How to learn from my mistakes

I’m going to write about how you can make sure you don’t ruin a good start in TEFL publishing like I did in the near future and if money matters to you then you could try the complete opposite of My TEFLtastic Life, but as Karenne has asked me to contribute to the upcoming Mardi Gras of advice for TEFL blogging noobs I thought I’d start with some cock ups closer to my TEFLtastic home. Meaning here. No, this awful introductionary paragraph doesn’t quite make it onto to the list. We’re talking about things like:

1. Moving pages about and renaming them all the time, so that by far the most popular and famous page of TEFLtastic is the “Error, page not found” one (rather than my ideas for a TEFL version of Big Brother, which is what I really should be famous for)

2. Ditto for putting links to my stuff on the ITESLJ links pages etc before I had decided on the final address. Think they’ve lost patience with me and ignore my updates nowadays

3. Everything having incredibly long names, leading to worksheet pages with URLs that are longer than a blog post (especially so for categories, but think this is only relevant to WordPress)

4. Pasting in Word texts as worksheets and blog posts and messing up the formatting of the whole page

5. Uploading a corrupted Word documents and so making the whole blog disappear

6. Still having the task ahead of me of going back over old posts to add and delete categories and tags to match the more recent ones where I knew what I was doing

7. Having almost as many categories as blog posts and pages (although Google doesn’t seem to mind, despite online rumours to the contrary)

8. Copying my own content from elsewhere on the Net rather than just linking to it

9. Putting worksheets in two different sections and so repeating content rather than just linking to it

10. Leaving putting links to other relevant sections until now rather than doing it as I went along

11. Posting worksheets before I had worked out how to put PDF versions up, so that now half of TEFL humanity thinks TEFLtastic worksheet = pain in the butt to print out

12. Posting too often, and so not getting any discussion going before a new post is in its place

13. Constantly adding, deleting and renaming categories and tags

And here are some solutions, in case you are interested, in no particular order

1. Think about what sections you might want to have and start with these from day one. If you are going to be putting up worksheets, just using the same categories as you use on your hard disk is probably good enough

2. Call blog posts and worksheets what you like, but edit the addresses to make them shorter

3. Avoid calling blog posts and worksheets the same thing as previous ones, even if they are in different sections

4. If you have a WordPress blog, use the Paste as Plain Text button to take away all the formatting and then put italics etc back in. Otherwise, use Wordpad to get rid of as much formatting as you can

5. Upload PDF files rather than Word ones, as they are much less likely to have corrupt data in them. See PDF Online for how even I can do it.

6. Go back over your blog posts once a month or so to edit, tidy up categories and tags etc. While you’re at it, you could write a highlights of the month post to make it seem more worthwhile. Or you could just use it as an excuse to listen to BBC radio online while doing something mindless on your computer.

And that, luckily*, is all I have learnt in two years, so that may be the end of blogging about blogging for a while. I could try blogging about blogging about blogging, but we’ll leave that for a budding Charlie Kaufman

*because I go with Homer Simpson’s theory that “Every time I learn something new something old falls out of my brain”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 9:03 am and is filed under links, TEFL blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.