Fun with Facebook Fan Page Creation

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Dave

Having stopped by a few blogging forums for advice on best practices, I noticed many people mentioning Facebook Fan Pages as a good way to go as far as encouraging traffic to check out your blog, so this weekend I set out to create a few for my sites.

The first fan page you make, apparently, can be created complete with a custom URL without needing to gather up a fan base first (you have to like it yourself to get it up and running though), but I found when I created the next two pages for Mindbla here and my pictures blog lulzJapan, I was unable to get an official “vanity” URL unless I had “more fans”. What I didn’t realize at that point was that the official fan count for creating more than one fan page is 25 fans, so after wondering for a while why I wasn’t able to get my URL when I had a handful of *likes* I delved a little deeper and discovered that particular requirement.

I must add here that Facebook doesn’t put all the info out there in an easy to find place (like perhaps on the page where you’re supposed to click to get your URL, for example), they seem to like making people hunt around for it, or perhaps they just don’t want us to know what the requirements are, in order to keep people guessing perhaps and, I suppose, keep them more busy and active on Facebook. Crafty folks, those Facebookers. In addition, I was also disappointed to learn that there no longer seems to be a way to include an RSS feed on the pages in order to keep them updated automatically, apparently the only way to update them with current blog postings is to do so manually upon each blog update. I’m not sure why they’re against having an easy way to keep your fan pages updated, but in any case I guess there’s no way around it at present. Perhaps if Facebook receives enough complaints about it they’ll switch back, I did notice quite a lot of people complaining about it while I was searching (to no avail) for a way to set up some sort of an update feed.

So anyway, armed with all this new information, I gathered together the forces of my personal Facebook page, and within 24 hours or so I had my legions of fans onboard and was able to snatch up the official URL’s for all three pages. If you’d care to, please feel free to check them out and join the party by liking one or all of my brand new Facebook fan pages!

http://www.facebook.com/mindbla

http://www.facebook.com/lulzJapan

http://www.facebook.com/UpbeatRhythms

Thank you for reading this latest update on Facebook Fan Page Shenanigans and, as always, thank you for checking out the Mindbla blog, talk to you soon in the next installment.

I Squidoo, do you Squidoo too?

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Dave

Here on the Mindbla blog we’ve discussed Twitter and assorted Tweet-related sites, what Tumblr is all about (hint – think Facebook for the Younger Generation) and all of its glorious insanity and peculiarity, then there are the giants like Facebook and Google Plus that occupy so many peoples time and attention including ours, along with all kinds of other new and interesting (and confusing!) social media websites available for our enjoyment these days. Today I’d like to talk about another interesting, though quite puzzling, social media site out there which is another quasi-blogging platform with some mildly interesting twists. It is known, strangely, as Squidoo.

On Squidoo you create mini-blogs, known as lenses, where you write posts, add links, upload pictures, and do all kinds of other stuff that you might do on a regular blog like Mindbla here, but the twist is you publish this lens as a sort of stand-alone site (although you can link them up as well), and it gets ranked and people can search for it and you can actually make money from the ads there. A very nice feature is you can opt in for donating your money to charity rather than simply collect it yourself, which can be nice if you’re not making much and would rather simply donate it to various charities. In fact, that seem to encourage that, since it’s the first option in the setup, and actually getting the money is further down on the list.

There are some other fairly amusing twists, such as receiving points for your various activities such as creating lenses and liking and commenting on other people’s lenses and a bunch of other stuff. It seems as though you are able to get points for pretty much anything you do, so it can be rather addicting and fun to see what earns you points next. On the other hand, it’s really tough to see the relative value in gaining all these points, you unlock some mildly interesting new features that don’t seem particularly special and aren’t anything to write home about, but I suppose that’s all part of the game to keep the people all engaged-like and happy. Welcome to Web 2.0 style, right? There are also some feature known as a ‘quest’ which I gather is just a way to encourage people to create lenses of one particular type or another, or read other people’s lenses, and other money-see monkey-do type stuff like that. Seems more trouble than it’s worth but then again I haven’t really been using Squidoo for all that long yet, maybe it’ll grow on me over time.

Thanks for reading!

Isn’t Social Media supposed to be Fun?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Dave

I’ve been working hard making use of Social Media sites in an attempt to promote my blogging efforts, but I must say the advice I’ve received from so many quarters insisting that it’s a great idea to add your new blog content to a bunch of Social Media sites has proved to be quite a grind. A downright drag, really. Playing around with Social Media for fun once in a while is amusing, trying to keep up with all of it and make sure you continue to update your content on each page and make sure to add fun headlines and thank people who liked it and reciprocate all the friend requests that come along? It really does start to feel like an actual job after a little while. The idea of having a blog and trying to promote it is something that I thought would be lots of fun, but at least this particular aspect of it has turned into much more of a chore than I really ever thought it would be.

Fighting for Page Views

I have been relatively pleased with the amount of traffic I’ve been receiving for a newbie blog, but it absolutely feels like like I’m having to do a lot of work just to keep things on an even keel. FIghting for each and every page view, as it were. I hadn’t realized just how difficult it is to maintain even a small but steady flow of traffic to a blog, although given the amount of content out there and how many bloggers are trying to do exactly the same thing, I guess it’s not all that surprising.

On the few days I’ve put up some new content but done nothing to promote it, the results have been disappointing to say the least. Over on upbeatrhythms, for example, I’ve had several days when I got no visitors at all! Clearly that’s a bummer when you work hard to come up with some new content to share.

One Blog off to a Good Start

On the other hand, I do feel as though I’m still getting my feet wet, and I’ve not really gotten into the flow of putting up some really valuable and useful content and spent the requisite amount of time talking it up, so if I can keep at it I’m sure things will pick up.

Here on Mindbla I’ve been pleased to see a steady stream of visitors, and the third site which is my funny pictures blog has been doing gangbusters for such a new space, I had over a thousand visitors on a few occasions which is fun to see and makes me feel as though I’m at least heading in the right direction.

Part of the ease of that project is the fact that it’s much easier to upload a picture or two per day with a small blurb or comment. I’ve found it quite easy to stick to a schedule and then send out a few tweets and put up the links on Delicious or Digg or wherever, the pace and rhythm of it works well. It’s not so easy when you want to do some writing and come up with interesting topics or, in the case of the music site, to pave the way for some bigger projects such as a video tutorial series that I really want to get done but it takes a lot of time and effort behind the scenes before I’m even ready to publish anything. I did manage to get that video series off the ground last week, so now I’ve just got to keep at it. But it’s a lot more work and preparation than a pictures blog, that’s for sure, and that’s even before factoring in all the Social Media promoting I should be doing for the site!

*sigh* – now where did I put that password for StumbleUpon again?

What you Need to Know about Tumblr

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Dave

One of the sites I’ve been playing around with and trying to figure out in my efforts to become a “social networker” these days is Tumblr. The more I learn though, the more confusing this particular space seems to become.

At first glance it seems like a blogging platform, similar to Blogger perhaps. But although when you sign up the first thing that seems obvious is to write a post, when you browse around to other Tumblr pages you start to realize that not many people over there are doing any blogging in the traditional sense.

It’s a weird sort of mix, in a way it’s like Twitter on steroids. There’s no particular 140 limit or anything, but people don’t write much in a post, if anything at all. Mostly people seem to put up pictures, gifs and videos in a long stream of consciousness sort of way, and not many people seem to really engage or comment on each others’ posts. There’s a lot of liking and re-blogging, so each page turns into a sort of amalgam of the posters’ own personal contributions along with content they’ve ripped off from other peoples’ spaces.

Some pages look a lot like Pinterest, some blogs carefully crafted collages of images along with others which are little more than just a bunch of random pictures, and there’s also a YouTube element that I don’t quite understand yet that seems to involve telling the world incredibly personal stuff via video where you write your innermost thoughts on pieces of paper and hold them up for the camera while playing some seriously Emo sounding music of some kind.

Then there’s TumbleTrain, which is not actually on Tumblr but somewhere off-site and seems to be a sideshow focused on getting more Tumblr followers, which is apparently the holy grail of the whole Tumblr thing. If you have a lot of followers you’re cool. Or something.

Anyway, I don’t quite ‘get’ Tumblr yet, but perhaps it will come to me over time. At the moment, it hasn’t really hit me so I find myself frustrated trying to figure it all out and wonder why exactly the communication age has turned into such a multi-media, random seeming cluster that people use to try to explain to the world who they are and what they’re all about. Somehow, even Twitter seems rather quaint and simple in comparison!

On tweets and twitter, navigating the internet

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Dave

Getting ready to chirp

Along with firing up this blog over the last couple of weeks, I also signed on with twitter (I’ve had an account in the past but never made much use of it) once it became fairly clear that was one of the ways to ‘get your message out’ as it were.

However, the more I’ve been using it the more confusing things seem to have become. There’s the retweet thing and the reply thing and then you’ve got tweet deck and some site called justretweet that seems to be geared towards driving traffic. All neat and good, but it’s a pretty confusing bunch of stuff for an internet idea that began with such simplicity (and brevity, more about that here).

To anyone who’s been following me or will be doing so (I invite you to please do, I’d be happy to hear from you, the link is just to the right of this post at the moment though I’m still tweaking the blog setup as well so your milage may vary), I must apologize if I’ve committed any faux pas or missed the point or anything else as far as twitter etiquette (twitiquette?) is concerned. I promise I’m a fast learner, I hope that being able to give shout outs in brief form will prove to benefit this blog and my readers, and I will attempt to get the hang of it as quickly as I can.

The focus of this blog has been morphing, somewhat organically which I’m rather pleased with, as I get a feel for what kind of content might be valuable here online, and I’ll be talking a lot in the coming week about that revelation along with several other life and internet related topics. Suffice to say my original title idea, “On Writing and Music”, doesn’t quite express the fullness of what I’d like to delve into here. I’ll get more into it and I hope you’ll subscribe and come on back to read about it, because in any case I’ll be broadening my overall tone while at the same time hopefully bringing my niche into focus by including my observations on life in today’s crazy fast, twitter focused internet world and some ways in which I’ve found to navigate through it, or in some cases just sit back and smile at my own reactions to it. Until then, hope you’re having a great weekend!

The more I delve into this whole online presence thing the more I realize that my niche on these internets is right in front of my face, staring me down with tiny tweets and fast paced confusion.

I am, middle-aged.

Whew. That was harder to write than I thought it would be.

Well, I don’t consider myself old, to be fair. I grew up with a remote control in hand and all the latest star wars toys like everyone else.

What’s Star Wars, you ask? Okay, leave.

Seriously, just go.

This blog is not for you.

This blog is for the pre-facebook,pre-twitter, oh-so-relaxing pace of the good old 1980′s, when Moscow nukes scared us a lot more than fanatics plotting from caves ever could, and when the price of a CD (yeah, like I said, I ain’t that old lol) meant you got the whole album WITH cool cover art and something to read along with it.

My name’s Dave, I grew up with computers but no internet (and certainly no twitter), and I speak for all us over 35ers who are still, we hope, relevant in this crazy super-fast world of ours.

Regarding our wacky crazy internets and how frustrating the lightening, twitter fast pace and constantly changing trends can be for the rest of us non-teenagers that didn’t grow up with it all. But in a way we did grow up with it, or a primitive version of it anyway, at least mostly. I’ll explain further on down, but it has to do with remote controls, the Brady Bunch (the show, not the movie), and The Force sans midichlorians. Here’s part one if you missed it or would care to refresh your memory or either found this page via hyperlink (yup, new to me too!), or else just don’t feel like scrolling (are you that lazy?).

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what this website is going to be all about, what my angle will be, that sort of thing. The more I’ve discovered just over the past couple of weeks the more I realize that my niche on these internets is right in front of my face, staring me down with tiny tweets and fast paced hecticism (yup, made it up. if it’s good enough for politicians it’s good enough for me, and doesn’t that word just sum it up perfectly anyway?).

Oh, and by the way, I do like twitter. I don’t ‘get it’ yet, but I like it. It’s neat, and you can connect with a lot of peeps all at once, and the fast pace can be entertaining, exciting even. I actually just learned about a new feature, the buffer I think it’s called, from a reader and I tried it out and it was pretty cool. But I think I’ll stick with Tweetdeck for now, it’s pretty simple and the graphics are like something out of STNG (if you don’t get that reference, you get a pass because you have to be a real Trekkie to get it and it’s a pretty old show at this point lol).

So anyway, give me a shout out on Twitter or, if you don’t bother with that stuff, feel free to leave a comment here. And do subscribe, because I’ll be updating this blog a lot and I hope to bring new and interesting commentary (and a few rants like this one) and would love to hear form you about what you’re interested in reading. Thanks!