Tag Archives: blogging

Ch Ch Ch Changes

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
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Welcome everyone to the new Random Sarah. I hope you like the new theme, but more importantly I hope you enjoy the new content. I’m moving towards having this be more of a personal blog again. I made an attempt to do that last year, but I’m giving it another shot.

I’m not yet ready to admit defeat and say that Tumblr killed my blog, but I will say that it wounded it. My Tumblr has become a place where I really can post about anything. It really is much more random than Random Sarah is these days.

But I’m not giving up on my blog just yet. I’m just allowing myself to explore all the different things I’m interested in here on Random Sarah.

Don’t worry, I still love the internet and I’m sure I will write about startups and tech from time to time. But I also want to feel free to post about art, photography, interior design, food, and all the other things that catch my interests.

That may seem a little unfocused, but I got some good advice recently about blogging, if you keep writing, it will get focused. That’s exactly what happened when I started Random Sarah back in 2008. The more I wrote, the more I found myself talking about social media, online communities, and gadgets. It was a great way for me to get involved in the community and learn. Now that I talk about a lot of that stuff on a daily basis for work, I want to explore new areas in the same way.

I hope you keep reading Random Sarah. Any feedback you have on the changes I’d love to hear it.

Listening to your community

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
1

Building community is something I’ve always loved. My first experiment in community building was this blog, my personal blog. That community has grown, and stayed with me these last 3 years. From back when I started video blogging on Viddler, when I was doing Y! Live videos every night, when I was a featured user on Pownce,  when I started a video podcast, there have been so many awesome adventures that this community has supported me through.

But when you build a community, you also need to see how it reacts to changes that you make. When I started blogging about health and food, those posts never got nearly as much positive feedback from the community as the posts I would write about iPhone apps, or my geek gift guide. Just because my personal interests shifted, I can’t expect the entire community I built to be interested in it too.

So even though this is my personal blog, I feel that the content has lost direction and I would really like to re-focus it. I will continue to write about technology, geeky things, and online communities here on Random Sarah.

However, writing about food, health and my diet is something that I have a growing interest in and while I won’t write about it here on Random Sarah anymore, I am pleased to announce that I am started a food blog called Eat Raw. I wanted to start from scratch and build a community there that is interested in learning more about raw foods, and health in general. I have different goals for Eat Raw now then goals I had when I started Random Sarah. Some of my goals are the become a featured publisher on FoodBuzz, to grow a community that is interested in Raw Foods, and possibly attend a Raw Foods culinary school and see where that takes me.

These are all things that I would love to happen, but it will take hard work and dedication to the community for it to grow. But I wanted to let all of my Random Sarah readers know about my new endeavor into the world of food blogging and to let you know that I will continue to bring you the same Random Sarah content here that you are used to.

Thank you again for supporting me and reading Random Sarah.

Finding time to blog

Posted on by Sarah Cooley
4

So since I got my dream job as the community manager for Postling, everything got really busy, really fast. I’m working a full time job, going to school full time at night, and trying to stay healthy and lose weight!

How does one find time to blog in the midst of all that?!

I’m starting to thing that I really have to start a writing schedule, and make the time to write the blog posts I want to write and make the videos I want to make.

I enjoy producing content, so it’s stressful for me when I don’t have time for that outlet in my life.

But I wanted to give you all an update on my weight loss goals, and staying healthy through all this stress. I’ve officially lost 20 lbs!

When I first started at Postling, it seemed very difficult to stick with my regular eating schedule. When you are suddenly out of your element, you lose control of your food to a certain extent. And if you aren’t the type of person who plans every meal in advance, suddenly not being in your own kitchen can make deciding what to eat very difficult! (especially when you are vegan)

I’m starting to feel like I’ve regained control and even picked up a few great tips on how to eat anywhere and stick to my plan. (more on that in a later blog post)

Stepping on the scale and seeing a lower number than before still feels amazing, and I’m looking forward to losing the next 20 lbs!

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.