Last year it snowed in Iowa.  A lot.

I remember the first few times part of my sidewalk was already cleared.  The next time I was out shoveling and the neighbor across the street was using a snowblower to clear his sidewalk.  Deep in concentration, I continued shoveling.  The next time it snowed,  my sidewalk wasn’t cleared.  As I finished shoveling, he was finishing his driveway.  I went over and said hi, asked him about his snowblower, and asked if he had previously cleared the sidewalk for me.  After he said yes, I thanked him and said how much it really helped, especially since I have a corner lot.  As I went back to my house, I thanked him again.

After that, the one sidewalk was always cleared.

A simple thank you works wonders.

So my list of “social media” thank-you’s follows.  Not trying to “name drop” – but giving my sincere thanks for those who have really made a difference in my blogging, podcasting, etc. trials. In no particular order:

• Adam Curry – podcaster and entrepreneur extraordinaire.  First played my promo for Rutter’s Ramblings, then started the Troy Needs an Ipod Contest, and later became a great online friend.
• CC Chapman – met through Adam Curry, later became a good online friend and met at Podcamp Boston 2 and Blogworld. Worlds nicest guy.
• Chris Brogan – Knew the name when we had lunch at Podcamp Boston 2, but not much else about him. Later he sent out a few retweets for my site here.  Someone I always go to for inspiration. And heck of a nice person.
• Joel Comm – A mentor, friend and inspiration.  What more can I say?
• Crew at Central Iowa Bloggers – you guys rock.  Always a source of inspiration and learning
• Bitmethod (Daniel, Neal and Igor specifically) – setting a high bar for doing the awesome
• Chris Pirillo – fellow Iowan, full-time video streamer… and good friend.
• Jim Kukral – First started talking about 2 years ago, now working on rebuilding one of his websites into a great resource for bloggers (see below)

And to everybody else Ive met at tweetups, barcamps, #cib, or just a cup of coffee someplace.  You all make a difference, I’m grateful for having such creative people as friends and colleagues.

Please

I have started rebuilding a blogging tips web site called “Ask The Blogger” – please take a look, subscribe, comment, interact, whatever.  I would love to build on the conversations I have at #CIB and develop it as a place for blogging tips and tricks.  There are a lot of websites out there offering the same thing – but this one is the place I finally feel “home” – and I’m inviting you in.

Have a wonderful holiday and great 2011!

• The kitchen ninja
• the blogging ninja
• the marketing ninja
• the adsense ninja
• the wordpress ninja
• etc.

Starting today I am starting a new breed of “expert” name… introducing…

The Chinchilla

• Social Media Chinchilla
• Twitter Chinchilla
• The Galloping Chinchilla
• The Blogging Chinchila
• The adsense chinchilla

Who knows… maybe it will catch on.  But even if it doesn’t…

Enough with the ninja names already.  Please?

I attended BlogWorld Expo this year, and finally met one of my acquaintances, Jim Kukral.  Jim and I have been talking here and there over the past couple of years ever since I discovered his Online Video Toolkit instructional videos.  We also have a common friend in Joel Comm.

At BlogWorld, I first met up with Jim at a party in the Luxor suite on Wednesday, where I made a joke about a tuna appetizer being bacon (someone overheard and tried to correct me, and I just rolled my eyes – it was a JOKE!) and then we ran into each other over the course of the conference.  I went to the Wiley booth and bought a copy of his book, and saw that Steve Garfield (whom I met at Podcamp Boston 2) was also there, so I took the goofy picture of me, them and their books.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago.

Jim sent out a tweet about a web site he was interested in partnering with someone – or outright selling it.  And it hit me.  This is what I was looking for.

With this blog, and also with my podcast, I have a tendency to talk about the medium instead of the niche I am trying to talk about. For instance, on my blog I blog about blogging, and on my podcast I podcasted about podcasting.  This can turn off readers/listeners who found your content because of your main niche, and don’t really care how much you know about the technical side of creating the content they are looking for.

So – what better way than actually doing a blog about blogging?  I had always resisted because Darren Rowse is such a powerhouse in that arena.  But this site is different in that visitors actually ask targeted questions, and those are the main basis of the content.

We are still getting things revamped and re-organized, but the new site is:

http://www.asktheblogger.com

I hope you check it out.

I get frustrated by the success others have within their niches, but truth be told I don’t really HAVE a niche.  Not so much anyway.  Let’s face it, unless you are Wil Wheaton (hi, Wil!) having a “personal blog” is never going to reap the monetary or statistical rewards of one focused within a personal niche.  The entire category of “personal blogs” is not filled with many success stories.

I have struggled over the years to find my “niche.”  So much so I sat in a room with Joel Comm, Dan Nickerson and Joel Ownby in the offices of InfoMedia in Colorado asking them “am I just boring?”  Their response was swift and decisive: “You have a book.  You’ve sold over 2,000 copies.  Leverage that – there’s your niche!”  Yes, I could do that.  But I am so far removed from the niche living here in Iowa, that I don’t feel what I say would actually matter.

So I have struggled in finding that niche.  Maybe it is “filmmaking in Iowa” and I can blog about the state of the film’s film industry, etc. since the incentives dried up.  But there is already a blog on that. Besides that, there is really only one other niche I am willing to devote the amount of time to:

Making money on the Internet

And try to break into THAT. It is one of the “no no’s” of trying to start a blog.  Everybody tries to get into that and everybody fails. Besides, I don’t have a product, list or network built up that would support that.

Attending Blogworld was inspiring, but it still did not yield many ideas for my “perfect niche.”  I am still looking for that one “thing” that will hold my interest (and readers).  I admit I was very jaded about blogging a few months ago and was resigned to the fact that the only people making money on the internet were people selling products on making money on the internet.  While I know there is room for “real people” to be successful blogging… I still wonder at times whether I am “interesting” enough to do so.  It isn’t a lack of knowledge on the fundamentals – perhaps it is a lack of understanding and knowledge of MYSELF.

Definitely something worth investigating and cause for more introspection.

Dartboard photo by Loutsu

I sat down, and for the first time that weekend did not take notes. I wanted to hear what CC had to say, and didn’t think any of the actual “topics” would appeal to me, or warrant writing down (for me).

Boy was I wrong!

Immediately at the start of the panel, the panelist expressed their distaste for the term “daddybloggers.” I have known CC a long time, and despite being a really smart social media maven, he has always blogged about his kids in an entertaining way. I heard he was starting up this new site/network called Digital Dads, but I figured it was just going to be a bunch of dads talking about parenting.

Yeah, I believed the stereotype.

As CC and the others explained, Digital Dads is not just about parenting, its about guys being guys. It’s a far cry from The Man Show, but just because they are guys, and they happen to blog once in a while about parenting, that doesn’t mean every post has to be so.

But the panel also ended up being an example of what not to do.

During the Q&A session, a representative from Disney who worked with the mommybloggers  recently, asked a question to the panel.  After it was answered, another attendee of the session got up and started pitching the Disney rep while the session was still going on near the front of the room, just feet away from the panel.  I could feel the tension rising, and each of the panelists shot looks of disdain in the direction of the man, but he persisted.  Rude, unprofessional and BAD FORM.

So what did I learn from a panel on daddybloggers?

- Don’t pigeonhole yourself or others based on a specific blogging “label”

- Don’t be a DB and interrupt a panel to pitch yourself to someone else at the panel

- Wearing a dress, wig and high heels isn’t for everyone

Did I mention CC also has a book coming out called Content Rules? More on that later…

People often wonder what their blogs are missing. There must be some reason why they aren’t getting the massive numbers visiting their blog, right? The answer is usually plain and simple:

You aren’t writing anything of value.

I’m guilty of this too. One look at the past posts on TroyRutter.com and you will find posts on everything from Babylon 5 to writing my book, to the proverbial and cliche what I had for dinner.

And I wondered why I didn’t have the kind of traffic I wanted.

Then there are the posts that DO generate traffic.

Posts such as my tutorial on how to run Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time. Posts such as the one entitled What’s Holding You Back which was tweeted by Chris Brogan.

The common theme spoken of during all of the sessions at Blogworld revolved around a core piece of advice:

Write awesome.

People don’t come to a blog to read “ok.” People don’t retweet “meh.” People read and recommend awesome.

So, write awesome!

And don’t worry about the search engines… more on that later.

After a while, the newness wore off, and I started to notice something. A lot of what I was tweeting I really didn’t want or need archived on my blog. While my blog was more of a professional tool, my tweets bordered on the stereotypical “what I’m doing” messages.

So, I took the daily digest of Tweets off my blog.

I was wrong.

As you can see on the home page of my site, I include the latest tweet on the right hand side.  The lesson I eventually learned was this:

If your tweets are too personal and you don’t want them posted on your blog – maybe you shouldn’t make those tweets in the first place.

Anything you put out there contributes to your brand.  If you don’t think your Twitter stream is worthy of including on your blog, I would consider making a personal and a professional Twitter account, and separating the two.  This doesn’t affect your transparency, but it could bring up your blog’s professionalism and help your image.

How do you separate between your professional and personal tweets?

The battery.

Now, you would assume the battery would have nothing to do with the computer starting up. Indeed, I would assume some people run their laptops without the battery altogether. But in my case, I found out the laptop needed the battery to start up.

Unfortunately, my battery was zapped/drained of all energy too.

So, what I did was … wait. I removed the battery from the laptop compartment and set it on my desk for an hour, put it back into the laptop, plugged in the AC and it booted up. It would seem that if the power is completely knocked out of the laptop, it still needs a boost of battery power to get it going – even with an ac adapter.

Without the battery, my laptop wouldnt start up, and the “plugged in” indicator on the laptop wouldn’t even light up. The AC adapter looked fine, and tested fine, but it would not power on the device until the battery built up enough charge by remaining dormant and then finally it had enough juice to start up and begin charging the battery again.

I think maybe the shock drained the CMOS battery, and it needs to draw from the battery to get it going again.

Now that it is up and running – no problems! I hope this helps others with the same issue with their Vaio laptop not powering on.

I went to the page for Exec PHP plugin, and despite reading the warnings, decided to give it a try – no luck.  It seems it does not work on the latest version of WordPress.  I also learned of another one that would do includes, but again, no luck.  So, after thinking for a bit, I came up with the only solution, and maybe it actually is the best solution.

I connected to the server via FTP and navigated to the themes folder, and downloaded the page.php file of the theme I was using.  I renamed it, in this case, rankings.php and uploaded it.  Then I used my FTP client to change the permission to 777 so it could be edited from within wordpress.

From there, I edited the new file, making sure the first few lines were:

[sourcecode language="php"]
<?php
/*
Template Name: Rankings
*/

get_header();
?>
[/sourcecode]

After that, I had the entire page the same as the theme’s default template, and where I wanted my PHP to be I added this line:

[sourcecode language="php"]
<? include ABSPATH . "/wp-content/custom-php/ranking_page.php"; ?>
[/sourcecode]

I then uploaded my PHP script(s) to that new custom-php directory where they lived happily ever after.

Now, when I add a page in the admin area, on the right hand side under Page Template, it asks me if I want the rankings.php page or the template’s default.  I choose the rankings.php page, hit publish, and my code is now integrated into that page only.

I hope this makes sense.  If anybody knows of a PHP plugin that actually works with WordPress 3, please let me know.  But I think this way is far more secure and coder-friendly.

In it, a man who had been laid off after 25 years with a company is given a job with an up-scale restaurant in New York. The man was grateful for the chance, and promised to give 100-200-300% to the new job and to his boss. His first day on the job he was given a checklist to make sure things were done before the lunch rush.

Almost frantically he ran around the restaurant, checking off things on the list, then he came to making sure the sidewalk outside was clean and free of obstructions. It was, but then the man turns and spits on the sidewalk, directly in front of the restaurant and in view of guests already inside.

Almost immediately the restaurant manager, who had cameras watching him, came outside and said “I don’t think you are right for this company.”

Many people, including yourself, may be passionate about your job. You go in to work claiming to give 200% to making sure the business comes first, only to spit on the sidewalk. Maybe its taking a smoke break in front of the building, maybe its wearing your company logo polo to the strip club, or maybe it’s something deeper like even being rude to your customers.

It’s opened my eyes to subtle things I have done/are doing that could reflect negatively on my business.

What about you? Have you inadvertently spit on your business’s sidewalk? Do you have more examples?