I now have the pleasure of maintaining three blogs. Three very, very different blogs with three very, very different needs. So different, in fact, it's almost hard to call them just blogs, especially when trying to describe them to various people during various times of the day.

The verb/noun of 'blogging' has transcended being simply a one-word descriptor. It's just not enough anymore. I get asked about my experiences blogging from time to time, and more often, how to get started. The answer, lately, is not so easy. In my mind, it has become impossible to give advice without first knowing why the user wants to blog and what they hope to get out of it. Much like I won't plan a speaking or writing engagement without first knowing my target audience, I now won't plan blog content until I realize what the blog is for and who that target audience is.

I can't help it; I'm a consultant. By nature I need to understand the why before I can recommend a course of action, otherwise I may be leading a would-be-blogger into a course of action that could take away from their enjoyment of the experience or not fulfill their needs/expectations.

No matter how I try to stay away from generalizing, it always seems to come down to three types of blogs, each with their own types of content, needs, and audience. Therefore, I usually explain it this way when people ask me questions. It's always easier to relate to a concept that everyone already knows about and can relate to. Even though the majority of blogs usually falls into some sort of gray area in between all of these, I always revolve these three blog types in relative terms around a product. I've found it's just easier for people to grasp the concept that way.

A Personal Blog
The content reflects the product. In this case, the product is the individual - You! Time spent wisely here is to be focused on living your life, so you always have exciting, fresh things to blog about from your own unique perspective.

Your audience is found through a number of ways... Google, family, friends, friends met through social sites, StumbleUpon, etc. Loyal visitors return because your life, writing or content gives them something to enjoy, something of value that's meaningful to them, or they just want to find out what the heck you've been up to lately.

The author may write for various reasons. It could be therapeutic, fun, a gateway to a niche blog, or a great way to keep in touch with friends and family. The name and URL of a personal blog is of minimal importance. Sidebar links can be focused on social site widgets, blogrolls, Flickr badges, affiliations, etc.

When the personal blog of a friend just stops, my first thought is that they are either busy out living their life, or something has happened. Yes, I worry!

A Corporate Blog
The content certainly helps the product, but the content is not the product itself. The product or service that the corporation sells is still the product! Regular visitors are business partners, customers, product users, community partners and competitors.

A corporate blogger can blog for many reasons - branding, public relations, community and customer relationship building, product or company announcements to name a few.

Corporate blogs are so powerful today that I have either been trained subconsciously or have learned to rely on them as the primary source of information coming from that company. In addition to company or product announcements, corporate blogs that show strong, intelligent industry commentary in time become industry leaders themselves, which can help sales and strengthen community/customer relationships.

While many corporate blogs and their authors exist outside the company domain/firewall, it's outside this brief overview and will not be mentioned here. For corporate blogs located on the company's website, if the information stopped suddenly I wouldn't be able to help it - my first thought would be to question the welfare of the company as a whole before the author. In that regards, open communication would seem to be key before a corporate blog simply ceased to exist.

Sidebar links can be focused on industry news sites, product links, company links, partners, etc. Traffic can be driven through links via business partners, forums, links from the company's home page, etc.

A Pro/Niche Blog
Here, the content IS the product. It must be original and fresh, and due to the importance of search engine rankings, it can never be duplicated. Special attention is paid to a voice/niche to stand out, as well as being able to find the blog easily via search engine in order to reach a wider audience.

Because of the importance of Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) on every page, these blogs have special needs and must be highly technical in regards to tagging, URL-formation, and RSS readability.

Regular visitors are loyal followers and search engine users. The author's time is spent writing good content, building social networks, and driving traffic to the blog.

The name is highly important for two reasons. The first is that short, memorable URLs are easy to remember and brand. The second is that changing a URL on an established pro/niche blog will drastically hurt search engine ranking and inbound URL links (equally as important to SEO) will be dead.

The authors write for many reasons - fun, community support, income, networking, etc. The purpose and success of a niche blog lies with fulfilling a missing need with the readers. Traffic can be driven through search engines, reciprocal links via other niche blogs, heavy RSS feed promotion, linking to articles others write and adding additional commentary, heavy participation in social sites, etc.

How focused is will the niche be? Is it too focused to gain much readership? Does that bother you?

When the blog writing stops, visitors may worry, they may send an email, but in time, they also may just move on to the next blog that provides the same type of content they need.

Like some corporate blogs, some pro/niche blogs place emphasis on the author, some do not, or they may have multiple authors. Some corporate/niche blogs will not work at all without the original author's voice or URL. It's up to you to decide the why's and how's. Do you have existing competition? Do you even see it as competition? What will make your blog special and unique? What are you offering that no one else does? Is your "voice" important to you?

After it is all said and done, however, I always place special emphasis on two things. These things will never change.

1. There are no rules.
2. Blogging has always revolved around community and sharing. It's an old cliche, but it's true - content is king. At the end of the day, throw out everything you just read and focus on writing the best content you can. It's rewarding for you, and it's rewarding for the reader.

This is just my perspective. Let's get some more. What can you add to this? What do you agree or disagree with? Are you a blog writer? Why do you blog?
Are you a blog reader? What attracts you to certain blogs, and what makes you a loyal follower to them?
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OK, so I'm wearing yellow too, but it's hard enough trying to corral a toddler and a dog into a picture without getting ME involved!



In celebration of Ye11ow Day, here's my day so far:

1. Make a bottle, and watch The Wonder Pets ("This is sewwious!") with Zoë.
2. Get breakfast out of the way, settle the squirt down for a nap.
3. Check on the status of my Lotus Domino email domain migration project I did this weekend. As anticipated, no problems.
4. Take pictures for Ye11ow Day!

In celebration (and since the email changeover went down this weekend, I'm re-linking to a recent tip I posted: How to add a second email domain to your Domino server.

Let's all celebrate Ye11ow Day. Have you upgraded to Domino 8 yet? Are you thinking about it? Do you have a great tip to share? Log in and blog right here on the LUG group blog!



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In case you've missed it... here's the order of operations:

1. IBM released a press release "with authoriatai" about the growing number of seats (outgrowing Microsoft) in Q2 2008. And there was much rejoicing.

IBM Growth in Emerging Markets Fuels Lotus Momentum

2. Alan Lepofsky, even though no longer employed by Lotus but who still Bleeds Yellow nonetheless decided that August 11 shall be hereby declared "Ye11ow Day" in celebration.

Eleven shall be the day that is Yellow Day, and the day that is to be Yellow day shall be eleven. Twelve shall not be the day. Ten could be the day, except that the day shall then proceed to eleven. Thirteen is right out!

On August 11, show your support of all things yellow by wearing the color! Post a picture of yourself. Send me (jess.42@gmail.com) a picture of you or your office decked in in your yellow garb, and I'll post them here!

LotusUserGroup.org supports yellow day!



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You know, I design a certain way and everything works, and I never really thought that the WAY I was designing was a contributing factor in the whole "everything works" bit.

Case in point. For every database I develop, I select my placement of hidden fields at the top or the bottom of the page, usually depending on what the standard is for the organization I'm developing for.

Case in point 2: As most of you know, I'm a Notes client junkie. It's rare for me to do any sort of web developing, but I was that day, so there we are.

I created a $$Return field that would use the parent doc's UNID carried over from another field to form the URL go to back to once the form was submitted. Computed for display, everything looked great, except... no doc ID.

I try everything, until finally I admit to myself that I need to get AWAY from laptop for a bit to think. It had to be something REALLY EASY, as it always is when you tear your hair out.

(I think I should note that perhaps I have been watching a bit too much "Blue's Clues" with Zoë, as I said, "now we sit down in our thinking chair and think....think... .thiiiiiiiiiiink.")

However, I think Steve from Blue's Clues is onto something, as about ten minutes after stepping away from my computer I KNEW what it was.

I walked over, swapped the placement of the $$Return field and the field which pulled in the value of the parent UNID, and it worked beautifully.

Sure enough, it seems that if Field2 picks up Field1's value, then Field1 must be on the form somewhere before Field2. I did note that I can also check "Compute after validation" to make sure it fills in correctly no matter what.

It sounds so easy. Ten years of developing and I'd never made that connection?

How long have I been doing development? Have I really just always been lucky or developed in a way that I never had to make the connection that the way they are placed on the page is the order in which the values will be calculated?

It just goes to show - just when you think you are experienced, it takes one small little field value to show you that there is ALWAYS more to learn!

Has anyone ever had a moment of Zen like that? Can anyone enlighten me some more on ways that computed fields work that really do make sense once you think of them? Let's hear!

Jess

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First of all, apologies for the long delay in between posts! I am discovering that with an almost-11 month old, weeks go by like DAYS!

Anyway, out of all the projects I've been doing lately, one of them has been to add an additional email domain to a Domino server.

There's no shortage of misconceptions about this, so let's examine what's really involved.

First and foremost, let's clear up one very common misconception: the email (SMTP) domain is NOT the same as your Domino Domain. Your Domino domain shouldn't end in a ".com", and is used to control internal mail routing and the Domino directory.

1. Register your additional domain name.

2. Point the MX records to your Domino server, or a SPAM filtering service.

3. Now is a good time to send an email to those in your company whose address will be changing!

4. Add the domain as an alias in your Domino server's Global Domain document.
(Conversions tab --> "Alternate Internet domain aliases" field).

5. As of now, that's really all you need to do. If my domain is "solacelearning.com", and I add a new domain of  "solaceconsulting.com", if my shortname is "jstratton", then I can now receive email from both 'jstratton@solacelearning.com', and 'jstratton@solaceconsulting.com'. 

Of course, my RETURN address will still be whichever address is in the Internet Address field in the Domino Directory.

If I am splitting my Domino Directory, and certain people should ONLY be allowed to receive email from one domain or the other, I need to first make sure the correct people have the new Internet Address field listed correctly.

I can do this by selecting the users in the Domino Directory and using the "Set Internet Address" tool in the Administrator client.

Once that is done, I need to make sure that Domino ONLY uses the entire Internet address to do lookups, and not just the shortname. I can do this by going to the server's Configuration document --> Router/SMTP tab --> Basics tab, and changing the "Address Lookup" field to 'Fullname only'.

The nice thing about this is that if you change the Internet Address for a user, the next time they log in it will automatically pull that address down to their Personal Address book's Location document.

And that's it! The entire process is seamless to your users, with the exception that they now have a new Internet email address that they'll need to notify their contacts.
Are there any "How To" procedures that you'd like to see here? Have you completed a project and would like to share your steps? Log in and blog, or send me an email about it at Jess.42@gmail.com.

-Jess

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Hello

This is a question I would like to pose to the user group is possible.

Both Notes and corporate IT have evolved rapidly over the past two decades. Notes has become a full-fledged, and dare we say, industrial strength development platform. IT has evolved from back-office automation and desktop productivity to the superhighway of business processes. And with IT maturity has come increased responsibility to align IT with corporate objectives and to ensure corporate security, system reliability, and regulatory compliance. Now many organizations find themselves at a crossroads: bring Notes development into the IT fold, governed by the same policies and practices as other development platforms, or abandon Notes and face the costs and pain of excising and replacing potentially hundreds of Notes applications operating in every corner of the company.

Your opinions and views on this would be very welcomed.

Many thanks

Lisa

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If you've needed an excuse to check out the weekly Topic Forums here at LotusUserGroup.org, Kevin Pettitt of LotusGuru.com has given you a good one.

He's placed a download link to the latest version of his SuperNTF template and has asked for beta testers.

--> Get the beta of SuperNTF from the LUG Topic Forums!

(From OpenNTF) - SuperNTF is a Notes Client framework to make development easy for novice developers. It contains modules for tasks such as configuring the Help file for a database, exporting, soft deletions, user activity, and more.

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There is a silence in the air... apparently last week was brought to us by the letter I - (iPhone, ILUG). The dust is settling. Twitter is relaxing. Everyone take a deep breath.

Now! Onto the fun stuff. Ed Brill is happy to announce eight new Lotus product Wiki's:

• IBM Composite Applications wiki
  
  
• Lotus Connections Deployment wiki
  
  
• Lotus Notes/Domino wiki
  
  
• Lotus Domino Web Application Development wiki
  
  
• Lotus Quickr wiki
  
  
• Lotus Sametime wiki
  
  
• WebSphere Portlet Factory wiki
  
  
• Lotus Web Content Management wiki

Here's a link to the IBM Lotus Wiki list of the eight, so you can bookmark it directly.

On another new note, Yancy Lent has decided that our community has too many downloads - and has done something about it. He's created a "Downloads" page on Planet Lotus to directly link to downloads on other sites (think tucows, or downloads.com).

Check the downloads page for direct links (tucows-style) to sidebar widgets, product trials, conference session slides and corresponding material, templates, etc. I'd love to see direct links to the top downloads from OpenNTF.org, such as Blogsphere, Ext.nd, or whichever seem to be the most searched for there.

I'd also love to see direct links to all the end-user related applications on OpenNTF. I know I have a few up there. Lots of conversation lately has been how to drive end-user traffic to the Lotus community; this could be a great start.

On a side note, Yancy has also illustrated how it's a great idea to go over your web site's stats and search terms to give your users what they are looking for. According to him, over the past 30 days, the phrase "download" is the most searched-for term on PlanetLotus.org. My guess is that term skyrockets a few weeks after each conference.

Now. Time to dust off my presentations and downloads and get them up there. I have to find them first. To quote Ben Poole, who introduced me to this great phrase, "Gah!"

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