Remember National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) back in November? You all used the opportunity to take a swing at churning out a 50,000-word novel on your blogs in only one month — some with great success!
It’s an even more fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you. And maybe the best part is that it starts whenever you want it to! The only objective is to post every day for a month. So why not begin with July? To make it official, sign up here. It’s open to anyone with a blog, anywhere in the world.
The NaBloPoMo team provides a theme for each month, which isn’t mandatory, but is a nice way to gain inspiration that can kick off your daily updates.
Not into that? Then we suggest sticking to the stuff you’ve been blogging about all along — the things you experience and love — with the added caveat of keeping it on the regular.
If you run out of steam, you can always find ways to blog about the dozens of weird celebrations and holidays that take place in July, in addition to Independence Day in the U.S. — like Ice Cream Soda Day, Video Games Day, or Bugs Bunny’s Birthday.
To plug the WordPress community into your endeavor, we suggest using NaBloPoMo09 as a tag on each post you publish to your blog. They’ll show up on the tag results page, which is also a great place to get inspired by your fellow bloggers.
A note: Please refrain from commenting with questions about NaBloPoMo in response to this post. It’s not a WordPress project. Instead, check out their FAQ to learn more about its objectives and requirements.
Last month we launched the Yahoo! App and 360 importer so you can migrate your content to WordPress.com quickly and easily. And we introduced the SocialVibe widget, which helps you earn donations for the charity of your choice. July will bring more feature updates, and more of the themes and customizations you’ve been asking for. We’re listening.
Here are the stats for June:
388,580 blogs were created.
5,845,417 posts were published.
411,540 new users joined.
5,800,941 file uploads.
3,633 gigabytes of new files.
810 terabytes of content transferred from our datacenters.
8,330,617 comments.
6,841,633 logins.
1,245,935,191 pageviews on WordPress.com, and another 1,245,882,985 on self-hosted blogs (2,491,818,176 total across all WordPress blogs we track).
2,153,176 active blogs where “active” means they got a human visitor.
I’ve recently started following another expat Kiwi in London’s blog and her post last night, entitled “deep breath“, struck a real chord with me. The situation, for me, is completely different but the sentiment expressed – that I might not be good enough – is something I well understand.
She writes:
“I have been playing chess with this fear for the best part of 30 years. And in a weird way I am thankful for it. It has pushed me forward and given me a defiant courage to do it all anyway. I have spent years living on my own, paying my own way, being responsible only for me. I have affirmed to myself every single day that all of these things are evidence of my independence, strength, capability. This is the me I promised myself I would be when I knew there was no going back. And while mostly serving me well, this self-suficiency has also created a dark and twisty me, the one that thinks letting go somehow equals weakness.
I want to keep growing, experiencing and metamorphosing. And this involves allowing myself to be still for a while, to be really here.”
I guess I’m re-posting this because I know that these are feelings many of us have over the course of our lifetimes and sharing in it sometimes, realising we’re not the only ones to feel like this, can be so incredibly helpful. I thoroughly recommend you read her entire post, from start to finish, if nothing else it is a lesson in honesty.
Having a little blogishness catch-up with myself on this fine sunny London morning and have provided a few more “Blogs I Read” links as well as another VSO blog. I (clearly) recommend all of them but well worth having a flick through and seeing if there’s any you’re interested in following too.
You spend a lot of time creating great content and attracting an audience for your blog. What if you could use that influence to make a positive social impact? Now you can.
We’ve teamed up with SocialVibe, and now by adding the SocialVibe widget to your blog, you are able to earn donations for the charity of your choice by getting sponsored by a brand that appeals to you.
Each time someone visits your blog and engages with your brand (by rating a video, for example), you’re making a difference. That impact is immediately visible on your badge, i..e., ‘My blog has provided 63 cups of clean water for people in need.’
The money donated comes from your brand, so you and your readers never have to pay a dime.
In addition to earning donations, you’ll also get feedback from your charity about the difference they’re making thanks to you. By clicking the charity logo in the badge, you can find information about your cause and view real-time goal progress.
Setup is easy and only takes a few clicks – just go to Appearance->Widgets in your dashboard, add the SocialVibe widget and pick a cause and a charity. For more details you can find documentation in our support area. If you change your mind about your sponsor or cause, you can easily make adjustments by visiting your widget dashboard.
If you are running a self-hosted WordPress blog, be sure to grab the SocialVibe plugin.
With SocialVibe, our community can pool our individual influences to create positive change in the world.
May was also the month for our largest-ever WordCamp San Francisco. Mission Bay Conference Center was a packed house, but (amazingly) everything ran on schedule, and nothing went wrong! A round of applause is due to our sponsors, speakers, and everyone who attended for helping to make WordCamp such a smooth success. Thanks for making it all possible.
WordCamp San Francisco had 739 pre-event registrations (a huge jump from 427 last year), and 789 actual attendees from 32 countries — plus 15 speakers, six sponsors, and lots of volunteers.
While things have greatly improved, there is still quite clearly a wound (as opposed to a nice neat scar) and it’s causing all sorts of fun. Today’s particular adventure involved conversations with nurses and doctors regarding why the wound appeared to have opened up a little in two places and, more worryingly, why green pus appeared to be oozing from said places. Delightful! I do hope you’re not reading this on a full stomach . . .
As I continue to rest (mostly) tucked up in bed, you would think I’d be blogging like crazy but in fact the very opposite is true. I watch tv. I read. I sleep. I drink water and eat vegetables (sometimes). I am incredibly bored but seem to be better at blogging when I am at last vaguely busy. My mind works better when there is more to think about than one thing at a time – a luxury I am “enjoying” at the moment.
But things are steadily improving, we hope, and I vainly hope I’ll be back at work next week for a couple of days before Tim and I head off to Santorini. Failing all else, surely some relaxing in the Greek Islands will do wonders.
The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com
Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)
Thanks to Yahoo! for their help with their Yahoo! Application Platform, and thanks to all of you for the best blogs on the intertubes.
If you need help with either of these new toys (or anything else), please contact our support team.
So part of this blog is my attempt to document the whole VSO process from beginning to end. As such you are now about to be subjected to a short post of my first proper conversation with my volunteer placement advisor (VPA) at VSO.
It took so long for the two of us to be in the same country and therefore able to talk to each other that I was going to be damned if I let my recovery get in the way of the first real discussion about the lay of the land with placements and such and so it finally happened last Friday.
Much of it was an information-provision exercise on her part and for a lot of that I’d already gleaned what I needed to know from the scarily comprehensive handbook. She was, however, able to shed light on some very important things.
1) My CV and profile are on the big all-powerful VSO database
2) It’s hoped we’ll find a suitable placement in the participation and governance field for me in time for the September/October 09 leaving dates.
3) It is, however, possible I will not be leaving until February (that feels like a really LONG time away right now), should a placement not be found as quickly as hoped.
4) At this point, it is my job to sit tight and wait. I could be fundraising but I think that might be easier once I have a placement (any advice from current volunteers on that?).
All good stuff.
So as I sit and wait for a suitable placement summary, I shall entertain you with ramblings about UK politics and, of course, my exploits on the sunny Greek island of Santorini (Thira) in two weeks time for Tim’s birthday.
A week and a half ago I dashed (attempting to faint on the way as I walked myself there) to A&E with massive stomach cramps and this quite-literal gut-wrenching pain below my tummy button. I’d been in pain since 4:30am and had managed to convince myself to attempt to wait it out until about 7:30am when, after a quick conversation with the doctor-professional parental-unit, I walked the two blocks to UCL hospital. After 3 and a half hours I was sent home with pain meds after the docs were more than a little unsure about what the problem was and having actually fainted (luckily in the hospital).
The long and short of it is that I reappeared back in A&E that evening (thanks be to Tim for convincing me that giving the docs another go was a good plan) and after another agonising four hour wait was shifted into a ward to have blood tests, which were shortly (although I did get to sleep in between briefly) followed by the removal of my offending appendix and a general investigation and thorough cleaning of my insides. Delightful.
Somewhat understandably, I have spent the last week and a half off work with a dressing covering one side of my tummy. Rather than key hole surgery, they went for the long deep cut-her-in-half route and so the scar is already quite impressive. Bruising is incredible and my first attempt at changing the dressing involved me lying down for a long period of time to get over the shock and horror at how awful it looked.
I am, however, recovering and am more awake every day – that said I have slept most of the day. It’s been good weather for getting better in though, and now that the political situation here is really hotting up I’m quite enjoying having the time (and necessity) to not do much and read a lot.
Comparto con ustedes un video de una exposición que tuve la oportunidad de hacer el año pasado en representación de la Asociación Vientos del Sur, titulada "Participación Juvenil y Nuevas Tecnologías".
En mi exposición abordo someramente conceptos y herramientas útiles para el trabajo de las ONGs juveniles.
Web 2.0, Ciberactivismo, los nativos digitales, el poder de los Blogs, los Wikis, las mal llamadas redes sociales, entre otros temas están incluidos en este resumen de menos de 10 minutos (la exposición original duró 30 minutos)
Gracias a Gastón por realizar la filmación y a Nacho por convertirla a formato digital.
A quienes les interese la relación entre participación, juventud e internet, los invito a leer un artículo que escribí el año pasado para un dossier sobre "juventud y TICs" para el Portal de Juventud de América Latina y el Caribe, clickeando acá
I have got excessively used to having a working computer at home and at work. I watch tv, I read articles, I listen to music, I write posts for my blog…I enjoy the noise of typing. I even quite like having an overly bright screen to stare at much of the time. The internet allows me to connect to vast numbers of people all over the world with the greatest of ease and I love that. I volunteer for TakingItGlobal with the Action Tools team and would be completely incapable of doing this without my little lappie and decent internet access.
For the past three working days, we’ve had a complete computer shut down after the work hard drive corrupted (by all accounts – as yet unconfirmed) and the backup appears to have had issues as well. Oh dear. I have spent most of three work days reading books at my desk, staring at a blank screen and wondering what I’m missing…and it’s been difficult. I get my news from the internet. The internet tells me that two sets of my friends got engaged today/yesterday. Congrats on that by the way guys!
Maybe it’s been that I was bored (i.e actually had very little else I could do) but it also made me realise I might be a little too used to having computer access.
One of my requests with VSO is that I be, if at all possible, based in a town or city, where I can get the large amount of human contact I need to stop myself from getting lonely and depressed. I’m not someone who copes well by myself, although I thoroughly enjoy my alone time when I want/need it.
For me it’s also important I can somehow connect with the rest of the world on a fairly regular basis and I know this will be both possible, and theoretically easy given the types of roles I’m likely to take on.
But I do need to seperate myself from my computer more often I think…so that when things fail and systems crash, as they inevitably do, I have a book to read and am not left feeling quite so lost.
We’ve been busy lately here at WordPress.com — we’ve had an announcement of a new or updated feature for you every day this week. Today, you’re getting a two-fer!
Earlier this week, we announced VideoPress, the great new video feature for WordPress.com. Now VideoPress has its own home on the web at VideoPress.com. We’ve also got a great video introduction created by our company auteur Michael Pick, so be sure to head over and check it out. We’ll be continuing to add features to VideoPress, including support for WordPress.org users, so stay tuned to VideoPress for all the latest.
P.S. If you’re a design geek like me, you might be interested to know that the VideoPress logo (as well as all of VideoPress.com) is set in the beautiful Museo family of typefaces, designed by your fellow WordPress.com bloggers at the exljbris Font Foundry (exljbris.wordpress.com).
