TDH: Portfolio » publishing

I’m Awfully Quiet Right Now

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:29:37 +0000

You might have noticed, or rather not noticed, that I’m awfully quiet right now. That doesn’t mean that I’m out of words or ideas for blog posts, it is more a matter of Work Overload after the holidays. The inbox is full, clients are screaming for updates, and so on. As you might know, I’m not the kind of freelancer that works over holidays or even weekends these days, so that is probably pissing some people off even more than they want to acknowledge.

And then there’s that whole recession thing. It is starting to hit me, actually, with no less than four cancelled projects in two months’ time. Not good, but I’ll manage of course.

Anyway, that’s why I’m a bit quiet right now, but it’s also just half the story. I’m restructuring my online publishing, which will affect tdhedengren.com as well. It’ll mean more quality writing form yours truly, so don’t worry about that. The current state was pulled from tdh.se and was never meant to be more than temporary, as well as a showoff for the Notes Blog theme.

For now, I’m putting my blogging efforts on the Blog Herald (where I’m the editor), and on Twitter as well (follow me!). The latter is really me wanting an outlet, so there’s a little of this and a little of that there.

I’ll be back here soon, with news and relaunches, plans and tips. Stay tuned, be sure to subscribe, and have a great 2009!

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Living Hyboria, Blogging the Age of Conan MMORPG

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:09:15 +0000

Age of Conan is an excellent MMORPG, I’m totally addicted, which is fun. I’m playing with a couple of friends of mine, fellow Swedes, so we figured why not blog a bit about it?

Enter Living Hyboria. For now it’s just a simple pre-release beta-thingy, but it’ll get its own design soon enough. Expect a couple of updates each week.

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Scheduled Downtime: Moving Servers (done!)

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:23:30 +0000

I’m moving servers at the moment, which is one reason why it’s so quiet here. Not the only one though, working like a madman to get everything up and running the way I want it, which includes tdhedengren.com and BloggerTalks, as well as some other funky stuff. Balancing this with client work isn’t always easy, you know.

Anyway, I’m moving servers now, so expect downtime or no-updates-time at least, for the next 24 hours or so, depending on exactly when the tech people get to work.

Thanks for your patience.

Update! This is done now, looks like it’s working properly as well. Nice work, A Small Orange.

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Do You Know What You’re Publishing?

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:16:49 +0000

The internet is a lovely place. Here you can find collaborators, fans, writers, publishers, morons, bloggers, designers, silliness, and just about everything else. Everything is here, and the door is open for anyone who want to get started in online publishing, be it blogging or more traditional websites.

Problem is, it’s a very anonymous place, and it is full of people trying to make easy money by posing as freelancers, submitting content that are rip-offs or even straight copies on other people’s work.

PSDTUTS obviously experienced this, they removed a tutorial post, and wrote about it. That’s the right way to cover this kind of issue, be upfront and honest about that you’ve been fooled by some copycat lowlife wanting to earn easy $$$ on somebody else’s work. I feel sorry for Collis & Co., it’s an awkward and embarrassing situation.

I’ve been approached by a lot of writers for various projects. Most of them aren’t good enough, to be honest, but some submit great sample content, good post ideas, and seem promising. Problem is, they could have ripped that content from anywhere, and I wouldn’t know. The internet is full of good and not so good stuff, and there’s no possible way to keep up with it. You can google it, you can use services like Copyscape, but that’s about it.

Building an audience is hard, and building trust is even harder. Every time you do something that resonates badly, like publishing dupe content, that trust takes a beating, and the audience gets more cautious, no matter if it’s intentional or not. The only thing you can do is to be upfront about it, telling people you’ve been fooled. Still, the thought is planted in the reader’s mind, and the trust is bruised.

The internet is a lovely place, with millions of possibilities. Unfortunately, that goes for the shady people as well.

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Colleen Coplick on PR and Getting Famous, over at BloggerTalks

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:00:40 +0000

It’s awfully quiet here, isn’t it? Yep, it is, I’m busy, really busy actually. There’s a lot of things that just don’t show very well at the moment, designs and work behind the scenes. I’m really hoping to have some stuff for you guys soon, including my plans for this site. The current version was ever a placeholder, as you’ve probably gathered by now.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to let you know that this week’s interview over at BloggerTalks is up now, and it’s a good one: Colleen Coplick on PR and Getting Famous

Colleen’s the new blogger at Buzz Networker, and she’s got a background in the PR industry, so why not talk PR with her? I did, and the interview tells a lot, to quote my The Blog Herald news post on it:

[...] Colleen shares her views on paid reviews, PR agencies sending out samples, getting famous in the social sphere, how to write a great press release, and more.

Check it out, it’s a pretty good read, I think.

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Movable Type or WordPress?

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:41:46 +0000

I just published this week’s interview on BloggerTalks, talking to the new Blog Herald blogger, Arvind Satyanarayan about Movable Type. It includes comparing it to WordPress, talk about Six Apart Services, and more.

The interview article is titled Movable Type or WordPress – Arvind Knows What He Prefers and Why and I think you should read it.

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BloggerTalks Front Page Debuts

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:37:14 +0000

I’ve upgraded the BloggerTalks front page to what I had in mind all along, I mentioned it in the 3.0 beta launch post. The idea was and is to have a clean straight-forward approach, focusing only on the most recent interviews. Clean and lightweight, the way I like it.

Check it out, and for convenience (and archive purposes) I’ve included a screenshot below.

As you can see, I’ve decided to keep it simple and straight forward. Since BloggerTalks only have one kind of content – interviews – I find it fitting to only focus on that. The content is weekly, which in turns makes it even more suitable to focus on the latest addition in a different way than the rest of the content flow.

There are a few other fixes and additions besides the front page, such as the search results listing, and also the addition of further postmetadata.

I hope you like it.

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Are You Underestimating the Time Needed Editing Other People’s Work?

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:41:37 +0000

Have you ever been the editor of a site or magazine? Then you know how much time is spent brushing up people’s contributions, removing silly errors, sometimes fact checking, and even doing occasional formatting. I know that most blogs allow authors to proofread and publish their posts themselves, and it is good for the content flow, but bad for quality. We’re doing that on The Blog Herald, a site built on news and feature posts being more or less longer news, and it’s the only way to do it. Unless you have a proofreader sitting on standby all the time, it’s just not possible not to have this kind of posting procedure.

Devlounge, however, is an entirely different matter. I’m finding more and more of my allocated time there, being the editor and paid by Splashpress for it, eaten up by editing contributor’s articles. It’s OK to spend time fine-tuning pieces for a site like Devlounge, not built on news coverage but slower content, like tutorials and reviews, tips and tricks. It doesn’t matter if an article takes another day to complete due to proofreading, at least not as long as the quality is ensured.

On the flipside, spending this amount of time editing Devlounge pieces, means less posts from me. That’s not a good thing, I like to think. Compare it to the amount of stories I’m doing for The Blog Herald, and you’ll see quite a difference. And that’s despite the fact that I’m doing a ton of planning, and other things, behind the scenes to prepare for the upcoming redesign and reborn version of the site!

I’m not sure I like the development, honestly, but I do believe that it’s a good thing.

One thing’s for sure though, and this is no surprise to me who’s been working with editorial staffs’ for the last ten years or so; Editing other people’s work takes a lot of time. If you’re going to charge a client for doing editorial work, consider this, and consider it carefully.

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Spinning the Blogo Beta

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:27:38 +0000

I’m enjoying a cup of coffee while taking the new version of desktop blog software Blogo for a spin. It’s still in beta, but I’ve been granted access by Ben over at Brainjuice, and at first glance there are some great improvements. You might remember Blogo from my desktop blogging article over at Devlounge.

Like the Twitter support, for instance.

People into stalking me probably know that I’m totally addicted to Twitter these days (follow me!). It’s a real challenge getting anything done… Anyway, my Twitter client of choice is Twhirl, but I must say that Blogo might give it a run for the money, we’ll see.

I’ll dig deeper into the beta later tonight, or tomorrow if I know what’s good for me. I’ll do one thing though, I’ll treat you to a screenshot of the new Microblog Viewer as it looks right now:

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Looking at Newsletters Today

Thord Daniel Hedengren — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:53:33 +0000

I used to love newsletters, and one of the first serious online publications I had was an e-mail newsletter. Through the years, I’ve used newsletters to promote stories, sell stuff occasionally, but more importantly to get that direct connection to actual people. So let’s take a look at a recent Amazon newsletter I received, and see how it stands, shall we?

Right. This is before I’m allowing images in the e-mail:

Not so pretty with those code snippets, right? At this time, I’m not interested in the content at all. If it wasn’t sent by a reliable source, I would’ve deleted it, or perhaps even marked it as spam.

Let’s enable images and see if it gets any better:

That’s better, although not very pretty. Truth to be told, I’m amazed that Amazon’s newsletter renders so poorly in Gmail. Traditionally, rendering HTML in webmail accounts is something hard to do, but there are several HTML newsletter that are getting better results. Maybe they’re not doing as many cool things as Amazon does, but still.

Also worth noting is that I used to publish an e-mail magazine (called Kong, on videogames, in Swedish) with a strong visual style, including graphics and – for an e-mail newsletter – advanced HTML. It rendered well enough, so there’s no real reason for Amazon not being able to accomplish this.

Then again, didn’t blogs kill all the interesting newsletters already, leaving product pimping and spam to fight the uneven war on our attention?