Daniel Greene

Tag: blogging

Blogging, Web authoring, Web publishing, Web design…

  • danielgreene is I and I is danieljamesgreene

    I’ve made it a point to secure the usernames danielgreene and danieljamesgreene wherever I can so that I can give people easy URLs to find me on the Web. It would be nicer if I had the same username on all social networks, as Alexandra Samuel does (she can say, “Find me as awsamuel on … Twitter, De.li.cio.us, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Google, and YouTube), but djgreene is usually not available. In fact, narrowing my usernames down to danielgreene and danieljamesgreene involved several feats of account and profile management. Here’s how I did it.

    The YouTube Story

    Here’s a pair of cross-referenced videos I put on my old and new YouTube accounts as an “I’m moving” subscriber retention campaign, or what I guess some people might call a rebranding campaign.

    This one tells people I’m moving from azsingersigner to danieljamesgreene:

    And this one welcomes people to danieljamesgreene and tells them I’ve moved from azsingersigner:

    azsingersigner on YouTube now has a brother channel at danieljamesgreene on YouTube. I’ll keep azsingersigner because I’ve had it for four years and have received many views, comments, video responses, subscriptions, favorites, on my videos there. It wouldn’t be right to scrub all that. I’ll just start uploading all my new stuff to danieljamesgreene, and make sure all my old subscribers know to subscribe to my new channel. In case you’re wondering why I didn’t get the username danielgreene on YouTube, it’s because that username was secured by someone in Belgium a month after I joined, and nothing has been done with the account since. Oh well. My husband’s name, andysmithers, was also secured around the same time by someone in the United Kingdom, and nothing has been done with that account either. Username squatting, anyone?

    My Usernames on Other Social Networks

    The Facebook Story

    Although it might seem strange that Daniel Greene is danieljamesgreene and Daniel James Greene is danielgreene, there’s a method to the madness. When I first secured my username on June 13, 2009, within the first minute they were available, I picked the name I’d always used. I had barely considered getting a Page, and even if I had a Page, I wouldn’t have been able to secure a username on June 13, 2009 unless I had 1,000 fans by May 31, 2009. When I finally decided to get a Page a few weeks ago, I named it Daniel Greene, which I’ve always gone by professionally. Ironically, I couldn’t secure danielgreene as the username because I had already taken it for my personal profile. So I took the next best thing: danieljamesgreene– my full name including my middle name. But, oops! Now my username for my Page was different from my display name for my Page, and my display name for my profile and Page were the same. It turns out you cannot change your Facebook Page name, but you can change your Facebook profile name. So I changed my Facebook profile display name to Daniel James Greene. Now it’s easier for people to tell the difference between updates from my personal and public accounts. At the same time, I can do the kind of “this is that and that is this” cross-branding that associates one brand with another.

    Name Branding

    I’m a bit loath to talk about my names as brands, but–let’s face it–they are. Everybody’s name is, in some way, their brand. One of the reasons I’ve always used my name as my brand is that I do too many things to brand what I do with a company name. As Daniel Greene, I work as an interpreter for the deaf (sign language interpreter and oral transliterator), interpreter trainer, performing artist, writer, Web author, blogger, vlogger, photographer, and more. I do too many different things to limit myself to a blog or YouTube channel about one thing, and it would be too time consuming to maintain separate media channels for all my various vocations.

    Using the Middle Name

    Daniel James Greene is my full name. There aren’t as many Daniel James Greenes in the world as there are Daniel Greenes, so someday I might have to use my full name as my professional name. For instance, if I joined SAG and there were already a SAG member named Daniel Greene, I would have to join as Daniel James Greene. Likewise, if there are other authors or scholarly writers that use the my first and last name, I might want to use my full name. I plan to go on using the name Daniel Greene as long as I can, but I will use Daniel James Greene when I have to.

    Integrity

    So that’s the story of my usernames danielgreene and danieljamesgreene. I got them so that I could use my first-last and first-middle-last names for social and professional discoverability and recognition. I like to be able to find the people that matter to me, whether as friends or public figures; in return, I like to help people to find me. I also value integrity and consistency, and I believe in having as consistent an identity as possible. Integrity, to me, is doing what I say I’m going to do and being who I say I am. I believe integrity is also about integrating the various aspects of yourself into one. I’m not interested in using the Internet to take on imaginary personas; I just like being me here, and I prefer to do that with as few names as possible and let people know that both names refer to me.

    P.S. I also secured the domain name danieljamesgreene.com and set the URL to resolve to danielgreene.com.

  • Why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

    I finally got tired of the hassle and hours it took me to update my WordPress.org-powered self-hosted versions of two different blogs–danielgreene.com and smithersgreene.net. Trying to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 3.0 was the last straw.

    I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.

    This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.

    Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”
    (more…)

  • Thinking of moving from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

    It’s been such a headache for me to manage my WordPress.org-powered blog that I’m thinking of moving it over to WordPress.com. I didn’t realize until recently that I could even have it all on danielgreene.com. I read this article called WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org tonight, and I realized that, on WordPress.org, none of the Pros are helping me and all of the Cons are hurting me, whereas on WordPress.com, none of the Cons would hurt me and all of the Pros would help me. I’m not a PHP programmer nor do I really want to hire one to manage my site for me. I freak every time I have to update from one WordPress software version to another. Automatic updates always hang. Manual updates are a pain. With WordPress.com it’s all taken care of, and I could focus solely on what I really love to do, which is write and share media. The terms of service for WordPress.com forbid ads, but I don’t earn more than maybe $100 a year in Google AdSense ad revenue on danielgreene.com anyway. With the money I’d lose, I’d gain time— and peace of mind! And the few “legacy” pages I have, such as my Style Sheets Demo Page, while pioneering in its day, hardly seems relevant anymore. I could probably even put some of that CSS into a WordPress page anyway.

    What do you think? Any reason why I shouldn’t turn danielgreene.wordpress.com into danielgreene.com and move my blog over here?

  • Generic blog spam must be stopped

    Spam filters need to learn new tricks

    Why don’t blog spam filters recognize as spam those generic comments that link to commercial websites? Akismet used to filter all the spam that came into my blog, but now there’s a type it never catches– generic comments linked to a money-making (or even phishing or malicious) websites. These spammers write adulatory comments that don’t address the content or topic of the post. They tell you that you have just earned a new follower and that they will add you to their RSS feed straightaway. They say things like, “This is the best post I’ve ever read on the subject.” Note they say “the subject” without naming it. Sometimes they even write editorial comments that have nothing to do with your blog post. Here is an actual examples taken from a recent comment on my blog:

    Here’s one posted on my blog entry “Comparison of EPUB Download Sites”

    How risky is blogging really? Blog firings are relatively rare. In a recent survey of 279 human resource professionals by the Society for Human Resources Management, just 3 percent of companies reported disciplining bloggers and none reported firing anyone for blogging. You’re more likely to get in trouble for fooling around online or downloading music at work. About half the companies in the survey said they’ve fired or disciplined employees for Internet use that was unrelated to work duties.

    Note I didn’t say anything about “blog firings” or the risk of blogging in my post.

    If there’s any risk of blogging, it’s for your blog to be highjacked by people using your publication to promote their get-rich-quick schemes.

    Here’s one on my blog post “My first Speak & Spell workshop“:

    This is an excellent post. I have a similar blog myself so I will keep coming back to read more.

    And this from a guy who runs a blog about magic spells. At least his comment addressed the topic of my blog post, even if incorrectly.

    I’ll add more examples as they come in, which I’m sure they will.

    P.S. This is not a paid advertisement, but I do like using WordPress for Android because new comments to my blog show up as notifications on my Nexus One and I can follow the notification to open the app and mark comments as spam if I choose. It helps me stop spammers sooner than if I had to wait to get to a computer and log into my blog’s admin dashboard.

  • My first blog post using WordPress for Android

    WordPress for Android was released on February 2, and I downloaded it from the Android Market today for my Nexus One. Now I’m posting a blog entry with it. It looked like it hung just now when I tried to select Categories, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty. Oh– I just realized I just had to click the refresh button to the right of Categories and I got a list to choose from. Not bad!