Consider Carefully What Name You Use to Comment

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Lorell VanFossen has a great post up over at the Blog Herald asking the question What Do You Put in the Name of a Comment Form?

It is something to consider carefully.

As Lorelle points out you have three basic choices of what to enter in that field when you leave a comment. You can type in your name, your blog title, or some key words.

Your Name

Personally I’m a fan of the first choice. After all the field normally has the label “Name” beside it! In my mind it just makes sense to use my name.

Blogging, even business blogging, is first and foremost about people. And unless you happen to be in some weird Tibetan Monk movie we all have been given a name.

Since you are the person leaving the comment, then it makes sense that you would identify yourself with your name.

Now I can understand there are cases where folks may have good reasons to use a pseudonym. Writing is a huge part of blogging and writers have been using pen names for centuries.

It is probably a good idea to be consistent.

You have reasons to use different personas? That’s fine by me.

Just keep in mind that if you don’t speak with a consistent voice with whatever persona you are using at the time you will likely confuse folks and come across as a bit of a flake. Read more

A Little SOBCon Levity

You may not know Susan Reynolds. But I’m guessing you probably should. She bills herself as a new media consultant. And she is very active in Web 2.0 stuff like Twitter and Second Life.

But don’t let that fool you. Susan also has a remarkable creative streak. You may recall from my birthday last month, it was Susan who created my very own Chris Cree postage stamp to help me celebrate.

Well Susan’s been at it again, exercising her creativity. This time she’s stepping over into video.

Susan posted some Spicy Buzz Hits of the Blogosphere featuring Yours Truly partnered with Liz Strauss strutting our collective stuff in a little salsa dancing.

I’ve been out of the loop for a bit and didn’t realize that Susan has turned this bit of silliness into a regular feature over at her place. It caught me totally off guard. Be sure to check her blog on the weekends and find out who her next victims will be.

Just one note of caution before you click play on this little video piece Susan cooked up: DO NOT take a sip of coffee before clicking the play button. If you do it just might end up all over your screen and keyboard. (I was laughing so loud when I saw it Gorgeous demanded to see it too. And yes, she thought it was hysterical too.)

Thank you Susan. I really needed that laugh last night.

Enjoy!

Anniversaries Galore!

Thursday was a big day here at the Cree house.

Gorgeous had a big event Thursday evening to celebrate the first year anniversary of the Savannah chapter of eWomenNetwork. She started the chapter from nothing last year.

Thursday’s event was a smashing success with over 90 people registered and only a handful of no-shows. The keynote speech was presented by Dr. Kimberly Jackson of the Kare Group. Gorgeous outdid herself and the whole thing was a smashing success.

Go figure.

There was even a TV crew there gathering footage for a commercial.

All in all I had a wonderful time attending one of her events for the first time. Way to go, Gorgeous!

Another Anniversary

Thursday was also the very day when SuccessCREEations passed the One Year Old mark.

Pretty amazing to me that a little blog that I started originally as what I called my “opensource self improvement project” is growing into a full fledged business. Read more

Back in the Saddle

I don’t know how your life works. But there are times in my life when things happen that I have very little control over.

Most times it isn’t the big things that get in the way, but a myriad of little things that pile up and push aside those things that I really would rather be attending to. Like, say, my business blog here at SuccessCREEations.

In the current case the primary thing beyond my control was a coworker taking three weeks vacation and my having to pick up the slack. Basically my already busy workload on my day job has doubled.

Between that and keeping up with my clients there has been very little time or energy to do much of anything else.

Blog’s Still Here

One of the beauties of blogging is that your blog will still be there if you take a break for a little while.

Now I don’t recommend taking big breaks like that as a regular business practice. Your stats will drop off like buffalo being chased over a cliff and it will take time to re-build them to where you were before.

Like getting thrown from a horse you have to climb back aboard at the soonest available opportunity. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes. Our minds have this weird ability to build up these huge mental barriers to getting started sometimes.

I find more often than not that once I get started on something I’ve let my mind build up into this hard project it turns out to be much less an issue than I imagined. Go figure. Read more

Mac Friday – 3 August 2007

Well it’s now been about 2 weeks since my Mac Mini arrived. And things are going well.

I overheard Gorgeous telling a friend that she doesn’t hear grumpy noises eminating from my office anymore. I take that as a good sign things are going well.

Before I got the Mac I was at the point where I was loosing about 20 minutes out of every hour on my machine waiting for things to process or rebooting. That doesn’t happen anymore.

One Hitch

Well, there was one morning this past week. For some reason my mouse laser stopped registering clicks. It would track around the screen fine, but wouldn’t click on anything.

The scroll function wasn’t working either.

I fought with it a bit to see if I could get it reset easily. I was hoping to figure out if it was something screwy I did or not. Smart money is on operator error.

Finally I just did a hard shut down of the computer, turned off the wireless mouse and keyboard, and powered everything back up.

Things have been purring along nicely ever since. One hitch in two weeks is so much better than the several times a day that I was dealing with that

MS Office Work Around

I don’t yet have much need for MS Office with what I do here on this machine. But occasionally clients will send me a Word document from time to time.

I’ve found a serviceable work around with Google Docs. It is right there alongside my Gmail account and can import and export Word documents just fine. It isn’t perfect. But it does work for those occasional documents you need to get out.

Eventually I’ll probably get MS Office for Mac, although I hear Open Office is pretty good too. Maybe I’ll try that first.

A Mac Resource

Was pointed to a great resource for news on things Mac by a friend. If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out Think Secret. It’s chock full of insider info.

Before I check out this morning, let me leave you with a little PC vs. Mac humor.

Enjoy!

See Which Pages Others are Viewing with Who’s Among Us.

I’ve been test driving a little blog widget from a service called Who’s Among Us. So far I’ve got to say so far I like it.

It is elegantly simple in what it does. It shows which pages other folks are currently viewing on your site.

What it does

When you install their widget on your site like the one here so that it displays on every page of your site folks can then see in real time how many people are viewing the site right at that moment.

Then anyone can click through the widget and see a list of URLs of the pages being viewed right then like this one for SuccessCREEations.

Customizing Your Widget

They’ve also got a very simple color wheel to help you pick some colors for your widget.

The way they’ve set up the color wheel makes it one of the simplest color choosing tools I’ve seen in a long time.

Simple click in an outer ring color to choose the background widget color. Then to the right is a vertical column with different shades where you can refine your color choices even more.

Next choose a contrasting color from the inner wheel for the number color. Again you get some shade options in the vertical bar to the right.

Very slick. And very intuitive. Read more

Surprising Light Bulb Moments

When was the last time you had a light bulb moment?

You know the kind. You’re just trucking along thinking things are just ducky. You’ve got things figured out and you know exactly where you are headed.

Then. Wham!

A moment suddenly comes when a whole bunch of things you never knew before, or probably never even considered, are set right in front of you in a way that is crystal clear and obvious.

You know without a doubt that your life will never really be the same again. You are thinking thoughts that you’ve never had before. And those new thoughts will change the direction of your life forever.

Dinner and a Light Bulb

That happened for Gorgeous and I last night.

We had a friend over for dinner. I thought we were going to be talking about a web site for him.

I think we all entered into that conversation thinking we were going to be talking about a web site for him.

But instead, after four hours of talking with our friend, Gorgeous and I both shared one of those light bulb moments.

It will be interesting to see where this all goes. I’m sure we just stepped onto a new path, one that we never even considered before.

How About You?

Do you ever have light bulb moments?

How did you know it?

How did it change you?