Sandcurves

At the end of my previous post, I said I'll discuss ways that you can follow along, learn from or even contribute to the project I am running, exploring the idea of crafting meaningful blogs. 

I don't want to set to much of a schedule for how I am going to work through the whole theme, I want to let it grow naturally and see where it, and most of all where you, the readers, take it.  However, I do want to go somewhat from getting your blog to stop sucking, through to being nice, through to being meaningful in content and design, through to building a team of serious fans and finally, to being super awesome. 

Well, something along those lines anyway

I might just post totally at random from time to time, just to get something out that I am keen to talk about. 

Follow

You can follow along by subscribing to this blog, of course, but I want to do a little more than that. 

I'll also use the hashtag #blog_craft.  I just couldn't shorten "meaningful" in a meaningful way - the hashtag would have an unusual following if I had #MeanBlog as the hashtag - of course, meaningful is just to long for twitter.  I know the underscore isn't normally used much in hashtags - but what the hey, I like it better than CamelCasing and I am worried that it gets confused with 'craft blogs', which may happen anyway.

The reason for the hashtag is that if I find something relevant that isn't on my own blog, I'll let you know on twitter with the hashtag.  And, of course, you can join in the conversation as well.  You can search the hashtag (if you are new to twitter) by looking on hashtags.org or simply using Twitter Search.

By the way, after reading this, I decided to start up a twitter account for sandcurves, twitter.com/sandcurves, so please follow me on that account if you are interested in what I say on this blog.  I intend that account to be more personal in nature - even if I get serious on this blog, it is my personal blog.  My other twitter account will focus more on nature, travel and Namibia.

Learn

I'm hoping that this isn't just a journey of mine, that you'll get stuck into what we chat about and see what you can do in your blog.  I'm no expert.  My experience as a naturalist taught me to explore and to dig into things deeper and deeper.  As a guide I learned that to get better than all the other guides I needed to deepen my knowledge way more than anyone else and I learned to ask questions and to view things from different angles, to ask questions, to experiment, and most importantly, never to get complacent about any aspect of nature - and I fully intend to take that approach here. 

So, don't just view this as instruction - try things I say, let me know what you think in the comments, and I'll go back and edit as we learn together.  I want the posts to keep on gaining value long after I publish them.

The more this turns into a discussion, the more we'll all learn!

Contribute

Let me count the ways…

1. Comment - Get involved in the conversation right here, I want to learn from you and want to make sure that I share in a meaningful way.  Sometimes I jabber on to much, and loose focus - tell me, help me to fix it up until we have something really useful
2. Tweet - share the stuff we chat about here on social bookmarking sites and get the conversation rocking.
3. Write some guest posts - I'm a learning, you are awesome people, of course, and you have knowledge and skills.  I'm sure, as so often happens, I'll be preaching to the converted… talking to people who have solid, meaningful blog.  Please write a post for me.  I can suggest topics or you can simply share what you have on your mind.
4. Write something related to the discussion on your website. 
5. Let anyone you know that is interested in this topic know about the project, so that they can add their two cents worth as well..

I have created a special page for the project on this site.  If you post a post on your own blog and let me know about it, so long as it is relevant and clean, I'll put a link to it on the project page.  As we go along, I'll edit the page and add all the posts I put up as well. 

As Steven Handel said in the comments of the previous post, maybe we can turn this into a book by the end.

Do you have trouble figuring out what to write in your blog posts.  If you do, that may be one of the things that is hindering you from becoming a really good blogger, and it is perhaps the first important step in creating meaningful content.  In my next post (probably on Wednesday) I'll be posting a post called "Solve your 'don't know what to write' problem forever". 

I'll share my work-flow, how I got there and why I think it works brilliantly.  If you have a special way of preparing for your blog posts, I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

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