Blogging Tools

Get to Know ExpressionEngine, My Favorite Blogging Software

Hey, if you’re in Vancouver this September, consider coming to the EE Roadshow on 9/26. This is a half-day conference that will introduce you to one of my most indispensable tools for blogging and web design—ExpressionEngine. Here’s all the pertinent info from the Web site http://www.eeroadshow.com/:

The EE Roadshow is an event for ExpressionEngine users and developers. It is part training, part brainstorming, part networking and all wonderful.

• If you’ve ever wondered how to make ExpressionEngine work better for you in your job, this is the event for you.
• If you’ve ever wondered how the other developers make EE jump through hoops and roll over, this is your event.
• And if you also happen to wonder what EE developers look like in person, well, don’t miss this.

ExpressionEngine’s online community is friendly and productive and supportive, one of the best on the Internet. The EE Roadshow is our way of bringing ExpressionEngine users and developers together in a real-world way.

The Details
Friday, September 26th
Vancouver, BC
1-5 p.m. (then stay for the part-ee!)
$50 per person

That gives plenty of time for you out-of-town folks to arrive, and gives the folks in town a great way get out of the office early.

Other training events can cost hundreds of dollars. Our low price: $50. That’s just the price of one cup of $50 coffee!

Check out the eeRoadshow sessions. We are covering everything from basic EE setup to developing your own custom module. And there’ll be special guests from EllisLab (the folks behind ExpressionEngine), as well as interesting prizes.

About EE Roadshow

The first ever EE Roadshow is brought to you by Boxcar Marketing, Venn Communications and Hop Studios, three passionate EE development companies who want to help bring ExpressionEngine to every Web site in the world.

Knit Yourself a Keyboard Cover

Check out these cool “body technology interfaces” from Sternlab! Well, perhaps “cool” is really the wrong adjective. I’ll go with the catch-all “interesting.” Be sure to scroll down the page for some really funny photos on this site.

If you’ve read Blogging for Dummies, 2nd Edition, you may have noticed that there are too many screen shot examples from knitting blogs to be coincidence. In fact, I love to knit, and one of the ways I tried to make things fun during the writing of this book was to find knitting blogs to use in the book. And there a lot of them out there—the knitting community has embraced blogging as a way of sharing experience, patterns, and tips, not to mention connecting with each other. And now we have these hilarious examples of how knitting and blogging can be united into one passion: knitted keyboard covers are just the start. A little silly, sure, but what a fun idea.

Although my hands do get cold typing all day…

Photo by bekathwia

Blogging Survey Puts GenX Age Group Out Front

Session 1 at BlogHer Business in New York this morning (man, an 8:30 start is rough when your body tells you it is really 5:30) is “The State of the Social Media World.” Elisa, Jory and Lisa of BlogHer kicked things off and then ran through a new survey of the blogosphere. Here are my big takeaways:

* 36 million women are in the blogosphere as readers or commenters
* 15 million women are publishing blogs
* the third most common reason for a blogger to stop publishing a blog (after lack of interest or time) is dissatisifaction with blogging tools
* although the media tells us that only young people are logging in significant numbers, it’s actually GenX (21 to 47, I think) that are really most active with blogs
* there are a lot of more men at this BlogHer event than the last one I went to

They’ve promised to post the survey presentation today, so when I know where you can get more information, I’ll update this post.

Hey, and if you’re here, leave me a comment so I know to look for you!

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the presentation PDF of the survey data.