Technology

How Blogging Helps Your Career #7 – The Laboratory

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(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)

Blogging is a way to grow and expand who you are – certainly it’s a kind of obstacle course that’ll teach you to be a better researcher.

But beyond the learning experiences and the stretching and expanding it puts you through, blogging also gives you options.  Lots of options.  A blog is there for you to do anything with.

Want to try a new blogging platform or plugin? Fine.

Want to try a new writing style?  Post that sucker no matter what.

Different layouts?  Easy.

Different SEO?  Go for it.

Blogging is about writing and communicating, but it’s filled with options from software and extras to the sheer freedom of writing anything on the internet.

Blogging is a laboratory.

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Can You Bring Business Along?

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Last week Rocky Agrawai of Venture Beat noted the simple painful fact that big box retailers have more online competition and need to upgrade.  He then documents his own painful big box experiences which you really don’t see in online retail (often because they’re screwups caused by being there).

Big Box retail needs an upgrade, he concludes.  I concur myself; most of my experience with Big Box these days is Frys, who has wisely chosen their own focus (crazy selections and sheer enthusiasm in bulk).

In fact, Rocky then went on to discuss how department stores need help too.  I imagine if he is going to fully explore businesses who are behind the times, he’s going to be very busy – and I encourage him, he’s got great insights.

We probably wouldn’t be complaining about this two decades ago as the stores wouldn’t have comparable experience.  We also probably wouldn’t be complaining as much as it’s a different economic and cultural time.  But in a day of cut-it-to-the-bone, short-term thinking, Big Box stores and many others often feel rather miserable.

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Conversion Experience

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So Quest for Employment is being put into iBookstore form.  By hand.  So far I’m going to say I’m finding iBook Author friendly in all the wrong ways, and not exactly helpful.  There’s some slick elements to it, but the hand-holding functions really don’t help.

It’s very odd, but I I suddenly realized just how many formats I have to work with – not on an intellectual level, but a visceral one.

  • First there’s the main doc, which I just do In Libre Office.  I do a few formatting tricks (avoiding bullet points) to make sure it’s very cross-compatible.
  • I bring it over into Jutoh.
  • In Jutoh I configure it for ePub (for Nook) and Mobipocket (for Kindle).
  • I view it in Calibre to make sure it looks OK, and maybe other devices.
  • Since formatting the book often reveals things to fix, once I’ve done these conversions, I get the spacing and organization right for exporting to PDF from Libre office.
  • Now, if I want a print book, then I also have to take a file and format it to have proper page locations, spacing, etc. for a print format.  This is exported as PDF Inevitably I’m going to blow tens of dollars running prints to get that right, or burn my printer out.  Or both.

It’s educational, but it teaches me one thing – I bloody well love being an author.  Otherwise I wouldn’t do this stuff.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.