December 2007 Recap [en]

It’s high time for a December 2007 Recap. 36 posts, including the November 2007 Recap. In future, I’ll try to do the recap nearer the end of the month. I will.

And I thought November had been busy?!

Going Solo and Going Far

Let’s get cracking: I’d say one of the major themes of December 2007 was my announcement of Going Solo, and a whole bunch of posts I wrote around that. I’ve now copied the posts over to the blogs of both Going Solo and Going Far, so I’ll link to them there.

On the Going Solo blog:

• Announcing Going Solo: the announcement
• Picking a City for an Event: Lausanne: explaining my decision to hold the event in Lausanne, rather than London, Paris or Berlin
• Headache: Picking a Date for an Event: where I share some of the pain involved in choosing a date (I actually had to change it to May 16th later on

For some reason, Badges at Conferences didn’t get copied over to the Going Solo blog — but it’s clearly related to this conferency stuff.

On the Going Far blog:

These posts are more general musings (most of the time) on the whole “starting a company” thing.

• News from LeWeb3: LeWeb3 (which I maintain should have been called LeWeb4) is where I started talking about Going Solo and approaching possible sponsors — a very important step for me
• Why Events?: an explanation of why I decided to start organizing events in addition to my current work as a consultant and speaker
• Advisors, Boards, Companies, Partners, Oh My!: trying to come to grips with the different levels of involvement others may have in your company (still figuring that one out, by the way)
• Websites and Blogs, Where Does One Start?: yet another post ending in a punctuation mark — worrying about online presence, and finding it kind of ironic as it’s my job to help people with theirs

Here, too, a post which I think I should also have copied over, but which got left behind: Feeling Like a Born-Again Blogger.

WoWiPAD, WPD, and Work-Related Stuff

While on the topic of events, December saw some action in the “get together and do stuff” department: Website Pro Day (WPD) and World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day (WoWiPAD). The second WPD (French post) was announced and took place on the 28th. WoWiPAD1 and WPD2 News was a short announcement/sign-up post.

As a result, I’ve worked a bit on my professional site (this month too, actually), and written about trying to map out what I do and how to “advertise” is: Working on my Professional Site (with a French version: Qu’est-ce que je fais, au juste?.

I also decided to start organizing a blogging crash course. As this targets local people, I’ve blogged about it in French: Trois heures pour se mettre à bloguer (the concept — I’ll be proposing this as a workshop at the LIFT conference once I’ve figured how to write it up… tomorrow — deadline is 20th!) and Qui prendrait des “cours de blog”?, my vision of the target audience for this kind of course.

I sent in a talk proposal for BlogTalk 2008 (BlogTalk 2008 Proposal — Being Multilingual: Blogging in More Than One Language). For the funny story, I had a nasty time booking my flights, then my talk was rejected, then I decided not to go to BlogTalk and started cancelling my flights, then I was invited to come on a panel (which I’ve just agreed to moderate), so I had to un-cancel and rebook a couple of flights. Sigh.

Still in the “work-related” department, as I was booking my flights with Kayak.com, I decided to write up the experience: Being My Own Travel Agent With Kayak. This was a chance to share what I’d learnt with my fellow travellers, and in the same time provide a demonstration of what kind of material I might produce during an experiential marketing campaign. The very next day, I came upon an article on a French blogger’s site (about some form of blogvertising) which prompted me to give some explanations about the experiential marketing concept in French: Marketing expérientiel vs. publireportage. So… two rather long blog posts just before Christmas. (There would be another post or two to write about the end of my adventures in organizing travel: sites that don’t take non-US credit cards, for example, or various weird pricing structures and policies you can bump into. But not now. Today, my travels for Feb/March are booked, finally.)

Though it was written early in the month, Blogs en entreprise, un peu en vrac (in French) also belongs to this pile of “work-like” posts, as it is an explanation of the issues surrounding corporate blogging and what it involves. I actually wrote it for a prospective client at the time.

WordPress Things

Another major theme for December was WordPress-related things (as you can see, I’ve been knee-deep in code):

• Ridding WordPress Plugins of Template Tags: a couple of neat tricks to save your plugin users from having to add template tags all over the place
• WordPress Sandbox Theme Problems: not all resolved, I’m afraid
• Nasty Problem With Basic Bilingual Plugin: resolved, thankfully!
• WordPress Deaf to Pings: seems to have mostly resolved itself, though I do often end up republishing posts 3-4 times to help the pingbacks get through
• Browser Language Detection and Redirection: not strictly WordPress stuff, but useful to anybody with a multilingual WordPress site
• Bunny’s Language Linker: New WordPress Plugin: now also in the WordPress Plugin Index — helps create links between equivalent pages on mirror-translated websites.

The Rest

Now we find ourselves faced with a bunch of posts that don’t seem directly related to one another. My interests are varied, and I must say that I sometimes wonder how anybody else but me would find such a mixture appealing.

Here are some about Web 2.0-ish related stuff:

• Twitter Advertisers and Friend Collectors: why I block some people on Twitter
• Hashtags For My Followees: an explanation of hashtags on Twitter
• Granular Privacy Control (GPC): a thought or two on the Google Reader Shared Items “privacy” non-issue
• Hoosgot: The Lazyweb is Back!: announcing Hoosgot, reincarnation of the Lazyweb

What’s left? Photography: Being the Model, where I express that though I’m glad to have my photo taken, I do consider I have some rights to the resulting photo as it’s a picture of me. Fresh Lime Soda Episodes 8 & 9 (yes, that was bad — episode 10 is waiting on my hard drive to be edited).

And two more posts in French: Arghl! Du spam par SMS! On fait quoi? — some practical advice on dealing with SMS spam. And last but not least, Du lavage de linge sale en ligne, about using blogs to wash dirty linen in public. The dirty linen being, in this case, the fact that one Christophe Ginisty CEO of Pointblog (the company which ran the now-defunkt Pointblog blog) owes a bunch of people — including me — money for work we did. This has been dragging along for years now (I wrote an article in early 2006 for a magazine that Pointblog was producing).

Selection

There you are! A month of blogging in just one post! Not feeling up to reading it all?

If you were to read only three posts (sticking to the English ones):

• Announcing Going Solo
• Working on my Professional Site
• World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day (WoWiPAD) and Website Pro Day (WPD)

Ready for five? Add these two:

• Being My Own Travel Agent With Kayak
• Photography: Being the Model