Entries Tagged 'Meta' ↓

After talking about it for months, I finally had a logo for this little blog created and did a redesign of the WordPress template. Thanks to Jay at FliteHaus for the logo and Chris Pearson for the Copyblogger theme I tweaked for the new blog look.

Let me know what you think–good, bad, indifferent, looks the same in my feed reader…

I finally did something I've been thinking about for a while. It took telling a friend how to do it to get me motivated.

My dilema is that I only have so much free time to dedicate to blogging. As much as I'd like to post more often, time doesn't allow it. I come across many good links on other beer blogs or web sites that I'd love to share but either don't have enough time to dedicate to a full post or don't have anything to add.

So, Del.icio.us and WordPress to the rescue. Starting today, as I see these links I think you'd be interested in, I'll post them to our Del.icio.us bookmarks. From there, a WordPress plugin will check every day for new links and post a nice summary to this here blog.

Pretty soon, I'll be able to automate myself and I'll just have to sit around and drink beer. 

[tags]beer,del.icio.us,wordpress[/tags] 

I won't bore you with a "best of 2006" style post that I've been seeing way too much of in my feed reader today. I'm too lazy to do it and I don't think anyone really cares. Instead, I just want to thank everyone for reading Hail the Ale! and thank my fellow beer bloggers for ideas and links.

I certainly don't speak for my fellow beer bloggers, but I have a feeling some of them probably feel the same way about getting press releases. If you are pitching me and want a writeup here, feel free to make your first paragraph tell me why this is something my readers may be interested in.

I know it is easy for PR firms to just add beer bloggers to their mailing list for press releases but keep in mind we aren't traditional media. Heck, even traditional media (whatever that is any more) probably doesn't like reading twenty tedious paragraphs of overly copy-written text to figure out what the release is about and how it applies to them. I'm not asking for a completely custom intro but how about a standard intro for bloggers that helps us figure out why this is interesting?

I like helping out brewers, vendors, etc. that have something of interest to the beer community and want to get the word out but since this is a hobby I don't have too much time to read a long email or open four attachments to figure out the who/what/where/why/when and how it applies to my little beer blog.

Sorry for the noise, rant over.

[tags]beer,pr[/tags] 

Since I moved this blog to Wordpress I've gone through a couple themes that went live. However, I tested tens of themes and browsed hundreds before I found some that didn't suck. Since I've been starting a few Wordpress blogs each month, I figured I'd take all my research time and make it a blog: Wordpress Themes That Don't Suck.

If you are using Wordpress, check it out and subscribe to RSS or email updates since I'll be updating this fairly often, especially in the next few days. If you have a theme that you like since it doesn't suck, use the Submit a Theme link at the top of that site to send it to me.

Now, back to your irregularly scheduled beer blog. 

[tags]wordpress,wordpress themes[/tags]