About the Blog: A Presentation Experiment

I'm trying this blog as an experiment! I don't usually do presentations or lectures, so there's no slideshow software that I have a lot of experience with ... but I do love blogs, and BLOG EVERYTHING is one of my online mantras. You can help me decide if it was a success or not! Please feel free to add your comments or contact me at Google+ or Twitter.

Here are some of the thoughts I have in mind in creating this blog experiment:

• Integrated notes. Although slides allow presenters to add "notes," it's often the case that the notes don't get read. In a blog post, I can put the slide part up at the top (so that it will show up in the browser without scrolling), but the notes will be just down below. The visual presentation won't be as artistic as in a slideshow, but since my only real goal is to convey information, I think having the notes right there with the "slide" will be worth the tradeoff.
• Integrated Twitter stream. Since one of my goals is to promote the use of Twitter as an online tool, having an integrated Twitter stream for the #UOConference hashtag (as a footnote widget) might be a good way to remind people of the power of Twitter, both during the presentation itself and also afterwards. 
• Additional materials. I know that there will be all kinds of things I want to include in the presentation but won't be able to include because of time, and there will probably be lots that I think of after the presentation too, so I can just use additional posts here at the blog to include all those materials. This post is an example of the kinds of additional material I can include!
• Linkability. Some online slideshows make it easy to link to individual slides, but not always. With a blog, every post is easy to link to, and you can also link to labeled sections of the blog as well. Blog post pages are also indexed separately and will come up in a search engine; that is far less likely with individual slides in a slideshow.
• Live content. I added the Twitter presentation at the last minute (after another speaker had to cancel), and I sure was glad I was using the blog format for all that live content. Instead of just talking about Twitter embedding and widgets, I was able to do all of that in the blog posts themselves. Long live HTML!
• Blog demonstration. Blogs are, for me, the single best tool for publishing online, so I am really happy to use a blogging platform for the presentation itself. Since I am not a fan of slideshows in general, it wouldn't really make sense to have the focus for the presentation be on a slideshow. Focusing on a blog makes much more sense!
• Quick and easy. I am very familiar with blogging software, and with Blogger in particular, so this will be quick and easy for me to do. 

For details about the Blogger.com set-up, see this post: Technical Details.

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Cartoon by Harley Schwadron

About This Blog: Technical Details

Here are the steps I followed to create this blog-as-presentation:

1. New blog. I started out with a "picture window" blog at Blogger.com, choosing a color scheme to match one of the colors in the Upgrading Online conference logo. I picked a transparent background to use for minimum distraction.

2. Layout. I am starting with a layout that I think will be "presentation-like," and then after the conference, I will change it to a more conventional layout.
Pre-Conference. The blog has just one column, with the widgets I normally use (navigation labels, Google+ profile, and some kind of Twitter widget) in the footer rather than in the sidebar. I widened the main column to 750 pixels so that I could enlarge the font to 20-point Trebuchet, and I changed the font to Trebuchet for the post titles and blog title also. I set the date font color to transparent (invisible), and I made the link text colors the same for both new and visited. I removed the top Blogger navigation bar and use this nifty trick to remove the white space. I need to remember to make sure to keep the width of the images to the usual 400 pixels or 500 pixels so that I can make this column smaller later.
Post-Conference. After the conference presentation is over, I will reconfigure the blog to a more traditional single column plus sidebar view and move the widgets from the footer to the sidebar. I'll probably reduce the font some, and change the column width to 600 pixels.

3. Index and backdating. I've created an index page to stay on top (with the Settings for just one post on the home page), and I'll be backdating the entries to 2014 in order to keep the index on top. I'll use the month/day settings in order to line up my "slide" posts in the right order when I'm done. I'll create index pages for each of the labels when I'm done; I'll date those to 1/1/2015.

4. Labels. I really like label navigation in a blog, so I'll be sure to have at least one label on each post.

5. Comments. I'm not a fan of Google Captcha, so I set the comments to Google accounts only with no Captcha, but I also changed the message to let people know they can contact me at Google+ and/or at Twitter too. I set the comments on a separate page (again, to reduce distraction).

6. Post formatting. I've stripped down the post formatting in order to have it not be distracting (no post date, etc.).

7. Post template. I created a simple post template to use for the actual slide posts (and I just delete the template contents when I am doing a different kind of post).

8. Spreadsheet. I set up a GoogleDocs spreadsheet to keep track of post titles and post URLs; I can use that later to organize the slide posts in order and quickly add the next/prev links to the navigation. I'll write up a post about that separately.

9. Subdomain. To make it  easy for people to quickly go to the blog during the presentation so that they can click on links, experiment with the live content, and save bookmarks, I created a static redirect at this subdomain: Upgrading.MythFolklore.net, and I made that the title of the blog for now. I'll switch to a more conventional title after the conference is over.