If you’ve read the responses of the 25 most influential tech comm bloggers and honorable mentions to being listed, you may have noticed that I haven’t said anything about it before now—other than on Twitter the day the list was posted. One reason is that I had other post ideas and some guest posts I wanted to publish first.

Now I’ve gotten around to it.

What Influence Is

Brian Solis recently wrote about how influence has been confused with online popularity. He says:

Over the years, I’ve explored the roles of influencers in social networks and as a result, I’ve refined the definition as simply the ability to cause measurable actions and outcomes. Intentional influence then assumes that certain actions are therefore definable and as a result, desired activity and results are now designed into strategies. The execution of these plans is then dependent on the reach and conviction of the influential voices to which they’re aligned.

One of the classes in my communication minor in college focused on persuasion and social influence. (Yes, majoring in English and technical writing and minoring in communication may be redundant. But the minor gave me a perspective on how people communicate in general, not just how to communicate technical concepts to people.) In this period of the ubiquity of social media, thinking about social influence is highly relevant.

Our textbook was Persuasion, Social Influence, and Compliance Gaining, of which our professor was a coauthor. The book is based partly on the premise that the three named concepts are closely related or synonymous and that they’re aimed at changing people’s thoughts, attitudes, or behaviors.

I believe influence is different than a social circle or even than attraction. Someone may be in my circle without being influenced by me. People may be drawn to my blog through a link on Twitter and never be influenced by what they read. I agree with my college professor’s view of influence: it’s bringing about change in someone else.

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When I started my Tales series, I wanted it to have a distinct category and RSS feed so that those posts wouldn’t get mixed in with the tech comm–related posts. I also wanted to have a header image for any posts in the Tales category that was different than the standard one.

Here’s the code that I put together to make the header image conditional based on the category, with some substitutes put in so you can change things based on your needs). Add this code to header.php:

<div id="header">
<?php if (in_category('1')) { ?>
<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/header1.jpg">
<?php } elseif (is_category('Category Name')) { ?>
<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/header1.jpg">
<?php } else { ?>
<img src="http://www.mysite.com/images/header2.jpg">
<?php } ?>
</div>

Notice two things:

• This code is set up for two conditions to show header1.jpg. You can swap out the category number or name for yours. (To see a category’s number, in your WordPress console’s Categories screen, mouse over the name and look for the tag ID in the URL that appears in your status bar.) You could also add as many different conditions as you like.
• This works with an image placed directly in the div. I don’t know enough PHP to know if I can have it change a background image in the CSS.

The following is a guest post by Norman Mann, a writer for Web Host Gear, a Web hosting guide site. He writes on the topics of blogging tips and online marketing.

WordPress is a powerful blogging tool with many customizable options. From the moment you log into the dashboard, you have many choices of how to configure your blog. How you configure these settings will affect how you experience WordPress and how readers experience your blog.

Themes

One of the first things you should consider doing is visiting the Appearances menu to choose a theme. Theme variations on WordPress include sidebars on the right or left, fixed or flexible width layouts, customizable menus, customizable headers, and multiple columns. The first impression visitors get of your blog is the layout, so it’s important to pick something appropriate to your content and the audience you expect to draw.

Settings

Once you have a theme in place that is to your liking, click through the Settings menu. Here you can set your blog title, time zone, the time and date format for posts, and comment moderation preferences. These are all basic settings that should be configured before you begin using your blog.

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For the two years between the time I got married and I graduated from Utah State University, my wife and I lived in a 400-square-foot apartment that we fondly refer to as “The Shoebox.”

Every so often, we’d get in the mood to rearrange the furniture. You wouldn’t think that 400 square feet gave us many options, but we managed it. The funniest part is that we’d both get in the mood to rearrange things on the same night—at about 11:00.

So I have the urge to rearrange things occasionally and to try something new. This is one of those times. In about a week, I’ll have been blogging for two years. Last year on my first anniversary of blogging, I started Gryphon Mountain Tales, “the more mythological side of the Mountain.” This year, I’ve redesigned my site visually. (If you attended my STC webinar on February 10, you got a bit of a preview in the designs of my slides.)

Wanting a change of scenery isn’t the only reason I’ve done this. A better reason is that I think the original design didn’t really fit me anymore; it didn’t fit what I’m trying to convey about myself. The new design, with its header image, tells more about me than the last one did. I’ve got a professional side, but I don’t mind acting like a cartoon character sometimes.

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One of the pieces of blogging advice you may get is to keep posts short. People don’t have long attention spans, and they flit from piece to piece of information without staying long at any particular one. Writing short posts can be nice also because you can write without making a big time commitment.

Still, I personally prefer to write longer posts much of the time. Most of the time, “longer” means just a few paragraphs, but at other times, I like to use the post to explore my thoughts. It’s hard to get into the guts of an idea or concept in 100 or 200 words. Just because I like writing, it can be tempting to keep writing. The trick is to actually go somewhere with my comments rather than to follow the train of thought until it ends in the middle of the woods, instead to end strong and with a point that connects with people.

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I remember becoming aware of blogs when I was in college; before that time, I hadn’t really spent any time online at all. In my initial judgment, I saw blogs as ongoing egotistical opinion articles—basically newspapers with only an editorial section. I didn’t have much motivation to be involved with them at any level.

Having been a blogger for nearly a year and a half has changed my opinion. Of course I have realized that blogs aren’t just people’s opinions on what’s going on in the news.

I admit that there’s a self-serving aspect to blogging. If you blog, you should write for yourself to a large degree. I usually write about whatever aspect of tech comm or writing crosses my mind, and I just have that urge to write about it. It’s a bit strange that I want to write in my spare time about what I think about at work, but there you have it. (If I want to write in this space but not about writing itself, I write a Tale.)

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I finally updated to WordPress 2.8 today. It looks a lot like the previous version, and I haven’t taken time to explore the new aspects yet.

However, I realized why it can be good to wait a little while to upgrade something like WordPress. After I installed the new version, I got an error similar to the one displayed at menoob.com in a post about the issue.

I followed the suggestion there, though I used FileZilla to change the plugin file name. (Fortunately, of all the plugins that could have failed, this one isn’t critical.) Bam! I could sign in to my admin site. My thanks to the menoob guy.

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