Trying on ecto

Tonight ended up being a short night for computer productivity however I did have the opportunity to play around with some new software. My MarsEdit 30-day demo ended today and overall I can say I wasn’t impressed. In fact, the last couple of posts to my blog were drafted and published through the editor available on wordpress.com. So with tonight I did some googling and came across an old post on Problogger.net list 5 essential OSX blogging tools. This post lead me to ecto.

Ecto, much like MarsEdit supports a number of blogging platforms and after installing can be used in minutes to started drafting your post. The editor provides all of my main features needed to support your blog publishing and additional features can be added through plugins.

First impressions… I am liking it so far. Deep dive to come in the following weeks however one important note is the cost. I couldn’t justify MarEdit for $29.95 however if all of the same features are there in ecto and possibly more I have no problem paying 17.95 for a license.

What does your blog say about you?

From the dmtweetup and conversations I have had this past week I have been rethinking what I am doing in terms of personal branding. My digg, delicious, flickr, blog and twitter account all say something about who I am and is easily discoverable by any future employer. So for me it is important that my online presence speaks to my interests, capabilities and provides a consistent message.

In blogging I have found this the hardest to do. I have always felt one of my strengths has been my organizational skills however I do not believe it shows through my blog. I also feel that I haven’t been able to convey my fields of expertise and interests, and I struggle the most with how do I balance posting about my personal life with my professional one.

To avoid deleting my past blog posts again and starting fresh I have decided to map out a plan and set new goals. I am currently thinking about what topics I want to contribute to the blogosphere and have a dialogue around. In short, if I want to be known for something what is it? Hopefully I will have the answer soon.

Before I end this post I have a few questions for who ever reads this. What are you doing around personal branding? If you blog, what does it say about you? What topics have you wanted to blog but have decided its in your best interest not to? And do you have multiple blogs and if so how are they different from each other?

No blog post tonight

This is a blog post about not blogging tonight — I had an amazing time tonight at the #dmtweetup. We had our biggest turn out to date and even had a writer from DM Juice join up and interview some of the group. Amazing conversations and always great to see new faces at the event. Its time to upload some photos to flickr from the event and then I’m calling it a night. I will post more about this tomorrow.

Change log

For those of you wondering what has changed on the site per my last post here is a short change log. If you have any additional recommendations to improve the blog please let me know! But just so we are all on the same page I play around with free technology/services and re-use code from other people much smarter than I am; so actually I really don’t know how to do any of this myself.

Change log:

• Purchased robjensen.info and it now forwards to this blog
• Updated “About Me” page
• Updated “Contact Info” page
• Cleaned and modified categories (but I still hope to stay fairly focused on business and technology observations
• Added a blogroll and listed a few blogs I want to follow and I believe align with things I would post about
• Added links to my other web-presense sites (Side note: I also made a lot of changes to my tumble log, ElephantsCrossing.com
• Added flick sidebar to display photos tagged with “tumblr” (which also feeds ElephantsCrossing.com)
• And just for kicks added the meta sidebar because I thought it could be longer

Not apparent on the site but playing a critical role in supporting my blogging I have also installed and started to use NetNewsWire to read other blogs, Skitch to take screenshots and post to flickr so I can easily add images to my posts, and MarsEdit to draft/publish my posts.

There is a lot more work that I want to do to make this blog meaningful and promote it across the blogosphere. I hope you will find my posts valuable or at least interesting. Let me know your thoughts on where I am going, what has worked for you, and what you think is missing.

Blogging for me, Blogging for you,

Rob

Updates and more updates

Admittedly, I am a horrible web2.0 contributor. In the past I would sign up for nearly ever service blogged about on TechCrunch and for about 2 hours I would use them. I was a beta whore but recently I have died down and focused on a few key services that have provided real value to my real life. My current favorite services are flickr, delicious, tumblr and twitter. I am also starting to enjoy some the events driven out of the web2.0 culture such as #dmtweetups, barcamp and overall have had some great conversations about technology, social media and collaboration.

The network I have built in Des Moines has re-energized me and motivated me to get active this this technology scene. So with that said I am making a large effort to contribute back and update my blog, tumblelog and start tagging my links and photos.

Glad to be back again, looking forward to driving to some of my technology goals and can’t wait for the next #dmtweetup!