 was that it said, quite clearly, that if you didn’t like it, you could downgrade back later. So once Andrea’s courses were all done, I proceeded to try the downgrade. Not an option. WTF? Apparently, buried in the small print was a note that it was an option for 30 days, but users were told to note that keeping a second copy of everything on their system was using up a lot of extra disk space so Windows helpfully deleted it after 30 days. You know, to help free up space. Would have been nice to have some sort of question or prompt at that point to say, “Hey, it’s been 30 days, and after this, downgrading won’t be an option anymore, are you sure?” Because I would have said “NO! I’m not sure! Ask me again in 30 days!”. But no, it just deleted it. On both systems. Now, sure, I have legit copies of Win 7/8, so I could wipe everything off, reinstall from scratch, put everything back the way it was, but I’m going to get forced to upgrade at some point anyway when MS Office or some such program doesn’t work on the old Windows anyway, and at the rate Microsoft is actively trying to kill old versions, that won’t be as long perhaps as most users hope.

So I accepted that the 20-year-old work horse of a printer was probably headed for the scrap heap and ordered a new network-compatible, double-sided, laser printer. Decent printer, decent price, free shipping with Amazon (I’m really enjoying the free shipping from them on my Prime membership). It arrived, and I hesitated to hook it up. I just knew there was every possibility that it wouldn’t go smoothly, and if it didn’t, I might take a hammer to it. My coping energy has been down, and is only slowly building back up since Christmas with some careful internal techniques.

However, in the meantime, just this past week in fact, Andrea upgraded her PC to Windows 10. And suddenly I couldn’t see her PC anymore, she couldn’t print, blah blah blah.

I found the problem right away, and it is the same problem that I think has underlaid some of the challenges from the beginning. When I upgraded my PC, my PC’s “name” was in the form of “Joe” (as in Joe Computer). Windows 10 however has a much stronger tie to the Microsoft online accounts, so the upgrade changed my PC name to “Joe Computer”. Now here’s the fun part — Windows 10 apparently doesn’t seem to want to admit that Joe Computer and Joe are the same computer or that Joe ever existed at all. Occasionally, when I try to do something deep in the bowels, Windows tries to tell me that Joe Computer doesn’t have the rights to do that because Joe didn’t give JC the rights. I over-ride, we keep going, all good. Except when it comes to networks.

From the beginning, Windows has told me that I’m connected to something called Network 7 i.e. a network created with Windows 7 by Joe. And that Joe created a Homegroup on said network. That I can join if I know the password. Here’s the thing — I *do* know the password, but when I try to connect I think it wants Joe to say Okay, but Joe doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather Joe Computer is asking itself, and it gets confused. It works for Andrea’s computer and the laptop, but it tells me I’m on the network already and I can join but it won’t confirm me. I followed all the helpful/unhelpful advice on Microsoft’s community forums, and nada.

Tonight, I went drastic. I disconnected from the network. I removed all the network settings I could find. It told me to do this for all three PCs, and then reconnect just 1 and create a new network + homegroup. Except that when I went to do Andrea’s PC second, it said, “Would you like to create a homegroup?”. Wtf? It wouldn’t let me do it before…oh right, my PC is now off. Joe and Joe Computer are both GONE. And her PC knows the proper name of my network, not “network 7” that I’m not sure exists anymore (it does, but I’ll get to that).

So I create a new homegroup. Looks perfect. Go to the laptop, and there is Andrea’s homegroup. Which I join, no problem, also set perfectly for the same network. Come back to my PC, turn it on, and voila! I’m still connected to Network 7 dammit.

I read something online that suggests it could be a “sticky” ID name and that it is still the right network. There’s an option to join a HomeGroup, which I do. Except this time I enter the new password from Andrea’s computer. And wait.

The computer whirs.

The icon spins and twirls.

It whirs some more.

More spinning.

Then it says, “Congrats, would you like to do something else now like….”.

Hallelujah and pass the ammunition! We have ourselves a network.

I quickly try to print to the parallel port to see if my some miracle it also fixed that but no. So I kill it, unhook it, and set up the new laser printer.

That can connect wirelessly to the router, and anything on the router can print to it. For some odd reason, it doesn’t ask me for a password, I am not sure why. Maybe because it is a printer and not a storage device. Odd, but I’m going with it for now. Bears further investigating, but not now.

I tweak a few things on my PC, and there is the new laser printer already in my setup. I love plug and play and auto discover — when it works.

I find an email I want to print, choose double-sided, and press SEND. And miracles of miracles, it prints just fine. No issues at all.

Andrea’s PC can’t print to it yet even though it can see it, but I think it is just delayed setup. Should work fine once she’s rebooted. I think. I hope. We’ll see. But *I* can print to it, and Andrea can print again to the colour. Plus all our machines are networked so files can be moved around more easily (particularly photos when I’m trying to amalgamate them all to one place for processing and backups!).

Stay tuned! But I’m hopeful I’m nearing a fully working network…

Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet

October 24 2015

Most people have seen the headlines, advertisements, tweets, blogs all with a similar headline to mine — “Cutting the cord”. Generally it refers to people who have ditched cable TV. Unfortunately, every article comes with 500 comments that say “I cancelled cable, and I don’t regret it, I never watched TV anyway.” Congratulations, you cancelled something you weren’t using. How very strategic of you. Perhaps you can also cut off your head for the same reason. Once you get past the idiots, the next wave is the holier-than-thous who say, “No one should ever watch TV anytime, anyplace, anywhere, it’s all crap.” Again, they can join the idiots with cranial extraction. I have no time for either group, and neither have anything to do with what “cutting the cord” is all about.

The primary goal of “cutting the cord” is to be able to generally access whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to pay for things you don’t want. In other words, TV bundling. TV bundling is where Rogers or Bell or Shaw or LocalMonopolyProvider says, “Great, you can have TV, but you have to take these 30 channels where 15 of them are things you’ll never watch”, and charge you $30-$50 for the startup bundle. After that, you usually can’t do complete a la carte ordering of the rest of the channels you are interested in as often they are bundled too — such as “Speciality channel package 1” that will come with Bravo and Showcase, plus three others I’ll never watch for $5.00. If I take Bravo and Showcase separately, they’ll charge me, say, $3.00 each. So I take the bundle to save a $1 on buying them individually but then I start wondering about the business model. How can they charge me $3 each for five stations, how can they bundle all 5 and reduce it from $15 to $5? Easy. The other three stations are worthless to most subscribers. They’re the toys in the Extra Value meals at fast food places…most of them are worthless, interesting for about ten seconds and then your kid has moved on.

The CRTC has been pushed and are now pushing for TV providers to change their bundling options to reduce the initial bundle cost as well as reduce the overall cost of bigger bundles. In the meantime, a bunch of people have said, “Umm, you know you can find most shows online now, right? There are other ways to get the feed without paying bundled pricing to one company.”

And that is where the movement started. It has blossomed since then to be more about “what services are you paying for that you can get cheaper through third-party providers?”. In general, this comes down to five areas for most people — internet service itself, cable TV, home phone, cellular service, and if applicable, internet hosting. Let me talk about my experience.

Internet service

I live in Ottawa, and that pretty much meant up until a few years ago that you either went with Bell for phone internet or Rogers for cable internet. Lots of deregulation happened, and lots of little internet providers started cropping up to offer phone-based internet. I had Bell for awhile, and then switched to the National Capital Freenet. In theory, I could run NCF with a static IP address which would allow me to run my own server at home to host my personal website. I played with the setup a bit, ran some configs on a couple of Linux boxes, got things to the point where I could start playing with it. And then reality hit me. I had no real interest in running my own server! 🙂 Put differently, I have no support behind me. If I screw something up, I have no “better geek” to call to say, “I need this fixed asap, here’s my chequebook.” If it went down, it would be down until I figured out why and how to get it back up. I’m an okay geek, I can install routers, set up Windows, wire things from A to B, do some basic troubleshooting. But if WordPress suddenly crashes, I probably have no chance of finding where the problem lies if I can’t even get online and reset the setup. So I gave up sometime ago on running my own server setup. It’s just a layer of tech I’m not willing to take on. I’ll come back to internet hosting at the end, I just mention it in passing as I tried NCF for sometime.

Then, NCF started messing up, my connection wasn’t that stable, and I experienced what is frequently the challenge with third-party providers. Sure, they’re cheaper. Why? Because they don’t pay the overhead all of the big guys do. Like 24/7 extended support. Like people who can visit your house to fix the problem on short notice. They did the best they could, but it was looking like a wiring problem, something they can’t fix. Bell owns the phone wires, and did the wiring in the house. So eventually I bundled it back up, went back to Bell (they were providing my home phone and satellite service anyway), got it all resolved, etc. A few years later, I moved to a new house, hadn’t liked the Bell dish going out in bad weather or high winds, and switched to Rogers. Along with Rogers cable internet. Worked fine, rarely any issues, even in a house where I had to run some extra wires from the first floor router to the basement office (I really prefer not to go full wireless in the house for main computers if I can avoid it). Worked fine, and when I moved again, I moved everything to Rogers.

I have a small secret. One of the biggest complaints for any of the companies is that the Customer Service Reps are frequently horrible for tier 1, first level support. Just as I was about to move, a Rogers agent called me to ask if I wanted home monitoring — I didn’t, but while she was calling anyway, I asked her if I was going to do the move, who I needed to speak to in order to make all the changes. She said she could do it. Here’s the secret — she was flat-out, hands-down, awesome. At this point, I had Rogers cable, Rogers internet, I added Rogers home phone, and I had Rogers cellular too. We reviewed ALL of it. And I do mean all of it. We went through each and every service, talked about options, and each and every time I asked a question, she either already knew the answer or clicked four buttons somewhere and came up with the options. All that bundling was complicated, it pushes even my limits, and she kept it all straight, understood exactly what I wanted and didn’t want, gave me options, recommended certain choices and explained why. It took just over an hour, and I never phased her once nor did I ever lose confidence in her performance. She didn’t oversell, she didn’t undersell, she was a customer’s dream representative. And when we finished the call, she gave me the office direct number and her name so that if I had any other questions, I could call her again. She still works there, I’ve spoken to her twice since. And no, I won’t tell you her name or give you the extension. She is MY secret and I am NOT going sharesies.

Fast forward three years, and I have had no problems with my Rogers cable Internet service. It just plain worked from Day 1. Well, maybe Day 2, I did have to do some setup. Rented the modem, and upgraded at one point in there to stronger modem/router combo when we finished the basement so that I could get a stronger wifi signal down there. Other than that, happy with just about everything.

Except the price. I was paying about $80 (excluding some bundling discounts) for unlimited internet, 5 Mbps upload speed and 25 Mbps download. Lots of deals were out with other companies, even Bell. But all of them were for phone internet. I honestly don’t care whether it is phone or cable, generally, just whether it works, and I have a theory about most people’s experiences with one or the other.

Most people are probably average users and are fine with either one. Maybe even 80% of them. It will work fine. Maybe some tweaks, etc., but both will work. Then there is another 5% who cannot work well with either setup…either their own computer setup is wrong, or they’re just idiots, the service isn’t going to work because the problem isn’t the service. And that leaves 15% where there is a definitive difference in quality of service. For example, there are pe ople who are with Bell, have problems with their service, undergo repeated attempts to fix it, and it just keeps being a problem. No matter what they try, it’s just a pain. So they switch, often to someone like Rogers. And suddenly it works. They think it’s a Bell problem, the whole company is the devil’s spawn, blah blah blah, and they like to complain loud and long about it on every forum they can think of, often with a very clear message “Rogers is better and anyone who is still with Bell is just an idiot.” Sitting right next door to them is a Rogers customer. They too had a problem, tried repeatedly to fix it, got nowhere, finally gave up, switched to Bell, and are now the voice of the newly-converted. Bell can do no wrong, Rogers is the devil’s spawn. Sound familiar? It has nothing probably to do with either company. It was just the wires in the house, local config, neighborhood, maybe local interference that was the problem. Not Bell vs. Rogers.

So when I saw all these “cheaper” companies, I balked. Mainly because they were only offering phone internet, and I’ve never tested the wires in the house. The phone wiring looks like it was done by a nervous and forgetful squirrel. Some of the jacks didn’t even “register”. It didn’t fill me with confidence. And if Rogers was working relatively perfectly for me, why mess with a good thing?

Well, here’s the kicker. I decided to make some other changes (discussed later), and I found out something kind of exciting. TekSavvy offered cable internet. In my neighbourhood. Cheaper, but with a slightly different configuration. I looked into it, basically all I would have to do is swap physical equipment, no need for anyone to come to my house to do anything with wires, it would be the identical setup as with Rogers outside, and they would just throw a switch somewhere. It sounded very enticing. Yet I hesitated.

So much of what I do in the house for other stuff, and the future changes, would depend on the internet working reliably. My wife is doing a semester of education this fall, and she needs internet access. Was now REALLY the right time to consider the switch? She was willing, partly for the cost savings, and because we also have our phones or wifi nearby. If it was messed up for a few days, I could get it fixed or working or just go back to what we had. I pulled the plug.

My new package with TekSavvy had same upload speeds (5 Mbps), which was interesting only as Rogers speed tests had never pushed above 3 Mbps. I don’t do a LOT of uploading, but occasionally when I’m backing up to the cloud, some reliable speed is good. TekSavvy’s tests have me at 4.9 Mbps every time, and a couple of times, I broke 5 (5.1, 5.2). No idea why, but it did.

Download speeds with Rogers was theoretically at 25, I would regularly top out at the 20 Mbps range. No biggie, I’m not a huge torrent freak, but I like to get what I pay for when I am downloading. TekSavvy is rated to 30, and I top out at…29.7 so far. Yep, almost exactly as advertised.

The big change is that I am no longer on unlimited transfers per month. The limit is 400 GB. I could drop it to 150 GB and save $10 a month, but thought I would start with 400 for the first few months while I’m figuring out backups to cloud storage too for some other stuff. I might leave it there, I might drop it. I could go up to unlimited for about another $10. Instead, I’m paying $55 a month. In other words, $25 a month less than I was paying for Rogers, although with slightly faster speeds and lower monthly bandwidth allowances. Rogers gave me a counter-offer, would have only been about $10 more than TekSavvy, so within the ballpark.

In the first year, that’s only $300 savings, and the new hardware cost me $200 (I bought the modem / router rather than renting it). I also added another switchbox to the mix, cost me $25 or so, but that was something I had been meaning to do for awhile, just hadn’t gotten around to it. When I had the basement finished, I had wires run from my 2nd floor office to the basement TV area and to the front-room TV area. Internet wiring to each. Actually two to the basement (one for TV, one for games). So, I kind of feel like I come out even for the first year. After that, $300 less per year isn’t a bad savings.

I know there are lots of people who will say, “Oh, TekSavvy sucks, you should be with x”. For me, it’s a lot like the Rogers/Bell fanatics. The only thing that matters is if it works, and mine does. If it stops working, or slows down drastically, I can always switch to someone else. And I’ll be a lot more willing to do that after I made a lot of other changes with Rogers setup already (more to come later). I’m with TekSavvy for my ISP, and that’s it. No other bundling with them. As such, I feel much more in control of my setup and costs.

As long as it works, no need to drastically change. The rate is pretty good, the service is excellent. I didn’t “cut the cord” and get rid of the internet, but I did trim the cost a bit. On to the other areas…

Watch out for brussels…

July 4 2015

One of the downsides of running a website (or 5) with comments enabled is that bots leave spam messages. The goal of the spammers is to leave something that might look enough like a regular comment to get through, and then once approved, to spam you at will (most sites have default if the user had a comment approved earlier, future comments get pre-approved — I block this feature and approve everything manually). One way to control spam is through plugins, and I do have several anti-bots that take the suspected spam and move it to a spam folder, just like most online email programs do. But I also review the spam folder just in case a legitimate message got through.

That wouldn’t normally sound like fun, but it is. There are some that come through as “great blog, love it, blah blah blah” and then say “here’s my site, check it out” (I don’t, obviously). But the approach up front is often intriguing:

You have packing, either mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes or both, rolls, sweetened cranberry sauce and then it’s topped off with pumpkin pie.
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Often they will do it as a question that looks and feels like a legitimate question from a user:

I do not know if it’s just me or if perhaps everybody else encountering problems with your blog. It appears as if some of the text in your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This could be a issue with my web browser because I’ve had this happen before. Thanks

And while some probably approve it, if you look at the spot where they can put their email address or website in the comment field, it’s a very obvious spam title like “*** SATISFY YOUR WOMAN ***”. Caught by their own desire to spam.

Some are text that are legitimate sentences but have nothing to do with anything:

This involves vacuuming off the dust which may deposit in crevices. You need to initial use white wine to assist dilute a red wine stain. Stay Away From Overused Language ‘ Be Original: Being ‘down-to-earth’ may be great, but do not mention it. School uniforms can be kept together, while work slacks must be in another place. You do not have to live with the blots and ground-in dirt on your carpeting.

Others are WTF moments:

WOW just what I was looking for. Came here by searching for skin issue.

It must be the key words I use like “skin”, “dermatology”, “treatment” when writing about HR or something computer-ish that drove them to me! 🙂

Others are just row after row of links to spam sites. But my all time favorite is the person who hasn’t configured a one-stop SPAM solution that says things like:

I really {like | love} your {site | blog | post | article | website}. You are very {smart | creative | well-regarded | intelligent | good at writing}.

For those, I actually am serious about them being my favorite…the comments are about 2 pages long, and are basically a form letter-style spam that us pretty well done. Highly generic, decently written, and obviously sold as a turn-key spam solution but the person buying it and implementing it is so stupid that they haven’t bothered to tailor it properly so it shows all the fields rather than the properly generated message the originator intended. In addition, the seller obviously intended for them to use one or two of the paragraphs, but instead the stupid newbie spammer has used 10-15 paragraphs. An excel spreadsheet with a random number generator would do just as good a job, and I’m almost tempted to program one to see if it can generate text for things like thank you posts, PFOs, etc. just to try it. It’s an interesting program solution but they did a good job in the design, even if the implementers are two bricks shy of a full wheelbarrow.

I await new spam, but in the interim, I have useful warnings like the following:

Hi there, just became alert to your blog through Google, and found that it’s really informative. I’m going to watch out for brussels. I’ll appreciate if you continue this in future. Many people will be benefited from your writing. Cheers!

Watch out for brussels? Thanks for the warning! 🙂

The pain of the internet

May 18 2015

There are times where I think the Internet is a wonderful creation, even with all its pitfalls, simply for how it allows people to easily communicate across vast differences. Then I see the downside of communicating with people that would be better kept at a distance.

My local astronomy group is the latest instance. The short version is that some of the local astronomy people don’t play well with others, and thus there are three local astronomy groups — the RASC (Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Ottawa Chapter), the OAFs (Ottawa Astronomy Friends), and the OAOG (Ottawa Valley Astronomy and Observers Group). Each group has its own eccentric nature and members, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that while most members really don’t care what the nomenclature is for any event, some do, apparently.

Take for instance our internet newsgroups. They are all relatively low-traffic — on a high-volume day, about 4-5 messages would be common, 10 would be an outlier. In total across all three groups. Most of the time there are 1-2, sometimes none. The exception is when a star party happens. When it does, people often send out notifications to all three groups saying “Okay, we’re planning one for X date”, then a second one just before to say, “Looks promising for tomorrow”, and then a third one to say, “Yep, weather is holding, we’re a GO for tonight.” Of course, then somebody invariably will respond to say, “I’ll be there” or “I’m bringing my 25″ scope”. All of which is normal everyday traffic.

Until earlier this week when the irregular scheduled troll appeared. Not always the same troll, but every group eventually has one. The snarky member who decides he’s pissed at the world and that everything that is being posted by other people is not up to his professional standards and is wasting everyone’s time. So, rather than ignoring it and getting a life, or raising it as a question for the group moderator, they blast the group. In some circles, this is often the start of a flame war.

However, here is why I am confused, and I’ll start with some context. I think generally there are four types of lists:

Announcement only (where only the list creator can post);
Moderated (where the list creator has to approve all posts);
Semi-open (anyone can post if they’re a member); or,
Open (anyone can post if they have the address).

There is an obvious reason that list moderators often opt for the open type – it builds a community by allowing people to post, comment, reply, discuss. Do I have views? Sure, I like semi-open over open, but I’m not the one running any of the lists.

And if I’m not running a list, why would I feel the need to police behaviour? It’s like a recent time at work — someone accidentally sent a message to a much larger distribution list than intended. Which was fine, it happens. Annoying, but understandable. However, people then started hitting REPLY ALL to say “take me off the list”, then others demanded by hitting REPLY ALL that other people stop hitting REPLY ALL (irony, thy pot is black). Then increasingly hostile messages policing the other behaviour. Totally separate from really hostile messages going back to the originator. For what? The recipient got a bunch of messages they didn’t want that they could have just deleted if 160 other people didn’t hit reply all and kill our servers.

Before blasting back, I also know how to work my own computer. For example, I could:

Raise the issue directly with the list moderator, not the person who sent the message — harassing other members is rarely a good idea, and often only results in a flame war. If I am not a moderator, I probably shouldn’t try to police behaviour on the list myself.
Verify my own list settings — switching to digest mode would give me a single email per day. Easy enough to scroll down to what I do care about.
Use my delete key — many email programs allow you to delete “THREADS” so if someone responds, it will auto-delete any responses too.
Set up a filter — I’m on another list with almost 20000 members. Some people rarely contribute anything I care about. So I added them to a blacklist on my email — anything coming from them gets auto-deleted, never shows up in my inbox.
Consider unsubscribing. My view is that if others are responding positively to posts and the moderators are allowing them, a pretty good bet that they were considered ON-TOPIC by most people on the list. Which means it may not be the list for me.

The part that genuinely confuses me on this one is the vehemence of the blast. The guy is subscribed to a local astronomy group’s news list. He’s objecting to announcements of meetings, planning of star parties, and people talking about their telescopes…I hate to contribute to flame wars, but I had to ask — what the heck did he want to talk about?

Articles I Like: Building my viewer base on my blog…

February 26 2015

I find the whole “traffic” thing kind of weird, I must say. Posts about Foreign Affairs almost 2 years ago still get hits, no idea why, maybe it’s just because there’s nothing else out there that is like it. Maybe I hit a niche. I blog about personal stuff, get a lot of hits, go even more personal, get nothing. Kind of hit or miss for me. I know, overall, though that it will grow, still finding out how to get the word out without turning into a self-promoting spammer whore. I do know that I need to drastically alter my FaceBook strategy at some point, just haven’t gotten to it yet. However, since I am interested in building my “reach” so to speak, I often find myself clicking on tips and tricks. Heidi Cohen published a blog entitled “How often should I post new content?”, so when I saw it in a list of resources from Jon Morrow, I immediately clicked over to see it.

There are lots of “rules” out there that are analytics-based that say “Thursday afternoon is the best for Twitter” or “Facebook is good from 10:00 to 2:00”, etc. And most of them, in my view, are completely useless. Put more technically, those may be great stats for the overall use of social media, but the standard deviation is gigantic if you do a sample size of “1” to see if it is applicable to your blog and content. The only way to know is to test it out on your own site. The problem, however, is that I’m not doing this full-time. It’s totally a part-time gig vs. other commitments. So I don’t have the flexibility to bend my schedule to my blogging schedule, and I don’t particularly like doing “scheduled” posts. I might draft something that is on my mind today, but 3 days from now, totally irrelevant. I’ve tried it, and what I find is that take-up is a lot less if my post isn’t written and posted in an “immediate tone”. I just write too passively if I know I’m not sharing it for several days.

Cohen’s piece isn’t about that — it’s about # of times per day and how many entries on your blog in total to start generating critical mass. Nothing revolutionary, but certainly interesting. The real gold in the blog post, however, is a section about how to increase your frequency and output, for which she has a list of 7 things to do.

Collect post ideas. Don’t force yourself to sit down and grind out a post from scratch. Jot down the ideas as you get them so that you build the outline of a post over time and it’s partially written before you start. I find this very helpful for reducing writing time.

I love this option, and I’ve been doing it for some time. My problem isn’t a lack of ideas as I’ve got in the habit of seeing topics and adding them to my Evernote list; my problem is not then going back to it and actually writing them!

Use an editorial calendar. While this may seem like additional work up front, it helps to schedule post ideas and ensures that you cover important topics.

I hope to adopt this later this year, not quite there yet, but more related to another type of content (memes) than my regular posts. I just don’t quite have a set routine/schedule for the other ones yet. But I’ll get there.

Mix in other media formats. Another way to facilitate content creation is to use other media types. For example, include a weekly video, cartoon or photo.

I haven’t yet figured this one out yet, but I’m working on it. I have lots of clip art to choose from, which is one option, but I am also looking for ways just to expand my normal repertoire. However, I don’t want pics just to have pics — they have to help me tell my story, or they’re no good to me.

Create regular columns. Like a traditional magazine’s on-going features, develop columns with built-in, easy-to-execute formats such as customer of the week or book review.

Similar to the second one about an editorial calendar, I do want to get there. In the meantime, some of them are standardized already (like book reviews or a recipe format).

Share the workload. Have regular columnists who write every week or every month. This works well for business blogs because a variety of employees are involved. Alternatively, invite guest bloggers.

This is an extremely popular suggestion, and my short answer is probably never. Come on and sing, “It’s my blog and I’ll write if I want to, write if I want to, write if I want to…you’d write too if you had a blog too”. It might be a bit of a control issue, I don’t know, but it strikes me as odd when you have other content on your blog. You’re running a blog, not a business website offering a platform to others usually. I don’t care if others do it, I probably won’t. The only exception I could see is if a friend had an interesting story to tell, and I thought it was worth sharing as a blog, and they don’t have their own blog. I might be tempted then, but I’d have to think about it. My blog, my words. It seems like a no-brainer — unless you’re more interested in fandom and followers to your site than you are in sharing YOUR expertise.

Curate content. Have focused round ups or a best posts feature. The critical element is to add commentary explaining why that post is important. Here’s where less is more. You’re providing a service by selecting the best of what’s out there.

This is exactly the approach I`m willing to take. Excerpts perhaps but add your own commentary. Otherwise, I think it`s just stealing, even if you give the original source. Fair use means you’re excerpting pieces, kind of what I’ve done here today with the pieces from the article. But I limited it to the context and then added my own pieces.

And how do you finish it off? By linking back to the original so they can find it, such as the original article that prompted this post via How Often Should I Post New Blog Content? [Charts] – Heidi Cohen.

The PolyBlog

My view from the lilypads

Tag Archives: computers