ONA09: “What if I’m not going?”

The Online News Association’s 2009 conference is about to kick off. … And it’s already taken over my Twitter feed.

Not going to this year’s conference?

No worries. You can catch free livestreams of the conference’s keynote speakers:

• Twitter CEO Evan Williams – Friday, 9 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. Central
• Technology journalist Leo Laporte – Friday, 1 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. Central
• BlogHer CEO Lisa Stone – Saturday, 9 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. Central

This will be my second time seeing Evan Williams speak. About a hundred folks were lucky enough to hear his thoughts when he spoke at UNL’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications last April.

Want even more ONA09 goodness?

Also free for ONA members: [Livestreams of] 16 of the 18 sessions from The Front End and The Back End tracks on Friday and Saturday on Journalists.org.

Access to both tracks will be available for non-members to purchase for $25 each day. (Not a member? Join now.)

All in all, I have high hopes for this conference. (Just take a peek at the schedule.) I’ll be tweeting throughout, and you can follow the #ONA09 hashtag for thoughts from the rest of the crowd.

Week 5: Add portfolio materials and install plugins

This post is the fifth in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first, second, third and fourth posts if you missed them. Check back next week for more.

It’s Week 5 of the blog series, and now that you’ve done some groundwork, it’s time to put up your clips. Luckily for you, the entire Wordpress community is going to be there to help you: They won’t write your articles or take your photos, but they will provide you with lots of plugins to make things easier.

So, gather up those articles, photos, audio slideshows, headlines, page designs, videos, podcasts and interactive graphics, and let’s get rolling.

How to upload your clips

You can do this one of two ways: Individually uploading them using the Upload/Insert tool on your WP Admin or by dragging and dropping them onto your server using your FTP program. (That’s the same one you used to install your theme.)

If you use the latter, just make sure you aren’t uploading files into your theme’s folder. That should be reserved for items that actually make up your site’s design.

For videos, I recommend Vimeo for hosting. There are some limits on how much you can upload per week for free accounts (paid “Plus” accounts with much higher limits are $60/year), but the quality is better than YouTube by leaps and bounds, as evidenced by this screen grab. (Watch the amazing video it’s from while you’re at it.)

For text stories, link to the online version on a news outlet’s site or post the text on your own site and provide a link to the original. What I’m trying to say: Don’t post loads and loads of PDFs of print stories if you can help it. They’re just not as reader-friendly online as they could be.

Granted for copy editing clips, there’s not really a way around the PDF issue when posting print clips, at least that I’ve found. Sorry.

For photographs and page designs, my guess is you’ll want to post a handful of your best photos and make them into a gallery of some sort. I’ll get back to how to do that in a second when we cover plugins.

(A general warning: Don’t rely on your former employer’s site to be the only source for your clips – especially if it’s a college outlet. If you’re simple going to link on a story on the DailyGazette.com’s Web site, I’d save a copy of the story on your server, too. When content management systems are updated, these can be lost or unpublished. I speak from first-hand experience.)

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Week 4: Put up your resume in HTML and PDF formats

Apologies for the delay, folks, but after a bit of a holiday break, I’m back. This post is the fourth in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first, second and third posts if you missed them. Check back next week for more.

For this week’s task, we’re going for focus on resumes – both in HTML and PDF forms.

We’re doing this for a couple reasons. We want to make it easy for a recruiter to do two things:

• Scan your resume on your actual site
• Download a copy of it and print it out

And since we’re going to take the time to do this, it’s a good idea to give that resume a bit of a facelift if it needs one. (I’ve found it’s convenient to do this now, rather than in the fall when you’re under a deadline crunch for internship applications.)

Part 1: Give your resume a facelift

So, here are some tips via Twitter.

1. Ditch the Word template, go into InDesign

Lauren Rabaino (@laurenrabaino) said:

Don’t use a word template. Show you know a liitle Photoshop/indesign … http://is.gd/18A5w

Andrew Spittle (@andrewspittle) had a similar message:

Do: create something personal, something yours. Dont: just use an out of the box look that hundreds of others are using.

I totally agree. If you have access to InDesign, it can really add a visual punch to the design of your resume. (If you’re stuck with Word, at least do some minor tweaks.)

It can also help you fit more information on without making your resume look cluttered.

Lauren’s blog post has some great examples of resumes with a bit of flair, but not so much that it gets out of hand.

This blog post also has examples of some tastefully designed resumes. (Straying too far into Crazytown can land your … um, “artistic”? … resume in a recruiter’s trash can, so don’t get too wild.)

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Week 3: Write first blog post and About page

This post is the third in a weekly series that will take journalists through how to set up a professional-looking portfolio Web site. Find out more about the series and read the first and second posts if you missed them. Check back next week for more.

This week you’re going to get comfortable with the basics of creating content on your blog.

You can create two basic types of entries on Wordpress: blog posts and pages.

Blog posts are just what they sound like. You’re reading one right now.

Pages are used for things like your resume, portfolio or blogroll. The tabs across the top of my Web site all link to individual pages.

So, now that we know what each is meant for, let’s create some content.

Write your first blog post

You might want to use your fist blog post to introduce yourself, give readers a little insight into why you are making your site and foreshadow what you plan to blog about.

Go to www.YourDomain.com/wp-admin and log in.

On the upper left hand side, you’ll see a button that says “Add new” underneath the “Posts” tab. Click it.

Now you’ll want to give your blog entry a title.

In the body field, you’ll obviously put the body of your post.

Some basic buttons you'll use

To style your text, pay attention to the blog and italics buttons, as well as the drop-down menu that says “Paragraph.” “Heading 3″ tends to be the one you’ll want to use for subheads.

You also may want to use the bulleted list and numbered list buttons, plus the quoted material button and indent buttons.

Speaking of all this stuff, allow me to go on a very important tangent for a moment.

Writing for the Web: Just the basics

Some things to keep in mind about writing for the Web:

1. Link. Link. Link.

• If you refer to an article online, link to it.
• If you mention someone who has a personal Web site, link to it.
• If you mention your favorite movie, link to its IMDB page.

I cannot underscore the importance of links. They help your Google search rankings, and more importantly, they make you look like you actually understand the Web. Get friendly with this button.

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