VJ Blogs and Technorati

[DrEskaton]

I've noticed very few VJ's are running blogs of their gigs or other news.

If you want a free easy way to promote yourself this might be worth checking out.

I've just set up Wordpress using Simpletags plugin which I found pretty painless and easy.

As a result my website has an automatic RSS feed and anyone using the Technorati blog search service and searching for VJ gets my webpage in the search.

Details on setting it all up...

www.wordpress.org
www.technorati.com

live search of millions of blogs for VJ:
http://www.technorati.com/tag/VJ

[SilentEclipse]

Dr Eskaton, I have been looking at your post for 5 minutes and I still dont understand it.

What is an Rss feed...for starters?

[DrEskaton]

ok sorry, yes it was very heavy on jargon my bad....

RSS = really simple syndication. its a way that people can subscribe to your web page and get something ike a scrolling news ticker of headlines.

take a look at this explanation from BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm

The important thing is that RSS provides an easy way of search engines being notified when your web site is updated.

a blog= weblog. an automated way to update your website more easily. eg WordPress or Livejournal.

I found it a real pain to update my website with gig reports and photo galleries. So I've started using an automated content system called Wordpress. Now I can generate new pages including photo galleries really quickly through web forms, I don't need to use a HTML editor and upload pages manually anymore.

Take a look at www.quartonian.net especially the screen shot gallery. Everything is done automatically even generating the thumbnails.

so far I have wordpress just on my quartonian.net site but I'm going to convert the rest of my website soon. Especially I'm going to do an update after every gig with photos of the event and it will all be much faster now.

Technorati is a very powerful search engine that automatically searches peoples weblogs and is notified everytime someone makes an update (through an RSS feed). It's the google of weblogs.

these links might help with the rest of it...

http://wordpress.org/docs/faq/
http://www.technorati.com/help/faq.html
http://www.technorati.com/help/blogging101.html

I think a lot of VJ's would find it useful to have automated blogs for their sites so I was trying to share the info I found and if we all use the technorati tag VJ on our sites then we can easily keep an eye on what people are doing.

[SilentEclipse]

OK thats great thanks, I understand it now.

I dont have a website but is there a way that i can create a stand alone blog for my visuals and have it updated on technorati?

and if so what would be the best blogging site (????) or portal...woteva :confused: to use?

:help:

[trotskythecat]

I would highly recommend wordpress (http://www.wordpress.org) - easy to use, free, powerful. That's what I'm running at the lava flow (http://flow.la-va.org).

Would you tell me good Dr, what plugin are you using to create your galleries?

[DrEskaton]

trotsky,

im using exhibit for the galleries, from here
http://redalt.com/downloads/

plus adhesive from the same site.

I'm also using SimpleTags
http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/

and

Download Manager
http://guff.szub.net/download-manager/

Eclipse, just do a google search for "free wordpress hosting"

but I would highly recommend paying for a shared host which gives you more control over your website. I pay $50 GPB a year for very good hosting.

I go through these guys www.alternative.net.au

they're Australian but with US based servers.

what you want to ask for is webhosting using CPanel + Fantastico (these are tools to setup and manage your website) wordpress is one of the options that fantastico installs for you.

yeh it's a lot to learn, a lot of jargon... that's why i thought i'd pass some knowledge on after just going through it myself....

[WordVirus23]

there's always:
www.livejournal.com
and my prefered networking/blog solution
www.myspace.com

it's set up to allow videos on pages, has a picture gallery, or you can always use something like:
www.photobucket.com
to host your pics and just link to them.

these are solutions for people who'd rather not put that much mental footwork into having a presence online.

http://www.myspace.com/wordvirus23

and my blog is @:
http://blog.myspace.com/wordvirus23

[PanicFilms]

I just started a blog telling my story from VJ'ing with a band called Airiel (http://www.airiel.com) at this link here (http://pinecone4.blogspot.com)
blogger is pretty easy and user friendly. i'm also on myspace here (http://www.myspace.com/arturovalle)

[Nema]

here's another one: http://healthygeek.blogspot.com/
btw, i also made a 100% automated blog that collects rss feeds with articles about programming, theater, vjing etc from all over the world. http://hippotizer.suprglu.com/

[Lara]

We made a Narrative Lab blog here. (http://www.nlab.org.uk)

[famouswhendead]

we just put stuff on our site....

[holly]

Also using wordpress on wetcircuit.com, but my tags are done using Ultimate Tag Warrior(link (http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/10/23/the-ultimate-tag-warrior-wordpress-plugin/)) which find to be swell.

[littlecatalyst]

...and i thought that everyone was getting all creative with their font sizes... silly me, of course its automated...

[littlecatalyst]

hey holly when you use tag warrior, do you chose which tags are big and which are small or is it random?

[robotfunk]

wordpress too here, not really tagging as of yet (should I?)
another software tip:
I use gregarius (http://gregarius.net/) to digest all my fave RSS feeds into my 'personal newspaper' which I read twice a day (hour).
Unlike a lot of website that provide such a thing, this lives on my own server, so no ads and it looks how I want it to look (well it will at some point). Having it on my server means I can access it anywhere.
here's mine (http://www.robotfunk.com/rss/)

[robotfunk]

hey holly when you use tag warrior, do you chose which tags are big and which are small or is it random?
I think neither, the size would be an indicator of how closely the tag matches the content of your site.

[holly]

hey holly when you use tag warrior, do you chose which tags are big and which are small or is it random?
It's not random (although it looks pleasantly random), it's based on how many posts contain that tag: the bigger or (sometimes) brighter the words the more often (the more relevant) the subject is to your site. It's called a "tag cloud" and it's user-definable: can be listed alphabetical, or more-posts-come-first, or more-posts=bigger-font, or more-posts=different-color, etc. It's dynamic and updates itself (woohoo!).

On my site I set the tag cloud to list the tags in order of most used, plus color them in order of most used so you get the fade-effect from bright to dark, top to bottom, large to small. If you rollover any of the tags there is a little floaty "title" which pops up and shows you how many posts will come up when you click it.

RF, tags are the new categories. I still use categories for big sorting and certain plugins that do stuff based on categories (like private areas), for instance on my site I seperate my personal works and portfolios from the areas that are admired works by other people. For this main-level sorting I use categories, but for topics and sub-categories I'm using tags. I'm using only about 7 categories. Not sure how many tags, but probably will add more as time goes on.

[holly]

Well, we covered the blog thing a little. Some of the plugins Esk mentions I'm also using ("manage downloads" for my free clips, "adhesive" for sticky posts), but not too much mention of Technorati. Since it'spart of this thread title I'd like to say it kinda sucks: looks sorta messy and searching for "VJ" didn't bring up Esk's site within the first 4 pages, but it did bring up one of my EyeWash pages for "VJ Moto", which altho "VJ Moto" is a tag on the Forward Motion Theater site, it isn't quite the same as just "VJ"....

At least someone is doing a tag search engine, just wish it was a little cleaner.

[rhino]

I just dumped my old website because I found it far too tiresome to update, I just use livejournal for everything now, it takes a few minutes to update, I can even update text and images via my mobile phone. I love it!

[littlecatalyst]

what's your LJ username?

the only drags with live journal are that theres no counter and it's a bit wonky if you want to take it to your own url, and i have yet to figure out a way to embedd videos which you can even do in blogger now

[rhino]

http://richarddesouza.livejournal.com/

[Miguelo619]

I'm not smart enough to figure out wordpress so I use blogger..
http://accentfeed.blogspot.com/

[Jukkis]

Anyone using youtube.com for 'hosting' or promoting their visuals?

It has nice connectivity with http://www.blogger.com or http://www.blogspot.com (same site).

You can add new video clips to your own blog with one click (via your youtube.com account/site), no coding needed.


Heres' blog I've there, it's not about VJiing, but just showing as example how you can integrate your (or someone others) youtube.com videos to your blog.

http://homemadetubers.blogspot.com/

All videos and blog posting I've made via youtube.com, not on blogger.com ... it's really simple to use.

Same way you can of course fairly easily integrate youtube.com videos to any blog, but this is what I've used + myspace.com of course. ;)


I never really liked of livejournal.com ... it's somehow clumpsy.

Technorati.com is really cool, but it's more for people finding your blog or blog topics/tags via it... so basically it's like google, but for finding blogs and subjects etc.

If I would need to recommend one blogging software, it would wordpress, it has really nice collections of plugins, so you can tweak it really a lot... but with wordpress it might be good to have own hosting space with php/mysql-support and some knownledge of web techniques.

Anyway... remember to tag your blog posting, it's really important so "right" people can find your posts and blog. With blogger.com is downside, that I've not found possibility for tagging posts yet. ????

just my 2 cents.

:love3:

[technodrombg]

http://lab604.blogspot.com
just keeping track of my gigs