Cincinnati Women Bloggers

With the recent announcement that the popular online photo editing site Picnik is shutting down, a lot of us are frantically trying to figure out how we’ll edit photos for our blogs after April.   While it may feel like our photo editing worlds are crashing around us, there are lots of great alternatives out there.

Here are just a few we discovered today while looking for a Picnik replacement:

1. BeFunky (per Matthew Dooley) web-based, mobile app available
2. Picture2Life web-based, mobile app available
3. Pixer.us web-based
4. PhotoShop Express web-based, mobile app available
5. Pixlr web-based, mobile app available
6. Splashup
7. Phixr web-based
8. FastStone (per Christiaan Todd) download nec.
9. GIMP (per Christiaan Todd) download nec., mobile app available

While there are some differences among these – some of the cool options, storage, look/feel (some are very photoshop-esque), for the most part they all felt pretty similar with regards to offerings. It’s really going to come down to the individual user and how they like the user experience and what their needs are. Are you just looking to edit a photo – resize, crop etc. or are you wanting to change the look and feel, add snazzy effects. For those of you who regularly use programs in Adobe, you’ll probably be most comfortable with Photoshop Express, Pixlr, Splashup and Gimp.  FastStone seems like it would appeal to professional photographers.

If you have any other’s you’d recommend, or if you have experience with any of the above and would like to elaborate, feel free to leave us a comment with your thoughts. As the weeks go on I’m sure I’ll find a replacement for picnik…… fingers crossed

So you’ve started a blog. You’ve determined your topic, you’ve customized your template, and you’ve written some posts. Now the question is, how to bring readers to your site?

Here are five easy and effective options to consider:

1)      Find Your Community – Find like-minded blogs, communities and forums (same niche, target audience) and engage in the discussions taking place there. Add the RSS feeds to your reader so you can watch for topics that would be appropriate for you to weigh in on.

2)      Use Social Networks – Set up accounts with networks like Twitter & Facebook to share links to your posts.  Applications like TweetDeck & HootSuite are great resources for scheduling posts in advance.  Please note that while these are great tools for sharing your content, remember to keep the “Social” in social media and also engage in conversations and RT others when appropriate.

3)      Guest Bloggers – Invite other bloggers in your category to contribute a guest post to your blog. Not only will you be able to promote that they are sharing a guest post, but more than likely they will promote their post through their networks, potentially opening you up to new audiences and readers.

4)      Tag, Tag, Tag – Want to help people find your blog when searching the internet? Use Tags. When creating tags, use specific terms that you think people would use when searching for the information you are sharing. Example: You are a food writer and you write a post about Taste of Belgium’s delicious new restaurant downtown.  When tagging, you’d want to use very specific search phrases that would bring people to your post like “Taste of Belgium,” “Taste of Belgium Review,” “Cincinnati Belgium Restaurants,” etc.”  You would not want to use broad terms like “Restaurant,” or “Belgium Restaurants.”

5)      Leverage Your Analytics Results – You can learn a lot about your readers by reviewing your blog’s stats. Analytics tools like Google Analytics or Get Clicky (we LOVE Get Clicky) allow you to see what topics are driving the most traffic to your blog as well as the search terms and referring sites that are bringing them there. Not only does this allow you to understand the topics that your readers like best (thus you should continue to write about), but it allows you to see which blogs are sharing your content and that you should continue (or start) to nurture relationships with.

There are of course lots of other things you can be doing to drive traffic to your blog. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Cross-post from Hoperatives.com:

Attention bloggers!

Registration is now open for the 5B: Believers in Better Beer, Bites and Blogging Conference to be held Saturday, February 11, 2012 at the Cincinnati Convention Center. For more information and to begin the application process, go to http://www.hoperatives.com/?page_id=9709 and follow the instructions there.

 

Cheers and here’s to better beer! (And bites and blogging!)

Carla and Tom

Cross post from Hoperatives.com:

Hoperatives in conjunction with Cincy Winter Beerfest is proud to announce the 5B: Believers in Better Beer, Bites and Blogging Conference to be held Saturday, February 11, 2012. 5B is a one-day blogging conference featuring sessions on beer blogging, food blogging and blogging in general. Bloggers will sign up for one of the three tracks (beer, bites or blogging) but will be able to attend sessions in any of the three tracks. We plan to have panels featuring local chefs and brewers who are in town for the Cincy Winter Beerfest plus sessions with blogging advice no matter what your subject matter is. Topics being discussed include food photography dos and don’ts, how to deal with public relations agencies, when is it time to take your blog to the 2.0 version and more.

 

We are pleased to also announce that we have some great collaborators in this effort. Julie Niesen Gosdin of wine me, dine me (in Cincinnati) will be serving as our Chief Food Blogger and helping us with all things foodie. Susan Wenner Jackson along with other members of the Cincinnati Women Bloggers organization will be our Chief Blogging Bloggers and aiding us in organizing the more general blogging subjects.

 

Registration for 5B: Believers in Better Beer, Bites and Blogging Conference is just $50.00 which includes a general admission ticket for the Friday night session of the Cincy Winter Beerfest and a Connoisseur ticket for the Saturday night session. The Connoisseur ticket gets you early entry into the Beerfest, access into the Connoisseur Reception Area (which will include appetizer bites from twelve local chef driven restaurants, rare beer list, private restrooms) and a special Connoisseurs only entrance area. 5B attendees who wish to upgrade to a Connoisseur ticket for the Friday night session as well can do so for only additional $25.00 ($75.00 total).

 

Registration will be opened later this month. Bloggers registering for this event must be affiliated with an active blog (at least eight posts in the last two months).

When Digital Meets Deco,
We Make Connections

“Save the Date”
4th Annual Digital Non Conference

WHEN:  September 13th & September 14th

WHERE: Hilton Netherland Plaza, Cincinnati, OH 45202

For more information or to register, visit www.digitalcincinnati.org today!

Sometimes, the decisions we make as bloggers are not as easy as they seem on the surface. For example, choosing a web hosting company seems simple. Just go with the cheapest one that has the features you want/need. But there are often other factors that come into play when you decide to do business with a company. The partial repost below is the first part of a blog post my husband and I wrote for our Tag Team Tech blog on Why and How We Left GoDaddy.com. Specifically, the first half focuses on the “why” we left. If you would like to know more about the particulars of “how” we left, click the Part 2 link at the bottom of this post to go directly to the second half of the post.

Since we posted this, we have heard back from Go Daddy and we will be receiving a pro-rated refund, but we only got it because we specifically requested it. If you don’t ask for it, they don’t give it to you.

–Carla

We had been using GoDaddy for both our domain name registration and web hosting for a very, very long time. We started using them way back before there was such a thing as a GoDaddy “girl.”

This was a time when most web hosting was done with small local companies who couldn’t afford to provide things like guaranteed 100% uptime or weekend tech support. Sometimes, not even any tech support. Go Daddy had those features and many others in addition to very competitive pricing. Sure, it was a long distance call to tech support, but you always got a knowledgeable person who wasn’t in India. During our time with Go Daddy, we frequently would request the post-call survey so we could let the company know how great the tech support person we talked with was.

Then, the television ads started. And they kept getting worse. Can you say sexist? Can you say misogynistic? Every time one of the ads came on, you couldn’t help but feel dirty giving money to a company that objectifies women that way.

And then there was the elephant hunt video. If you missed it, GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson posted a video of himself hunting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. Parsons has since responded to the not-surprising outcry by saying that each year he goes to Zimbabwe and hunts “problem” elephants. Problem elephants? Really? Is the problem really with the elephants? He claims that it’s “one of the most beneficial and rewarding things” he does. We’d really hate to know what he does that he thinks is less beneficial and rewarding.

So more and more, we kept talking about moving off GoDaddy and last weekend we made the move. For the record, we went with Hover.com for our domain registration (Thanks Leo Laporte for telling us about them) and we chose Media Temple for our web hosting because Tom has used them on other projects. We decided to separate hosting from domain registration so hosting is a bit more portable.  Plus we like to support TWIT‘s advertisers.

So here’s what you see when you log in to GoDaddy with your account information:

Here’s what you see when you log in to Media Temple with your account information:

Any questions?

Remember there are at least three parts to moving from one web hosting company to another:

1. Getting all of your content from your old hosting company and putting it on your new hosting company
2. Getting the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) to understand that you’ve moved
3. Getting everything to work

Fear, rage and the eventual loss of hope in both God and Man are all optional steps.

Now here’s the deal: you want to do them in that order. Move your stuff first. Get things working as best you can (more on this in a minute), then do the DNS work. When that finishes, clean up whatever doesn’t work.

Part 2 of “Why and How We Left GoDaddy.com”