Category Archives: blogging

Good People Day 2010

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Two years ago Gary Vaynerchuk declared April 3rd Good People Day! It also happened to be the first day I made a video for randomsarah.com, and so I also declared it to be my blog’s birthday.

Every year I’ve been using my Good People Day post to sum up the last year, and thank all the AMAZING people in my life who made the past year awesome!

The past year of my personal life has been a crazy roller coaster that I cannot even begin to describe. But I wouldn’t take it back for anything because those experiences made me who I am today. I’m still struggling with a lot of the things that happened in the past year, but I know I will get through it because I have amazing friends and an even more amazing family.

But let’s focus on the good people in my more professional life.

David Lifson – I met you over a year ago and since then you have been a great friend, but an even bigger inspiration to me professionally. I am in awe of you every day as you continue to develop an awesome product with Postling.

Matt Knell – You’ve seen me through ups and downs and have always encouraged me to do what I love! Even if that meant waiting a while to figure out what I really wanted to do.

Michelle Deforest – You are an amazing women! I am inspired by training every day. Our professional relationship hasn’t crossed paths nearly enough, but we have the whole year ahead of us!

The entire Philadelphia tech community! – I don’t even know where to start, but I would be crazy to recap this past year without mentioning the awesome friends I made in Philly. There are way to many people to name, but you all welcomed me with open arms and you truly became my family there! I miss you all and I hope to visit soon!

My whole SXSW Family – You know who you are! This is an amazing group of people that sometimes I only see once a year in Austin, but I see them every day online and they make my life richer and full of love!

There are SOOO many people that I missed that have made this year memorable. You will forever be in my heart!

I’m looking forward to another great year blogging on randomsarah.com

Where to blog

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

Sometimes we think way too much about what we want to blog about, and where to post it. My blog got stuck in that. Usually on randomsarah.com, I would write about “social media”, “online tools” etc. So I hesitated when I wanted to blog about diet, food, weight loss, more personal things on randomsarah.com. But I do consider it my “personal blog” so why the hesitation?

What is your opinion of people who have “personal blogs” (that are clearly about a single topic or have a main focus) deviating from the normal scheduled programing to talk about something else that is important/interesting to them. Should they find somewhere else to write about it? Should they just post it on their blog and let the readers decide if they like it or not?

I’m posting this both on my tumblr, and on randomsarah.com

If you read either blog, I really want to hear your opinion. Also, I’ve been thinking about changing the link in my twitter profile to direct to tumblr instead of randomsarah.com, but I’m not sure which would give new follows the best idea of who I am, what I talk about, etc.

Thoughts?

Blogazine?

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

This morning I came across an amazing post by Smashing Magazine entitled “The Death of the Boring Blog Post”. It’s a great post that I wish I could re-blog here, but I honestly can’t because of the way the post is designed. (go look at it!)

It talks about the trend of Blogazines (blog that is designed like a magazine) not a magazine wordpress theme but rather designing a creative layout for each new blog post, based on the content itself. This requires skill, patience, dedication to the content and, most of all, effort on the part of the designer!

Reading these blogs is amazing. The content speaks to you visually and really pulls you in with the design. One such blog is Dustin Curtis. Here is what he said about creating this type of blog.

dustin_brainWhat prompted you to create a “blogazine” instead of a traditional blog?

I’m never satisfied with my work. Invariably, two weeks after finishing a design, I feel like I can do better. When I originally tried to design my blog, I kept finishing a design, hating it and starting over. This happened ten or twelve times until I finally gave up. Eventually, I realized that each post could stand on its own and be its own design that fit the content. Despite the holdbacks of HTML and CSS, it has worked much better than I had even anticipated.

Advantages?

The main advantage is one I didn’t anticipate. Doing a blogazine article requires a lot more work than a traditional blog post, and that has kept me on my toes; because such a large investment is required, I publish only what I feel are my best articles.

This seems to keep the quality fairly high. I start four or five articles for every one I publish. If I had a normal blog, that wouldn’t be the case — the other four articles would be published too, even though they wouldn’t be as good as the ones I do end up publishing.

Disadvantages?

The biggest disadvantage is that CSS and HTML are terrible technologies that weren’t designed for page layout. They were designed for structured content presentation, like for a newspaper, where all the elements throughout the website are the same and are re-used. But I’m trying to make a magazine, where the content and presentation are inextricably mixed and unique. The way presentation CSS is supposed to be decoupled from the content HTML is totally counter to the mission I am trying to accomplish, and it makes coding the articles frustrating, messy and time-consuming.

My solution to this problem has basically been to ignore convention and use inline styling for most of the presentation code and extract the website-wide presentation layer into a separate CSS document. This takes forever and is not ideal. To put it lightly, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with CSS.

I have often wished that I could create blog posts in InDesign. I come from a layout design background and I always had so much fun with InDesign and Photoshop creating interesting, yet still readable design. Unfortunately it would be very difficult for me to create this type of blog. While I do posses the design skill, I do not have any real HTML or CSS knowledge to bring the post to life online.

I hope to see more blogs like this one in the future. I think they are a great way to highlight online content.

7 Tips to Help with the Blogging Blues

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Since I redesigned my blog I have gotten a lot of great compliments on it. But a lot of my friends have asked how I keep up with writing.

I admit it can be very hard at times but you have to come up with ways to get over the blogging blues.

One of my favorite blogs, Style Me Pretty, just launched a supplemental blog called Backstage, where they write about the in’s and out’s of blogging as a business. The blog is a great read and recently Abby Larson wrote a post about Blogging Blues that I really wanted to share with you guys.

I’ve been noticing that a few of my favorite bloggers have been getting the burnout blues these days. And I totally get it. In this industry, it’s really hard to stay on top. To stay fresh and innovative and to approach each new day with a different set of enthusiastic phrases. And although I love what I do, the blogging blues can bite you when you least expect it. So today, I thought I would remind myself and all of you how to bring back that sparkle to the job that you know you love…you just might have forgotten why you love it.

  1. Keep a gratitude journal. Sounds big time cheesy, I know. But writing down the reasons that we are grateful for our jobs, for our creative brains, for our lives…will remind us all as to just how lucky we are.
  2. Take a break from the mundane and for one day, make it all about the fun. What does this mean? Well…if you are a florist and are bogged down in the business of being a florist, set aside one day to design flowers for your closest friends. Totally YOUR designs, influenced only by your love of your craft. For a wedding blogger this might mean spending a day with a cup of hot chocolate, sifting through all of your favorite vendor sites, finding inspiration in back copies of domino magazine, poring through galleries of your favorite weddings. Even reading your OWN blog to rediscover your voice, your passion.
  3. Reserve a day just for housekeeping. It will be a brutal day…paperwork, number crunching, computer cleaning…but in the end, it will free up your brain space to get back to what you love.
  4. Reserve a day just for brainstorming. Tait and I had a 2 hour meeting the other day to hash out all of the little details we needed to in order to move forward. It was hugely fulfilling and definitely reignited my motivation and excitement. Getting together a brainstorming meeting with your team will definitely bring back a little buzz. By encouraging everyone to participate (interns too)  in your session, you’ll inspire them, you’ll potentially discover a different perspective, you’ll get the fun brewing among everyone.
  5. At the end of the day, shut the computer off, swear off emails and grab a glass of wine or a hot cup of tea. Take a moment to think about your day and to find the bright spots, the spots that make your stresses all worthwhile.

I know that these aren’t particularly mind blowing ideas, but these are little things that I do to give myself a pick-me-up. Of course, we all struggle with different parts of our lives. Running a family, keeping a nice home, maintaining relationships with our friends, running a business. It’s basically impossible to do all of these really well but it isn’t impossible to fall in love with the journey.

A few things I wanted to add to this list:

  1. Don’t be afraid to re-blog. If someone wrote a post that you like, if it’s something you think your readers would benifit from, or if you feel like you have something to add to that post, don’t hesitate to re-blog the post. As long as you give credit to the original author and don’t try to claim the ideas as your own.
  2. Read more. If you are feeling like you are in a blogging rut, read more blogs. And start reading blogs that might not fall into your “category” of blogging. Technically Random Sarah is my personal blog, but it focuses on social media and web 2.0. But I read a lot of food blogs, fashion blogs, friends personal blogs, tech blogs, local blogs. It helps me see what is out there and really reflect on how I am writing my own content.

You have to love your blog, if you don’t know why you are blogging maybe it’s time to take a break from it and reflect on why you started blogging in the first place. Let me know what helps you stay motivated to blog in the comments.