Catching up with the 31day challenge

August was the month for the 31days to a better blog challenge. Only there weren’t enough hours in the day to get 31days of tasks done with all of the other things in my life. So, I have extended into September, and it may take even longer.

It’s not that I haven’t been working on this every day. Blogging is pretty simple to do, but very difficult to do well. All of the little details that make a difference collectively take time. Commenting, for example, can be really important to building community. In order to comment effectively, you have to read and think about the blog you are commenting on. Takes time. And when you are reading a wide variety of blogs, there are endless links to follow and interesting paths to run off on. Soon enough, one cat is sitting on the keyboard reminding me her food is a higher priority while the others are trying cute, leg rubbing and other assorted tactics. They are pretty hard to resist.
Days 20-22

The day 20 reader survey has been postponed through the infinite wisdom of Alex Miller. I am working on my Day 21 Reader focus posting about Sue Waters for BlogCascadia, as we have a program coming up on M-Learning next week. Sue’s blog, podcasts, and wiki are incredible resources in this area. Day 22 is posting to help new readers catch up on the focus of my blog, which I’m thinking will be a good follow up after determining my blog’s mission for Day 28.

Day 23: Go on a dead link hunt

This was a surprising task for me. I assumed since my blog is only 5 months old, I wouldn’t have dead links. But I did. I learned when I link to pages for specific events, often those pages are taken down after the event is over. I used two services to find the problem links, W3C checker and Xenu.

The W3C checker was fast, but it returned a list of broken urls, without telling me which page they were on. I didn’t want to sit down and fix them all at once by following the links then going to the admin for each one.

Xenu Link sleuth just seemed easier to use. The reports include multiple ways to listing the dead links, which were more conducive to working on them in smaller batches.

Day 24 is for search engine optimization. At this point if I can write for humans I’m happy. Someday when this all becomes second nature, I will be happy to focus on writing for machines.

Day 25 sent us shopping to learn about blogging, but I decided to go bike riding for blog learning instead.

For Day 26 we linked up to a complementary site. I chose to write a post about the book Visual Learning that Xplane, The Visual Thinking Company has republished. Today I got a call inviting me to facilitate at a conference as a result. Sweet!

Day 27 had us searching for a sponsor for our blog. Somehow I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet. Visual communication just hasn’t quite reached the pulse of the blogsphere mainstream yet.

Day 28 is for blog mission statement and I intend to work on this on two long flights across the US this weekend.

Day 29 was focused on thanking people who link to us. Common courtesy, which Alex Miller wrote a great post about.

Day 30 Social Media Sites. I’m really trying here. I have my Linked in profile. I have a Facebook account with only a couple of friends, and I keep trying to get the value of Twitter by following around a couple of other challenge participants. The key learning for me is these sites work when you have a critical mass of connections who are actively participating. My professional and personal networks still prefer face to face and email. When I do go to most of these sites, I feel like someone who has arrived at the party too early, or maybe better yet, the chaperone who just knows the real fun stuff is happening just out of my sight. I’m going to keep trying.

Day 31 is to take a strategic look at our blogs. This will come after setting the base line in my mission statement.

There have been a lot of really wonderful things that have come out of this process, and I will write about more of them soon. One of the best is that the group who worked on this, motivated by Michele Martin, has decided to go forward with the Building a Better Blog Community. After only five days, the group has more than doubled. I look forward to continuing learning with this global online community.