18th April 2007:
Why Blog?
Everyone else seems to be blogging, even Ryan Rosenberg, VP Marketing & Sales at Filemaker in the US is doing it. Why? How does he get the time? What is the purpose?
In fact, he gave me part of the answer when a few other UK developers and I meet him at Filemaker last year. He wanted to develop a two way dialogue with the developer community, so that his decision-making could benefit from that dialogue, from that understanding. Essentially he wanted to become better informed.
My old friend Justin Kirby gave me the rest of the answer yesterday. "Tell people what you are doing" he said. "Show them how and why you are passionate about you do, and ask them to tell you what they think. Ask them real questions and tell them when your decision making has been influenced by what they have said. By doing that you will open a dialogue and develop a relationship which will enable you to create better and more appropriate products and they will develop a more informed view of what you are doing and why."
How to Blog?
This made sense so first thing in the office this morning I had to decide how to do this, how do you blog? Logically, if you were able to edit a web site easily is seemed to be merely a case of writting straight into a html page, otherwise a framework that would produce the html would be required.
Fortunately, when we asked Phil Johnson to re-engineer our new web site last year we specified that it needed to be delivered as an Adobe Go-Live site i.e. ready for us to edit and manage from within Go-Live. Having discovered the delight of Go-Live's Components several versions ago it seemed to me that using Components for the site navigation would make editing and change fairly straight-forward since you just needed to create some new pages and redirect the navigation links in the main components to the new pages. It's really just a smart database. So you change one link, press save and every page containing that component gets re-written automatically. No doubt there are other ways of doing this but I like this method, it is fairly easy, fairly quick and reliable.
Then after another conversation with Justin took his further advice, found typepad.com and decided to publish through this blog service and repeat the material on my blog pages in deskspace.com.
Question: Can anyone tell me how to automate transferring the material in this blog to and from my own web pages?
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Update: I have linked this typepad blog into deskspace.com in place of the original local page and topped the blog with a banner to look like the web site - sort of. This avoids the previous question of how to move the data from one site to another. I also note that GoLive CS2 includes a set of Typepad tools - but that one needs to subscribe to the pro service in order to get the access required to build the Blog page from scratch and thus have complete control.
Is this correct: can anyone confirm, deny or expand this simplistic analysis? Ideally I think I want the Typepad blog page to appear as part of our own web site including full navigation both ways. The only possible concern is that the speed of display of the Typepad page seems somewhat slower than I would expect, slower than our normal pages.
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