02 Feb2011
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Social Media, Tech Tips
It’s frequently asked questions time on Diving into the Details! With this one, we’re not diving too deep.
Having your picture (a.k.a. avatar) appear in my blog comments takes only a couple of minutes. Go ahead, time yourself and let me know if I’m wrong.
- Go to the Gravatar website.
- Create an account.
- Verify your e-mail address.
- Upload a picture, and you’re done!
Gravatar associates your picture with your e-mail address whenever you leave a comment on a WordPress blog (and a few other blog platforms). If you have multiple e-mail addresses like I do, you’ll either want to confirm multiple e-mail accounts with Gravatar or make sure you are consistenly using the same e-mail address when you comment on blogs.
Ready to show off your avatar? Leave a comment below!
25 Oct2010
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Social Media
Last Saturday, I attended WordCamp Las Vegas. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on the popular blogging platform WordPress, which I used to create this blog. Most of those who attended were full-time web designers and programmers. I was probably most likely definitely the only accountant there.
I admit that some of the material presented in the conference was a little over my head, especially when they got into PHP code. My PHP coding skills are a level or two above copy and paste.
John Lynn speaking at WordCamp.
- Passion and motivation are the keys to blogging, according to my friend and client John Lynn. If anyone has that passion and motivation, it’s him, having written about 6,000 blog posts in the past 5 years. This year, John quit his full-time job and earns enough advertising revenue from his blogs to support his family. John’s most recent entrepreneurial project is a website to help raise money for sports teams and non-profit organizations. You can see John’s PowerPoint presentation on his website to learn about how he became a full-time blogger. Check out the plug he gave me on slide 8 (thanks, John).
- WordCamp brings in a tech-savvy crowd. It seemed like everyone had a laptop, iPad and iPhone. It was a good thing I bought a Droid X last month because it helped me to blend in a little bit.
- Creating a good podcast is a lot more difficult than having a microphone and recording an MP3 file. Scott Whitney from Podworx gave an entertaining and enlightening presentation showing how they incorporate music and eliminate the uh’s and um’s when recording podcasts.
- The M&M peanut butter brownies at the Palace Station buffet were pretty tasty!
- I didn’t take any notes on paper. I used Twitter to jot down great quotes and to have a record of stuff I want to look into later. On top of that, I shared those tweets using the hashtag #wclv with the rest of the attendees, and one of them expressed her appreciation for it!
- Twitter provided me with opportunities to meet people in person that I had read tweets from during the conference (i.e. “hey, you’re @techguy”)! Did I mention I need to change my cryptic Twitter name? Nobody came to me and said, “hey @whe97007!”
- For security reasons, don’t use the default username “admin” to log into your WordPress admin page. FYI hackers, my new username is “Dustin.”
- I need to try out WordPress’ photo editor instead of using Photoshop every time to touch up photos. It can do more than I previously thought.
- WordPress is a very powerful blogging platform and the possibilities of what you can do with it are almost endless. A couple of the conference sessions were mind-boggling.
- I’m planning to come back again next year.
06 May2010
Written by Dustin Wheeler, CPA. Posted in Social Media, Tech Tips
First, let me describe my background in regards to web design so you know where I’m coming from.
I built my first web page in the year 2000 using Yahoo Geocities’ WYSIWYG site builder. It was simple. I just typed out some text and dragged it where I wanted it, and put pictures where I wanted them on the page. It was fun and sparked an interest to learn more about web design.
Shortly after that, I took a web page design class in college. The course almost entirely focused on html code. I enjoyed the course and felt proud to finally be a sophisticated “hard coder” creating web pages with Notepad. I created several websites by just writing html code and CSS, including the website for my company, a Las Vegas CPA Firm.
However, I soon discovered that creating a website this way has its problems. For example, changing a navigation bar for all pages in the website required me to cut and paste new code to all of the twenty-or-so html documents that comprised each page of the website.
My eyes were opened to a better way of managing a website at the AICPA Technology Conference in June 2009. One of the speakers demonstrated how he used a content management system (CMS) to pull content from other sources on the Internet and automatically create html code. Another session of the conference was entirely about “blogging, podcasting, and social networking” which covered how a blog can benefit a professional. I left the conference with the resolve that I wanted to learn to use a CMS and become a blogger!
It was a long journey from June to November 2009, when I posted my first article on my blog. Why did it take so long? Consider that I did all of the following:
- I carefully observed several other CPA bloggers and picked out things I liked and didn’t like from their blogs.
- I researched several CMSs and blogging platforms, including Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, and WordPress. I finally settled on using self-hosted WordPress so I could have total control over my blog and customize it as much as I like.
- I purchased my domain and web hosting after a few hours of researching several web hosting services.
- I installed WordPress on my web server.
- Among more than one thousand themes (or general designs) on the wordpress.org website, I had to choose my favorite. I then had to further customize my design so my blog wouldn’t look exactly like other blogs using the same theme.
- I installed several plugins and widgets (programs for backup, security, and sections of my blog, such as the Twitter and Google Reader feeds on the right sidebar).
- I started an account with Feedburner to create an RSS feed.
- I opened an account with Google Analytics and configured it to work with my blog, which I have discovered to be a great resource to see statistics of the traffic to my site.
- I also opened an account with Google Webmaster Tools to observe how Google indexes my blog.
- I created an “about me” page and a disclaimer (every blog should have one!)
- At this point, I started writing blog posts. Every blog post has to catch the reader’s attention, be informative, and be entertaining. I wouldn’t write anything I wouldn’t want to read myself! It’s not easy.
This might all sound overwhelming to someone who has never created a website. If you’re in this category, I have some good news. It doesn’t have to take months to start blogging. In fact, I created a simple blog using Blogger and finished it in about an hour. This blog (dustinwheelercpa.com) took me so long because I created it the hard way, and I’ve learned a lot in the process.