Tips for Blogging

This has been a busy week at the reference desk (lots of people looking for school summer reading books). I didn't have any great ideas for today's post, so I thought I'd go meta - a blog post about blogging.

Here are a whole bunch of links I've been collecting that offer tips on blogging, or blogging better, or running a blog in general. Some of them are for personal blogs, but they apply pretty well to writing for a library website.

I suppose I should read them instead of just sharing them, but it's a start:

From iLibrarian:

• 6 Ways to Constantly Produce Quality Blog Content
• 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers
• 13 Types of Posts that Always Get Lots of Comments
• Five Ways to Better Engage Readers on Your Blog
• Write Better Blog Posts Today
• 20 Websites That Will Make You A Better Blogger
• 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog
• How to Blog Almost Every Day
• Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• 5 Rules for Better Web Writing
• 100 Ways To Improve Your Blog
• 100 Terrific Tips & Tools for Blogging Librarians
• 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck
• Handling Negative Comments On Your Blog Post
• The Ultimate Blogger Writing Guide
• Why Start a Blog & How to Make it Work
• 50 Blog Topic Ideas
• Tips for Better Blogging
• Secrets of the 7 Basic Blog Posts

From Librarian in Black:

• Tips for Bloggers - a neat checklist on what to do before publishing a post

From David Lee King:

• Digital Branch Style Guide - geared for organization websites, but absolutely useful for anyone writing for the web

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Reference Question of the Week – 10/4/09

I was asked these two questions back-to-back one day this week:

I want to sell my car on craigslist, and I want to be able to email people an info sheet. I've already created an Excel spreadsheet with mileage and other statistics, including a couple pictures pasted in. Can you show me how to put arrows and text on the pictures, and how to convert it to a pdf file?

...and...

I've been on Yahoo for a few months now. I know that I can get letters from people, and I can reply to letters people send me, but, can I send people letters too?

Of course, both of these are legitimate questions. I was just struck by such different technology experience levels from two patrons who walked up to the reference desk at about the same time.

And the answers are:

Excel's Drawing Toolbar (View > Toolbars > Drawing) allows both of these things. Click the icon that looks like an Arrow to draw an arrow on a picture, use the Line Style to make it thicker, and the Line Color icon to change the color. Then, click the Text Box icon to create a text box wherever you want words to appear. Use the Fill Color and Line Color to make sure it's legible against the picture.

To create a pdf version, we installed PDFcreator on our public computers. It shows up in the printer selection dropdown box, and creates a pdf file patron can then save to disk

...and...

Just click the "New" button in the upper left corner of the Inbox.

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