I’ve been enjoying writing up all the client success stories for Tech Liminal – and now, it’s my turn to tell my own story of how Anca Mosoiu and TechLiminal empowered me at a time when I needed it – badly.
How to hire a social media consultant
February 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment
February 13, 2012 6:30PM
There are more than 55,000 people who list themselves as “social media consultants” on Linked In. Given this situation, how do you know if the person you’re working with is qualified and has the skills to deliver what you need?
News & community media organization Oakland Local and co-working spaceTech Liminal invite you to come share you views–and get tips from some experts at our interactive panel on “How to hire a social media consultant.” The event is Monday, February 13 at 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM at TechLiminal, 268 14 Street, Oakland CA 94612.
Panelists include: Krys Freeman, aka blaKtivist. Krys Freeman is expert at using social media to market events and drive discussion, as her work with Butch Voices and Code for Oakland proves. Snapfish’s Deanna Dawson, an Oakland Local, has hired countless consultants in her career, and has great advice to share. Julia French, Covered Communications, an expert at aligning social media with brand messages and events. Fran Maier, Founder, TRUSTe and long-time entrepreneur.
Social Media Clinic
December 22, 2011 By 2 Comments
Every Monday from 4PM-6PM
Using social media in your work but have some questions? Not sure how to measure what’s working–or what new things to try? Now the doctor is in! This hands-on clinic is for social media users and consultants and offers a chance for the community to get ideas and advice from one another and from social media experts Kwan Booth, Deb Mason and Susan Mernit.
We’ll answer questions from participants, and try to work through issues together – this is how everyone learns.
Bring your lunch to this drop-in event. Register ahead of time–or drop if if there’s room.
Cost: $15
About Oakland Local Academy:
Want to sharpen your online tech and social media skills? Oakland Local Academy is the premier East Bay resource for learning how to use social media, market your business or organization online, and learn how to tell–and share–your own story. We also offer special workshops for job seekers.
Oakland Local Academy is the acclaimed training division of Oakland Local, the East Bay’s most-visited non-profit news & community web site.
We’re committed to offering affordable, high-quality training, mentoring and follow-up to Oakland-area residents, non-profit and community workers and business people. We also support tech and media entreprneurs through our leading role in InOak, an organization we helped start focusd on tech innovation in Oakland.
Oakland Local Academy is a tool that can help in job creation, better employment and speaking truth to power. To join our mailing list,email trainings@oaklandlocal.com
See oaklandlocal.com/trainings for more information.
If you’d like to sponsor a training for your group, contact us at trainings@oaklandlocal.com
Special ad rate for Tech Liminal customers
November 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Oakland Local is offering a holiday advertising package at a special rate to all Tech Liminal friends and clients. The package is a badge ad for a month on Oakland Local and a newsletter ad for 2 issues in December for $250. You must be a locally owned business employing 10 people or less to qualify and must place your order for this package by November 20, 2011.
Oakland Local is also offering special rates to Tech Liminal friends and clients members on banner ads for a month @ $200 (full price: $250) and on holiday newsletter packages (6 issues, $300). OL advertisers and promotional partners include The Oakland Museum, Yoshis, ASPCA, phat beets produce, Planting Justice, Marin Sun Farms , Farley’s, Rosenbloom Cellars, Cirque de Soleil. and the Dimond Merchants’ Association. Oakland Local readers are very engaged; many of our ads and offers have received click-throughs between 2 and 8 %; an average CT is .65-1.03.
We’re happy to work with you to craft holiday offers, programs and promotions that engage our broad audience (more than 82,000 visitors to the web site last month, more than 6,400 Facebook followers)– 92% of our audience told us that shopping locally is of keen interest.
For more information, and a chance to see whether OL is a fit for your holiday and/or ongoing marketing needs, please contact
Susan Mernit, editor/publisher
susan@oaklandlocal.com
(650) 814-9303
CONTACT US BY NOVEMBER 22 FOR SONE BONUS SERVICES FOR YOUR HOLIDAY PROGRAM
CSS Clinic
October 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Fridays, 2:00 – 3:00 PM (after the WordPress Support Group)
Cost: $10
The public demands it! We will now be offering a CSS clinic on Fridays, immediately after the WordPress Support Group. Bring those pesky things that don’t line up, questions about fonts, colors, and more, and get help with your site.
How to change the Twenty-Eleven Header size
October 14, 2011 By 4 Comments
From the WordPress support group… Just paste this code into your functions.php file, once you’ve created a child theme.
<?php
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', apply_filters( 'twentyeleven_header_image_width', 970 ) );
define( 'HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', apply_filters( 'twentyeleven_header_image_height', 150 ) );
?>
This will change the header height to 970 pixels wide by 150 pixels tall.
Organize Your Website Information
September 29, 2011 By 5 Comments
It’s hard to keep track of all the URL’s and passwords that you need in order maintain your online presence. Here’s a handy-dandy checklist we’ve been developing to help you organize it all.
Download the Tech Liminal Website Checklist
The first two pages of this worksheet are the keys to your kingdom! Guard them well.
The rest of the information is useful when you are building or updating your site.
What do you think? Is this helpful? Confusing? Let us know in the comments below.
Pretty Pictures and Your Blog – 5 Useful Things to Know About Using Images on Your Site
September 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Thanks to Cheryl Liquori from the fabulous Breakfast Blogging Club for inciting me to write this post. I was going to do a presentation, but it somehow seemed more appropriate (and easier to share links) to just make it a blog post.
The effective use of images can make your blog come to life. A wall of text is all well and good for when you’re trying to explain the meaning of life or writing a book, but many people stop and read a web page because and image triggered some kind of emotion in their mind. So, in this post, I’ll give you 5 tools you can use to begin to use images effectively on your site.
The Legal Fine Print
Images, like other online content, are subject to copyright. Make sure you have permission to use the images you put on your site, because your ISP won’t hesitate to pull your site offline if they receive a cease and desist letter from a copyright holder.
Finding Images
If you’re a photographer or can draw, you might be able to produce your own stuff. However, the internet is a fount of resources when it comes to finding illustrations for our sites. Some are free and some are paid. Here are some tools:
1) CreativeCommons.org – This site, dedicated to teaching people about legally licensing and sharing content online, provides a search engine and descriptions of licenses for finding content for re-use. One site that CC.org searches is Flickr.com – The world’s most fabulous photography community.
This image was found when searching CC.org for images of Oakland, and added to our blog post using the HTML code provided by Flickr.
2) Istockphoto.com – A stock photography site where you can license images and video. They’ve got a thorough search engine and lots of useful tags. There are other stock photo sites on the web (and even ones that offer free content) but I find istockphoto the most affordable and reputable of the bunch. You can buy an image for your site starting at about $2.50.
Bonus tool: If you do your work from screenshots, you should pick up a screen capture application that lets you annotate images. I like Jing, from TechSmith, because it’s available on Mac and Windows, and allows me to upload screenshots and videos to their site for a small yearly fee.
Preparing Images
Your images should be the “right size” for your blog – and no bigger. Consider pixel size as well as byte-size.
Some tools:
3) Google Picasa - This desktop application lets you organize, tag, and edit photos and images, as well as export them at various sites. Extremely useful and free. You don’t have to use Picasa Web Albums to be a Google Picasa user.
Aviary.com – this online suite of tools provide almost everything that Photoshop has but can be used through a browser.
Pixels and Bytes
Your site is made of rectangles. Some of these are particular sizes and putting an image that fits properly in one of these rectangles is recommended. For example, the content column on this page is 500 pixels wide, so I would use an image of that size in it. Your theme might put the kibosh on images that are the wrong size, but far more often they’ll overflow and overlap something else.
(4) You can tell WordPress to make your images the right size by going into your Media Settings (Settings, Media).
The finder can tell you all sorts of useful information
You can find out how big your images are from your operating system. On the Mac, this information is displayed in the Finder when you use the 3-column view. You can also get it by looking at the image “info”. Windows has similar tools.
SEO for Images and WordPress
Most search engines only look at the text on our sites. Images, which have metadata embedded in them, can also be tagged and labeled properly for use. The tags and labels are applied through captions (like the one on the left), and to the HTML “img” tag that tells the browser and search engines what’s on your page.
(5) Some helpful articles about preparing images and tagging them properly, in particular to help w/ SEO:
Top 7 Image Optimization Tips from Zemalf is full of details and is a very quick overview (somewhat technical).
From Website In a Weekend: Advanced Img Tag Handing for SEO (Part 1 and Part 2) – accessible, detailed, step-by-step explanations with circles and arrows and everything.
StudioPress and Theming Resources
August 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Hello there,
This is a work in progress post, but contains links to useful things for our HTML to WordPress workshop.
- Get Genesis (currently, our favorite framework)
- Genesis Hooks Reference
- Creating a WordPress Child Theme
- Visual Markup Guide
- WordPress Template Hierarchy (this tells you what files you want to create in your theme)
- W3Schools.com – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Help
- Firebug (useful tool for viewing and debugging in Firefox)
Useful Genesis Plugins:
- Genesis Simple Sidebars (Lets you assign sidebars to pages and posts on an individual basis)
- Genesis Slider (Create a slideshow from pages and/or posts)
Day 1:
- Get Everyone’s development environment squared away
- Genesis Demo (why I love it!)
- Intro to WordPres Theming
- Pages, Posts, Widgets
- Structure your WP Site
- Prep to cut up your design
- Create your child theme
Misc Configuration Options
- Screen Options
- Genesis Settings and SEO
A Developer’s Overview of WordPress
August 21, 2011 By 2 Comments
Learn about the world’s most popular Content Management System (CMS), WordPress. Anca Mosoiu, who has been developing WordPress sites since 2006, will give a developer-focused overview of this LAMP platform, which is simple enough for your grandma’s bridge club site, flexible enough for a neighborhood business association, and powerful enough for a book publisher’s online presence.
We’ll be discussing the following topics (but bring your questions, I like the free-for-all format of meetup discussions)
- How WordPress works (installation, wordpress.com vs. wordpress.org)
- Basic theming
- Plugins for 1001 utilities
- Where you can go to do more.
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