Welcome to my blog on all things SharePoint. I have a range of articles that will interest you if you've made it as far as visiting my blog. I was awarded as an SharePoint MVP by Microsoft in July 2010. I currently live in New York and am an Enterprise Architect at AvePoint Inc.. I co founded www.NothingButSharePoint.com with Mark Miller in 2010.

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Whitepapers

NBSP

Check out my articles on NothingButSharePoint.com

Solution Development in SharePoint 2007

This series was inspired by the chatter amongst SharePoint blogs on the best ways to approach customisations in SharePoint using Solutions.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8

Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

This series was inspired by a discussion had with Andrew Coates at a Perth SharePoint User Group meeting. This then turned into a 6 part series on Arno Nell's SharePointMagazine.net web site.

Initial post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

Webcasts

I have recorded various web casts that I present at User Groups or just on a specific topic by request:
How ASP.NET Developers can leverage SharePoint webcast
SPSource Webcast: Reverse engineer Lists to ListTemplates and much more
SharePoint Development with Unit Testing webcast
Perth SharePoint UG Web Cast on approaches to deploying artefacts (SPSource)
More...


Podcasts

I have been interviewed about Leveraging the SharePoint Platform by the SharePoint Pod Show: listen here .

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Ajax, Apple, DotNetNuke, Enterprise Content Management, Error Resolution, Gadgets, General, Governance, Microsoft .Net Development, Mobile, SharePoint, Sharepoint Business Forms, Sharepoint Business Intelligence, Sharepoint Collaboration, SharePoint Development, Sharepoint Enterprise Content Management, Sharepoint Enterprise Search, Sharepoint Portal, US Migration, Web 2.0, Workflow

Some advice for SharePoint Community Bloggers to up their game!   

Tags:
Technorati Tags:

I've noticed that there are plenty of bloggers out there that don't have a few social networking tools hooked up as well as some obvious tweaks. This will not only encourage more traffic to their own blog but also help the community to spread the word! So here goes:

Full Posts in RSS Feed

Don't cut your posts to summary fields in RSS feeds. If people want to pull down all the communities posts to read on a plane or car journey etc. If they are offline...they won't be able to see all your content! Don't try and force people to come to your site, it will deter people more than encourage reading!

Feedburner

A lot the SharePoint bloggers have 'ummed and 'arrrd about what blog engine to use or what url they want to use. This has meant feeds going offline and changing...use Feedburner at a minimum to prevent loss of readership. Also use it to track your readership levels!

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Technorati

Every blogger should register, login and configure their RSS feed with Technorati! It's a very clever engine that basically looks through all posts that are configured inside it and sees whether your posts are referred to. Check out my Technorati page and you'll see who's referred to me. This basically assigns you a Technorati rank.

This is what Path to SharePoint's SharePoint Blogs page ranks each blog! Have a look through the list and you'll see it's extremely accurate if you konw the community well enough in terms of regular quality content.

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Blog Post Titles!

I've contacted a few SharePoint Community bloggers about their blogs where the Page title doesn't show up properly in the <HEAD><TITLE> in the <HTML> which means that when people using Social Bookmarking tools such as Diigo try and bookmark their page...it doesn't pick up the post title...making it pretty useless for referencing later on! This is usually due to the CKS:EBE 2.0 SharePoint Engine blogs unfortunately!

Activate Blog Comments!

If you're posting content on your blog...please switch on comments so that the community can collaborate back. The irony is that most of the SharePoint blogs that don't have comments switched on is because of the limitations of the SharePoint Platform Blog engine!

Twitter

If you're not on Twitter, get on it! There's heaps of SharePoint crew online and they're all out there announcing new posts and sharing ideas and answering questions!

UPDATE: There is a Twitter Grader page for SharePoint too...just make sure you have SharePoint mentioned in your profile! Can't believe how many of you guys don't!

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PostRank

PostRank is a great way of showing your users which of your posts is most popular. This is especially handy if the user has only just discovered your blog after a post title catching their eye and wants to see what else your blog has to offer!

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Please use the comments to suggest any other things that people should be adding.

 
Posted by  Jeremy Thake  on  2/20/2009
8  Comments  |  Trackback Url  | 0  Links to this post | Bookmark this post with:        
 

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Comments


Wictor  commented on  Saturday, February 21, 2009  2:25 AM 
Most important of all is using full posts. I really don't have the time to read only excerpts. And most importantly I can't read them offline.
/WW


Keith Dahlby  commented on  Saturday, February 21, 2009  1:06 PM 
As a relative newcomer, two more tips:
1) Don't get discouraged if it seems like nobody is listening. Less than 0.5% of my hits leave a comment, especially now that conversations often happen on FriendFeed or Twitter instead.

2) Try to provide unique perspective. I have no interest in another reblog that echos posts that everyone is likely following anyway (SP Team, AC, Joel, etc).

Amused that your Twitter example is my post. ;)

Cheers ~
Keith


Christophe  commented on  Tuesday, February 24, 2009  4:28 PM 
My advice ;-)
- include a searchbox in your blog
- allow users to subscribe to comments for a given post

Fully agree with Keith's comments btw.


Jeremy Thake  commented on  Tuesday, February 24, 2009  8:27 PM 
Yes completely agree with the subscribe to comments thing! Problem is that it isn't part of CKS:EBE 2.0 which is the extension to SharePoint Blogs in WSS 3.0!
WOnder if its been requested as a feature! Definately a big one, one of the reasons contemplating moving away from SharePoint. Can be done with Event Handlers and a few SharePoint Lists for sure.


Mike Oryszak  commented on  Sunday, March 29, 2009  5:44 AM 
Great tips for the technical blogger! I hadn't seen post rank before, that will be a nice addition.



Jeremy Thake  commented on  Sunday, March 29, 2009  3:49 PM 
Here is the link on how to modify CKS:EBE 2.0 to show post title in header <a href="http://www.tqcblog.com/archive/2007/10/27/improving-page-titles-on-a-cks-ebe-blog.aspx">here</a>


  commented on  Wednesday, April 15, 2009  5:49 AM 
Nice comments.
Want to add something. A suggestion!!
We can have a central site or blog where all sharepoint blogs and sites will be listed. This can help community to have all the links at one place only.
- Indrajeet


  commented on  Wednesday, April 15, 2009  6:24 AM 
Nice comments.
Want to add something. A suggestion!!
We can have a central site or blog where all sharepoint blogs and sites will be listed. This can help community to have all the links at one place only.
- Indrajeet

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