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Hello Fellow Blissdom Canada Attendees!

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Like many other web-savvy Canadian women, I will be attending Blissdom Canada this weekend. This conference is in its second year, and after the great time I had last year, I was thrilled to be able to attend again. The #blissdomcanada hashtag has been going nuts for weeks. Lots of folks returning, and lots of new people coming. We’re all so excited to meet and learn from each other. Never mind all the talking that can be done outside of 140 characters!

I plan to meet and talk with as many people as I can. Like lots of people who spend a significant amount of time online, I can be shy, but once I get talking, I may not stop! (I’ll try to rein that in, so you can talk too!)

If we’ve never met before (online or off), here’s an introduction of sorts:

  • hellomelissa.net is my personal blog. I’ve been blogging since 2000 and have done so under several domains and platforms (my About page tells this story in more detail). I write about my life and issues that are important to me. I don’t write as much as I’d like, and I’m hoping that this conference gives me some much-needed inspiration.
  • My twitter account is @mpricemitchell.
  • You can follow/friend me at various sites by either checking out the “follow me” widget in my sidebar, or by visiting my about.me page.
  • I have a fulltime job outside of the social media sphere, so I’m not in the know about every little thing going on out there. That bums me out sometimes.
  • I live in Toronto with my husband, daughter, cat and dog. I’m originally from a small town so I’m not completely city-fied yet.

That’s enough about me. I can’t wait to learn more about you! Hope to see you there and have a chat. If you see me at a table by myself, come join me! I’m not saving seats – I’m passively networking, hoping you’ll come sit with me!

#reverb10 – Day 7: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010?

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December 7 Prompt

Author: Cali Harris
caligater.com
@caligater

Prompt: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

reverb10.com

This article, posted yesterday on parentcentral.ca sums up some of my feelings on community:

First-time moms more likely to tweet and text than others

I was tweeting for over a year before I became a parent, but I found my usage really took off once I became a mum and was at home with the baby. I posted in other places too: Facebook, my “baby board” – a message board geared to mums with babies born in the same month as mine, my website, Flickr and so many places.

Having a baby just gave me so much to say to the world. I think that was because when I was at home, I was talking to myself or the newborn, who didn’t talk back yet. I needed an outlet for all the little things I wanted to say, but would forget by the time my husband returned from work. (By then, those little things weren’t usually as important anyway.)

Once I got out of the newborn haze, it was easier to reach out to the world and talk about things other than parenting a baby. I struggled with talking and posting about her too much, and reminded myself to talk about the rest of my life. Like most new mums though, my world was small and didn’t stretch much beyond my daughter. As she got older, my world got bigger, and now I feel like I’m part of the world as a person again, and not just a parent.

Two years ago, I never could have participated in this type of writing project. It would have been boring, repetitive and I wouldn’t have had the time. It may still be occasionally boring and repetitive now, but at least I’m not saying “ZOMG BAYBEEZ!” in every sentence.

I have been so grateful to connect with so many people online, whether they are parents or not. Going to Blissdom Canada this year allowed me to take that sense of community into the real world, and I hope to repeat that in 2011.

I find it easier to reach out online. Now I need to do a little more reaching out in the real world. I hope to do both in 2011.

My experience at Blissdom Canada 2010

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I attended my first blogging/social media conference last week. I’m finally starting to catch up with the cool kids on the interwebs!

I even lived to tweet about it.

I went to Blissdom Canada 2010 here in Toronto. Billed as “Canada’s first social media conference for women” it came with a lot of hype, and some high expectations. Tickets sold out very quickly so I was extra grateful to get my earlybird tickets. I would have been kicking myself if I had missed such an event taking place in my own city.

The conference ended on Friday so I’ve been processing it for a few days now. I’m struggling with how to put my feelings into words outside of “I had a fabulous time and learned a lot“.

It was great to be able to meet women who care about writing – and writing online – as much as I do. Matching faces to Twitter avatars is always fun – I joked that people would recognize me if I turned my head a certain way. I met and spoke to so many people I hoped to meet. I met and spoke to people I didn’t know of until we met, and now I have tons more blogs and tweets to follow.

Watching the smartphones and laptops going nonstop during the conference was a neat thing to watch. Some people are really great at live-tweeting or live-blogging an event or panel, which is really valuable for those following along at home. I tried to keep that to a minimum because I’m not great at it – I find I tweet one thought and miss the next one. I wanted to be sure I heard everything so I tried to keep my communications to a minimum during panels. It was neat to check my email and discover that my table mates had already started following my Twitter account. An extra bonus is that I’m already finding that I’m having more conversations on Twitter. I hope to keep that up. The fact that so many people are still using the #BlissdomCanada hashtag days after the conference ended says a lot about how much people got out of it.

What I wish that I had done differently

I wish that I had spoken up more! I have a tendency to speak less and listen more when I’m around people or situations I don’t know well. This is not a bad thing but listening to a conversation without contributing more than the bare minimum doesn’t show my best side. Once I warm up a bit, I can usually jump in and out as necessary, but I may end up saying something stupid or awkward. I know everyone does this, but I’d love a few less facepalm moments in my life.

I wish that I had asked more questions at the panels! This is related to my first point. I tend to not ask the questions I want to ask until close to the end or not at all. I want to listen to everyone else and see if they ask – or answer – my questions before I have to ask them. That doesn’t always happen so I need to learn to speak up for myself, whether it’s a question or a point I’d like to make.

I wish that I had a better “elevator pitch”! People would ask me about hellomelissa.net and I would say “I’m a personal blogger”. The next question would be “how long have you been doing this?” and my answer would be “over ten years”. I’m a dinosaur by blogging standards (and to a lesser degree, by Twitter standards, seeing that I started tweeting in 2007), and sometimes it shows. I was a little embarrassed that I depended on my longevity in the medium to try and legitimize myself. (I’ve struggled with this for awhile now as the link to a post from earlier this year mentions.) I struggle with the whole “elevator pitch” thing in real life too though so this is not a new thing for me.

I don’t want to be completely negative on myself so here’s some good stuff.

What I’m glad that I did right (for me)

I’m glad I mingled. I tried to sit with different people for each session. I came alone (and got a smiley face sticker to prove it) so it wasn’t like I had a group of friends I could hang with by default. Since I wasn’t staying in the hotel (hometown advantage! or disadvantage depending on how you look at it), I didn’t have roommates or travel mates. That left me free to sit with and talk to whomever I wanted. I spoke to lots of people – many of whom I may not have gotten to meet if I had sat with the same people all the time. When I went to the panels, I always sat at an empty or near-empty table and welcomed anyone who wanted to sit with me. That’s probably a passive form of networking, but it was networking  nonetheless. If I wanted to go lone wolf and do things on my own, that didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings either.

RockersI’m glad I dressed up for Halloween party. I was having a hard time trying to figure out a costume for the closing party. A frenzied trip to Value Village on the Wednesday before got me the stuff I needed. It wasn’t a fabulous costume, but I made an effort and that’s what really mattered. The fact that I ended up accidentally meshing with a couple of other costumes was a happy accident. Rockers unite!

I’m glad I sang karaoke at the party. I love karaoke, and I don’t get to do it often. I could have taken the easy way out and let everyone else do the singing. I’m fine once I get up there but I spend the time until they call my name super nervous and wishing I had never signed up. Once I’m done, I’m dying to go up again. I’m not the best singer by any means – I follow the “if you can’t sing it well, sing it loud”  school of thought. But getting out of my sometimes shy, take a while to warm up, listening self to get up in front of people and potentially make an ass out of myself is a great way to get out of my comfort zone. That and I have a secret rockstar living inside of me.

In Summary

A+++, will attend again. You should come too.

Playing with Posterous

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So, as you’ve probably figured out, I’ve opened a Posterous account. As the title of the site indicates, I’m using it as a junk drawer section for hellomelissa.net, my main site. You can access it from this site by clicking on the Junk Drawer link at the top of this page.

“Junk drawer” to me means: items I want to save for myself (like all those recipes I posted last night), pictures that I want to post but not necessarily post on my Flickr page (I’d like to keep all the pictures I’ve been posting on various twitter picture hosting sites in one place that is searchable.), and thoughts/links that are too long for Twitter but too short (or inappropriate) for this site.

What I like so far about Posterous:

it really is as easy as they say it is.

The bookmarklet – I posted all those recipes last night by going through my Read It Later list (where the links to those recipes were originally stored) and highlighting the recipe. Then I just clicked the bookmarklet and it picked up the formatted text and included the attribution link. I did some cleanup in a couple of spots to get rid of “Send to a friend” type links, but on the whole it was really smooth. I only had issues with autoposting (which I’ll go into detail on below).

What I don’t like so far about Posterous:

I really wish I could put this functionality on my own (WordPress) site. Not sure if a self-hosted Posterous would work like a self-hosted WordPress site, but I like having control. I like knowing exactly where my files are and being able to access them via FTP. Given that this is for my junk drawer stuff, this doesn’t bother me as much as if it was for my entire site. This is my issue though – many people prefer that Posterous does all the heavy lifting. I may also prefer it too someday, but I love my plugins!

I want Autopost to be SometimesPost. I added all my services so I could have the little icons under my profile. Then people can visit those places easily. I don’t want to autopost to those sites all of the time. I changed my autopost settings to say no one can autopost at all. My icons are still there, which is what I want. The problem with this is then I can’t click on a post after it’s been posted and autopost it because my services aren’t configured to autopost.

Then there’s the bookmarklet. Before I turned my autoposting off, I made a few posts last night with the bookmarklet but forgot to turn off the autoposting. Those posts then went to my various services in ways I didn’t want them to. Then I ran around (figuratively) deleting all the crossposts. The turn off autopost box is on the second page of the bookmarklet so it’s easy to forget to uncheck it.

To sum up I want to autopost some of the time, but I want to also be able to do it after a post has already made it to Posterous. I think I need to work on fine-tuning my Autopost options but any insight you have is totally welcome.

On the whole

I think Posterous will be lots of fun to play with. Any tips and tricks you have are totally welcome. For now, I’m going to look for Greasemonkey scripts to see if I can do some tweaking.

Update: See my update post (which was updated itself) to see how I figured out how I plan to work with these sites. It took some fiddling, but I think I can establish a good workflow now.

10 iPhone Apps I love right now: September 2010

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It’s been nearly seven months since my last post talking about iPhone apps I love. I still use nearly all of those apps regularly (I’m a little burnt out on Bejeweled 2 at the moment), but it’s high time I shared more of my favourites with you*.

Favourite Notetaking App: Awesome Note

$3.99 (free version available)

iTunes link

This is my go-to notetaking app on my phone. I love that you can file the notes in folders by subject. There is also a “quick note” option for those scratchpad-style notes that you may or may not need later (there is an option to save quick notes as full notes until you choose to clear them).

There are multiple views for each folder: thumbnails, list, to do, detailed, diary, photo and calendar. It is also possible to set due dates/alarms for each of your tasks. You can also back up, sync or transfer your notes to Google Docs or Evernote.

I use this app all the time and I really only use the basic features. As you can see, I use Awesome Note to jot down little notes about things I’m thinking about on the go. (There are also folders for Sean and for recipes off-screen.) I still keep a paper notebook in my purse, but I find I use it much less than I did before I got this app. Totally worth paying for.

Favourite Delicious App: Yummy

$1.99 (free, pared-down version available)

iTunes link

This mobile Delicious (the social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!) client is one of the few (if not only) iPhone app that allows people to sign into Delicious with their associated Yahoo! ID. (If you use a Yahoo! ID with Delicious, you can only sign in with that ID and not with your Delicious ID. I learned that one the hard way.) It’s simple and does the job. View and add your bookmarks on the go, add links to Read It Later (more about that app further down). The Safari bookmarklet makes it easy to send links you’re reading in Safari to Delicious without emailling to yourself to access from your desktop. Simple but very useful.

Favourite RSS Management App: Feeds

$3.99

iTunes link

While I still use Byline for most of my actual feed reading, I didn’t like that it couldn’t add, delete or organize feeds for me on my phone. Enter Feeds. It does all of those things, and is a nice little RSS reader to boot. It syncs with Google Reader or can be used as a standalone reader (nice if you don’t want to use Google as your main reader) Feeds has a clean interface with choice of colours (hey look! I’m using orange!) It also does offline reading, but since I like Byline so much, I haven’t used this feature much yet.

Favourite Offline Reading App: Read it Later

$4.99 (free version available)

iTunes link

Read it Later allows you to save any website for well, reading it later. It is available as a Firefox extension as well as an iPhone app. There is also a web version and unofficial (user-created) apps for Android, Blackberry and webOS, so you’re not out of luck if you don’t have an iPhone/iPad.

This is one of those apps that you don’t realize how useful it will be to you until you start to use it. I use it most when I’m reading something and find a link that I want to read, but don’t really have the time to look at carefully.  Instead of emailling the link to myself for later, I can click on the Read it Later icon in my browser (or from the bookmarklet in mobile Safari, or from Echofon, my Twitter client of choice). Then, when I do have a moment, I can fire up my Read it Later list and catch up on my reading. Another great place to use this is when I am reading my Twitter stream and want to read the posted links. I want to read the links, but also want to catch up on the other 2034 tweets in my stream. Send that link to Read it Later and they’re there when I’m done. Read it Later syncs across all your devices once you have an account and if I make sure all the articles are downloaded before I go offline, I can catch up with my reading on the subway.

Then, once I’ve read the link for myself, I have the option of sharing it with Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and a whack of other places. I find I use my Read it Later list as a pre-bookmarking list. I may read the article once and decide I’m done and mark it read and never look at it again. Or I may decide I want to keep it and bookmark it to Delicious. Your usage may vary depending on what sites you use. The sharing options only come with the Pro version, and while this is one of the more expensive apps I’ve bought, the price is totally worth it.

Favourite Birthday App: Occasions

$0.99

iTunes link

This app pulls birthday information from your contacts and Facebook friends and puts them into an attractive interface. You can also add occasions for the people in your lives who aren’t in your Contacts or on Facebook (like my two year-old daughter). You can also pull holiday information from 44 countries and six religions – super-useful if you’re like me and never remember exactly what day certain holidays fall on.

The interface is clean and easy-t0-read and you can choose from several backgrounds. Push notifications are available (and customizable) and you can contact the birthday person directly from the app. Great for those “oh crap! it’s so-and-so’s birthday! I need to call/Facebook/text them. Where is their @#$% number again?” The whole app is very customizable. You don’t have to have all of your Facebook friends’ birthday information loaded into this app. (I use it for my nearest and dearest only). The help/troubleshooting and tutorial sections are very well done.

Favourite Diary App: Momento

$2.99

iTunes link

Momento is a diary/journal app that you can input “moments” into – brief thoughts you want to record. It also imports your “social moments” – your Twitter  feed, Flickr pictures, Facebook updates and last.fm songs. While you may not think you need yet another place to track those moments, I’ve been really enjoying the calendar-style interface, which shows me just how social I’ve been. I’ve been using this app as a mini-diary for the things I don’t want to (or shouldn’t) share with the world. You can tag places, people, events or create custom tags. Photos can also be added to your moments. Finally the moment itself can be rated from 1-5 stars. I find I’m not using a lot of these features yet, but I’ve only been playing with this app for a couple of weeks. I’ve heard that beta testing is happening for the next version and I’m excited to see what’s coming in that release. Moments can be backed up into an XML plist file, which is readable by a text editor. You lose the pictures, but if you saved those in your Camera Roll, you should be okay.

Favourite Task Tracking App: Streaks

$1.99

iTunes link

Streaks is a motivational calendar that allows you to track how many times you’ve completed a goal by marking a big red X on a calendar. You can track multiple goals (each gets their own calendar) and there is a push notification option to see what your longest streak currently is. Right now, I’m using this app to track how often I’m blogging but you could use it for tracking exercise, diet or the days since your last smoke. This type of calendar can be very motivating so it’s nice to be able to create one on the go.

Favourite Flickr Upload App: Flickit

Free (pay version available)

iTunes link

The reason I picked up this app was because I wanted to do batch uploads to Flickr – the official app only allows one picture to go at a time. I like that I can control each picture’s set and tags individually. You can also set the pictures to be blogged or Twittered once the photo is uploaded. Simple, easy-to-use, and it works. A great app for all iPhone users who post to Flickr.

Favourite Game: Angry Birds

$0.99 (free version available)

iTunes link

I won’t go into big detail about this incredibly popular game. You fling birds towards pigs with the intent to squash them. It is very addicting and is totally worth the hype. I started with the Lite version and had to buy the full one so I could play more levels. Absolutely worth the 99 cents.

Favourite Dictionary App: Slango

$0.99

iTunes link

I like urbandictionary.com. It keeps me aware of how the kids talking these days. Slango is a portable version of the site that allows you to search for specific terms. I find it helpful when there’s a term in a book or online I don’t understand. It’s also useful if I just heard some kid say something that sounds filthy and I want to confirm it for myself.

That and the random word lookup often makes me giggle.

To all the other iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users out there: what are your favourite apps? Tell me about them in the comments. I still have money on the iTunes cards I got for my birthday and now that you can use a gift card to pay for apps in Canada, it’s easier not to run up your credit card on iTunes.

*Disclaimer, no one paid me to review these apps, or gave me free apps to try out. These are genuine reviews of apps I use regularly that I paid for myself.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
This work by Melissa Price-Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.
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