Creative blogging strategies: Oblique Strategies

Blogging can be tough. It's hard work coming up with clever things to say, interesting tidbits to post week in, week out. Any blogger who's been blogging for a while knows the feeling of 'blogger's block'!

Don't worry, you're not alone if you've experienced a blogging malaise. Creative people have been developing strategies for overcoming the blocks, dead ends and barriers that hinder great work for centuries.

One of the most famous was developed in the 1970s by musician and record producer Brian Eno: A deck of cards named Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.

Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards, each card containing a piece of advice, an aphorism or question designed to jolt the user into approaching the problem from a different angle, including:

• Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
• Put in earplugs.
  
• Retrace your steps.
• Do nothing for as long as possible.
• Ask people to work against their better judgment
  

Eno stated in an interview that:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

Consulting Eno's Oblique Strategies may not work for you, but perhaps developing your own way of introducing random elements into your blogging process could help you to achieve better results. Or perhaps simply wearing earplugs while you blog will be enough...

Using RSS feeds

If you're an avid blogger, chances are that you read a whole lot of other blogs. It can be time consuming to keep track of every single blog you're interested in by actually visiting the blog to see if it's updated.

The good news is that you don't have to if you use RSS feeds. Now, I know 'RSS feed' is a funny name but really there's nothing to it!

An RSS feed is kind of like getting email from a website. Once you're subscribed to an RSS feed using a reader, you automatically receive the new content as an email every time the blog is updated.

Some popular readers include Google Reader and Technorati (which can also be used to promote your blog, as we'll see in a minute) but there are hundreds!

Here's a quick video that explains RSS feeds in plain English.



Of course, the other great thing about RSS feeds is that you can use them to promote your blog. You can do this by signing up for an account with RSS providers like Technorati and Feedburner. Keeping track of your feed in this way allows you to see how many subscribers you have and gives you access to a range of other methods for promoting your blog.

It's also a good idea to 'ping' search engines and other services using site such as Ping-o-Matic.

Ping-o-Matic sends out a 'ping' to tell everyone that your blog has been updated. All you need to do is enter the address of your blog and...'ping' - out it goes! This is especially good for telling search engines you've updated as Google loves websites with brand-new content.

Creative blogging strategies: Rules

In 1969 French writer Georges Perec wrote a novel titled A Void. Now, A Void contains all the things novels usually contain: plots and sub-plots, twists, characters, intrigue and so on, but it is missing one very important element. Unlike probably every other novel ever written it does not contain the letter 'e'.

When he began writing, Perec created a rule that the letter 'e' would not appear anywhere in the book. Why would a writer do such a thing, you might ask; why would he make things even more difficult for himself?

The answer is that Perec was part of a group of writers who thought that placing constraints on their writing was a great way to come up with new ideas and to force them to think about things in an unconventional way.
Writing a novel without the letter 'e' is an extreme example, but there are many ways working to rules or placing contraints on your blog could help you come up with great ideas and make your blog more interesting and unique.

For example:

• Limit yourself to one medium, ie writing, video or photography - can you make your point by only using images?
  
• If your blog is for a business, you could try excluding all mentions of your product or service - this would force you to talk around the topic, exploring the issues on the periphery (which might be being ignored by your competition!)
• Limit the colour scheme: black and white, green and blue: what would your blog look like if every image you posted had to have something green in it?
• Create a rule that you must sit down and post at the same time every day or the same time every week (will you work better when 'forcing' yourself to be creative rather than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike?)
  

Of course, rules are made to be broken. And the decision to finally break a rule might lead you to new inspiration. It might even spur you on in the opposite direction, like Perec, who went on to write The Exeter Text in 1972, a novel where the only vowel used is the letter 'e'.

Upcoming blog workshops April 2009

Blog Creation Workshop Sunday April 5th
1.30 – 4 pm
Canning St North Melbourne
Cost: $120 (includes afternoon tea)
To book: cecilia@ocean.com.au or 0412 474 282
(Advanced Blogging workshop on Monday April 13 $120. Both workshops $199)

Blogger is a program that gives creative people a way to show their work to the world, stylishly, instantly, and for free.

Regular websites can be cumbersome to start, to update, and to get finished. With Blogger, you can post your designs, your events, your unique ideas as they come. Interaction from your visitors allows you to shape things as you go, keeping you and your work relevant, interesting, and in demand.What shall we learn?
In this fun informal workshop, Matthew and Cecilia will guide you through the process of setting up a Google Blogger website. You will make your first postings and learn basic strategies for generating traffic (relevant readers) for your site. You will also be given an introduction to Google Analytics, which gives you hard data on how people discover and value the work you have posted, allowing you to spend more time on what works and less on what doesn’t.

How do you define a good blog or website?
And what exactly makes a bad site bad? The best way to create an interesting and successful blog is to look at other successful websites and make a list of things you might like to include in your own, for example:

Content – Having an idea in your head of whom you are blogging for is a way of keeping your website consistent and interesting.

Design – By default, your Blogger website will look good. What you now have to think about is what makes your site easy (or frustrating!) to use: link placement and colour, font size, archiving, and generally making it easy for your audience.

Setting up a Blogger blog
Cecilia and Matthew will run through the process of setting up a blog, including:

• Setting up a Google account
• Choosing a URL and blog name (with important tips for getting found on Google)
• Choosing and customising a template to give your blog a unique look and feel

Making your first posts
The key to a successful blog is to make readable and appealing. Paying attention to the little things such as neatly formatted text and consistent image size will help make your blog tidy and professional. Cecilia and Matthew will run through:

• Formatting text
• Adding hyperlinks
• Adding images

Advanced blogging techniques
After the basics have been covered, Matthew and Cecilia will introduce some more advanced techniques such as:

• Adding tags - this will make your posts easy to find and sort
• Beginners guide to generating traffic
• Keyword research - did you know that you can find out exactly what people are typing in to search engines? We'll show how to find out where the people are and what they're looking for
• Installing Google Analytics - registering for this free service gives you detailed data on almost everything about your visitors including where they come from, how long they stay, how often they return

Pre-course to do list

• Do a Google search for a blog on a topic of your interest. For example “permaculture blog” or “yoga blog”, and see the best and worst of what’s out there. Have a think about what your niche might be, and what might work for you.
• Think about your blog’s name and theme
• Write a couple of mini-stories that will be your first blog posts (a paragraph or two is fine)
• Bring a couple of images in jpg format (preferably under 1mb in file size)

Book by phone or email (hurry as there are limited places!)
You will be given a list of blogs to preview, account details to send your workshop payment to, and workshop location details.

As with all truly creative acts, to make progress it's best to just jump in and start first, then clarify and refine later. So long as you plan to keep on going. How do you plan to keep on going? Set a weekly schedule for blogging, and stick to it even if you don’t feel like it in the beginning. Set a scheduled time (one or two months from now) to review if you want to continue or abandon your blog.

Once you get momentum, blogging can become an addictive creative act!

What is a blog?

What is a blog, anyways?

I found this interesting little video on Youtube. It's a simplified overview of the way the media has changed in the last couple of decades. I do find it simplifies things a bit too much (there are many more creative things you can do with a blog than just publish 'news'!) but it is a good place to start.

It was fun: blog creation workshop

Last Sunday Matthew and I held our first workshop, guiding 4 creative people as they put their good work out into the world using Blogger.

Here is what one participant said:

"A charming experience with lovely, humble, earthly people. Cecilia has such an enticing feminine exuberance inspiring you with her own excitement, and Matthew was both gracious and informative, giving much needed and appreciated attention on one-to-one basis. The afternoon tea was delightful."

-Elen David, dancer

Course participants, from right: Elen David - performance artist and dance director, Katie de Araujo -Yoga and wellbeing teacher, Lynn Beaton- Writer, Sandy Gorskey - mosiac artist and teacher. The tall fellow is Matthew, web creation master.

If you would like to get better at blogging, or spend a stimulating sunday with interesting, out-there people, our next workshop is April 5th. Contact Cecilia (me) 0412 474 282 or email, or comment.

What will you learn and do at a Blog Creation Workshop? Well, You will get your own free and stylish Blogger website, where you can share your pictures and stories, trials and triumphs with the world. You will learn how to become visible to your target audience, and come out looking just as you want when someone does a Google search of your or your specialty.

Handy hints: Control F

Often you can get lost on the internet. Browsing through several windows at once and copying and pasting text and images to and from documents is a good way to forget what you are doing. One of the biggest time wasters can be finding that little bit of text you just read, or searching through lists of hundreds of items for that snippet of useful information...

Unfortunately we can't computerize your brain to improve your memory but we can show you a handy trick for quickly locating what you need on a web page: Control F. 

The Control F function works for all major web browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Safari. (On a Mac however, you'll have to use Command F.)

Here's how it works: 

• Hold down the Control key (Command for a Mac) and then push the letter 'F' on the keyboard. 
  
• Depending on the browser, a box will appear at the top or the bottom of the page. 
  
• Enter the text you wish to find in the text field and the corresponding words should automatically be highlighted on the web page. 
• If the word or phrase you are looking for appears more than once on the page you will have to scroll to the next occurrence using the arrows that appear next to the text field. 
• If the word or phrase does not appear you will get a 'phrase not found' message. (Remember to check your spelling!)

Control F is handy for searching through pages with lots of text to find the information you need quickly (for example text-heavy blogs or large Wikipedia entries), but it has another use for bloggers. 

If you've ever been stuck for hours searching through HTML looking for the correct place to paste a snippet of code (setting up Google Analytics, for example) then Control F could be very handy. Instead of entering a word or phrase, you can enter a HTML tag and the Control F tool will highlight it, saving you the chore of scrolling through lines and lines of code!