Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Not sure what it is – but I am not interested in Twitter since coming back from the beach. I will continue to post up my new blog posts to Twitter so my followers can come over for a read, but trying to strike up conversation is out.

I feel like it takes too much effort to try and get someone out of your followers group to answer you and actually have a meaningful conversation about something. Most people are following over 1000 people and probably have more than 1000 followers and so it’s like trying to be heard in an arena rock concert while everyone is standing around chatting and waiting for the band to show up.

I think that with some time off and time away from the blog/internet/twitter I am going to concentrate my efforts on 3 things. 1 – expanding my service company, 2 – concentrating on good blog content and 3 – moving forward with my podcast plans with my buddy Bryan.

Geek on!

Damnit, I was number 5 000 312 on the site, not the magical number. See here:

The Famous Sayings Blog is getting close to 5 million page views. I decided to give a prize to the person on twitter who comes closest to being here for the # 5,000,000 page view and who documents their participation by taking a screen shot and posting it on their blog with a link back here and then posting to twitter about their accomplishment.

via Please Retweet – Famous Sayings Blog « Sayings.

Turns out that it was time to make some changes on the site. The old background and colours are gone and I am back to something a little more blue. It was time to update some of the plugins I use, 6 of them had newer versions and who knows what those updates would fix.

I have been working on testing a recording scenario for podcasts and that has taken most of my free time lately. The techy side is a lot of fun but my real dilemma is still the theme. I have been talking with a friend who I think will join me as a co-host about this and we are both really interested in tech/geek crap in general. I think that we are going to shoot for a general tech show related to current events and then throw some interesting features into the show.

Only outstanding thing right now on the blog is the email. Right now I am getting 2 copies every time I post. EMAIL ME IF YOU ARE TOO!!!!

Ciao for now.

… the problem with this of course; is that 90% of them wouldn’t ever answer the question and a good portion of those probably wouldn’t read the question. I suppose it’s every blogger’s dream to know that. Then you can make sure to post and include the information that readers are looking for.

Strangely enough my posting has been erratic at best lately. I know, I know… I realize how often I post these days, and most recently it has been slower plus I have had a cold from hell. So most readers know that I had big plans in the fall to set up a live video stream on the website and stream myself 24/7 for the masses. Well it turns out that it takes a lot of time to gain viewership and maintain it. You would think that I could have come up with that before investing all the time in the setup of the stream, but I guess that was also part of the fun for me; twas a true geek maneuver.

Now I have my head geared towards podcasting. I am not 100% sure of format or topic yet, but of course it will have to do with technology – no question there. There are so many podcasts out there that are very topic specific that I think it would be difficult to try and spin a “general technology” podcast from an unknown creator. Let’s face it (more talking to myself here I suppose) I really have never created anything published, so I am definately unknown in the podcasting world.

I think I am going to try and come up with a few different ideas with a subject and description, then post it back up here and ask for feedback. What is missing or what is it that I am so interested in that I think I can do it better than the rest of the world :P

Uh oh, could be a long list…. Mwahahaha.

I was looking at the page yesterday and it was way too “busy” or cluttered. It’s sometimes hard to walk that line between tools that make the site more effective and tools that make the site over bearing. Well I have decided to remove 2 things from the main page. The live stream is gone from the right widget bar and the Friend Feed submission box is gone from the posts.

I have decided to move away from the live stream because I have started to notice that it takes a huge amount of time investment to make it effective. People I have spoken to about this in person seem to think that I a referring to monetizing my efforts when that couldn’t be farther than my point. Effectiveness for me in this arena is the development of a following. Having people participate in the stream or blog is more important to me than receiving compensation for my time. The latter wouldn’t be unwelcome, but that’s not how I wanted to measure success at this juncture. So not only has the live stream been taken off the main page but I have removed the link to the live page as well.

I am finding it increasingly difficult to find direction in the 2.0 or Social Media world. I have been working on a blog for quite some time and still have a quite low readership, or a least much lower than I would like. My question remains “Where do I spend my time and how much time is needed to make an impact?”. There are parts of me that think it will be impossible to make inroads in the social media world without being laid off from my 9-5 job.

I do work hard at my day job but I have never let it spill over into my personal life unless there is some sort of special project that needs tending to. I have a wonderful family and after doing all the normal family things after getting home from work it is already 9:00pm. If I don’t want to get sick due to a lack of sleep, the most I can spend is a couple of hours a night in my home office writing articles or working on my site’s back end.

It simply doesn’t feel like enough! My main goal is to have enough readers and viewers to sustain quality content through their interaction. I would simply like to be available for people who need guidance or support with their technology needs. The problem is when you have a small amount of time available to invest in your own branding, building up an audience is very difficult.

So the original question remains. How much time is enough and where is that time best spent? Up until now I thought it best to concentrate on my blog posts or updating my website. I am not sure that is the best way to spend time anymore. There are hoards of people that are moving away from their personal blogs and spending time on Twitter or Friendfeed, most notably Robert Scoble. This definitely will get you noticed but it seems that you need to spend 10 hours a day for real recognition. If your main career is not fed through social media then you won’t have 10 hours a day, you might not even have 2.

As I write this article I continue to come up with new strategies for myself and then find ways to break them. The video/stream portion of my website is really what interests me because it is what gives me the instant feedback that I like. I wonder if you can really support a video stream and gain viewers simply by being active on twitter. For some reason I don’t think so.

I am starting to believe that there is no way to obtain my true goals by only spending 10-12 hours a week on my blog/stream.

I would really like to spark a discussion with this article, please comment away!

It’s been a long time since I have written a post on here and it’s depressing. I have done some thinking in the last couple of days and here is what I came up with.

I have wanted to do some online video streaming for quite some time and I have spent a lot of time getting my setup working so that it would run correctly. That took away from my posting time so there was a lack of presence on the blog which wasn’t good. Then for some reason I got it in my head that if I was going to spend any time on the website it should be in the video stream. There are 2 issues with that. First is that I absolutely need to be in my home office for that to work. I don’t have any mobile cameras to play with so it’s not a choice at the moment. The other issue is that it takes planning and some dedicated time. I can post from any computer connected to the internet, hell… even my cell phone.

Now that I realize what my mental block was I hope that I can get past it… Christmas is coming and there will be much tech to talk about :)

I have been searching for a plugin for WordPress to automatically send an email to my subscribers each time I post a new article. I haven’t been very lucky, until now! I have found a tool called Subscribe2. The name isn’t very telling however it will let you set up how new blog subscribers are registered for emails by default.

Before installing this plugin at www.thesleepygeek.com, subscribers did not receive an email notifying them of a blog post. Since installing the plugin, I can set that any future blog subscriber will automatically be put on the email list (unless they choose not to) so when posting they will be notified.

This is an exciting addition to The Sleepy Geek. I have wanted a medium to notify users of new material if they are not involved with the Web 2.0 scene. It has been easy to setup plugins that update twitter, facebook, pownce, etc. but there are people in the world who don’t subscribe to those services.

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) twittered a new site just a few minutes ago and I am psyched! It is a site all about grilling and BBQs. If you are a meat lover like me, then this is the site for you.

Prime Cuts is a site created by Justin Levy who not only seems to know a lot about meat and BBQing but also is a chef. So far there are only 3 or 4 posts on the site so it’s hard to see the continuity on the site but the posts that are there are very well written and very informative. I am always looking for new tricks with my BBQ, new things to cook and new ways to cook them.

So all you vegetarians can forgive me for this post, the rest of you go have a look and book his RSS feed :)

I was looking to add some RSS feeds to my sidebars for popular news sites that I view daily, or close to daily. I looked at using the RSS widget that is included in WordPress but it is very limited and I wanted something more customizable, which I found on KB Advanced RSS Widget.

Adam R. Brown is the author of this widget and I am pleased with what he has done. He has added features to allow you to list certain portions of the RSS feed coming in. Some of the other features include:

• Decide which RSS fields to display (as opposed to the default RSS widget, which limits you to link and title), and
• Decide how to format the fields (it doesn’t have to be a list if you don’t want it to be).

You are also able to add titles to each feed so that it is clear to your readers what they are looking at. With some work you can limit the title to a certain number of character or parse the first X amount of characters off the beginning. This is handy if your feed has a static lead in that you want to remove.

He also mentions that this is called an advanced product for a reason:

Be aware that it’s called “advanced” for a reason. You need to know some basic HTML, and possibly a little PHP, to use this fully.

I am sure most people who know how to install an widget on their own hosted WordPress will be able to get this in there and working.

As you can see for now I have added feeds from Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo because they are a couple of my favorites. I think that I will eventually move towards putting a news service, or a more current events type blog on there. That seems to make more sense to me for my blog.

If you are looking to add RSS feeds to your site go take a look!