BlogPodium 2013: Why Canada's Design Blogger Conference Blew Me Away!

This weekend was the big BlogPodium conference that I have been looking forward to all spring and summer - heck all year!  I was lucky enough to work with the amazing Jen Flores of Rambling Renovators on the marketing of the event, and not only did I have a blast and learn a bunch, I also found so much inspiration in watching Jen take on this huge project and knock it out of the park.  That girl is a quiet dynamo.

Jen and her team, photo by SmugMug

All the things I love about conferences happened at BlogPodium

• I spent the day hanging out with people who immediately understood why I spend way too many hours writing, editing, styling, photographing, photoshopping, tweeting, instagramming, and web-surfing.  No explanations required, no rolling of eyes in my direction.  These were my people, and there were almost 300 of them.

• Everyone was as happy and excited to be there as I was.  The mood was celebratory, the smiles contagious.  It was an amazing day before it even started.

• The speakers and panelists were inspiring.  I filled my iPad with quotes and ideas, and had many 'AHA!' moments, nodding my head with all the other bloggers in synchronicity.  These guys knew their stuff, and our stuff to boot.  I have a resulting to-do list that is for sure going to light my blog on fire.

• It was like a big ol' family reunion.  The nature of blogging means that many, many of my friendships and relationships are built online, through comments, tweets and instagrams. I talk more often with these ladies (and Tim) than I do my friends down the street, and as a result, I feel like I know them just as well, if not better!  So it is a joy to put faces to Twitter handles and be able to back up blog comments with great big hugs. (I'm a hugger.)

As an added bonus, I got to feel a real sense of accomplishment as I looked around at the sea of grinning faces.  I am under no illusion that my efforts brought them all there (the name 'Sarah Richardson' might have had a little something to do with it) but it felt kind of awesome to know that I was able to use my non-blogging skills to bring in a table or two of tickets.

My biggest BlogPodium take-away

The best part of the experience, however, was seeing a beaming Jen Flores floating around the rooms.  Unlike most conferences I have attended, I had watched the organizer work her tail end off with passion, poise, and purpose for months on end building up this experience.  She arranged the speakers, booked the venue, scheduled the sessions, oversaw the menu, brought in the big name sponsors, coordinated the blog contributions, and oversaw the marketing, social media, website development, event coordination, and all logistics.  Jen threw herself into this day with everything she had; refused to get knocked down by any of the setbacks or disappointments that arose; diligently worked through meetings, emails, conference calls, presentations, and every other task required with inspiring determination.

Through her vision and effort, Jen created an epic day that will fuel and inspire not only the 300 people in attendance, but their readers, clients, and colleagues.

To have been able to watch all this happen was the biggest gift of all, and was to me more inspiring even than Sarah Richardson's amazing keynote speech (which was awesome!).  Through this process, I learned from watching Jen that having a vision is just the first step.

If you truly believe in something, and are willing to invest yourself completely into making it a reality, not only will it happen, it will be a massive success.

Jennifer Flores Photography by Annawithlove

Not surprisingly, this philosophy seemed to be thread running through the day for me.  I heard it in Sarah Richardson's beautifully honest, sincere, and motivating keynote address.

I heard it in Margot Austin and Rhonda Riche's articulate contributions to the lunchtime keynote panel.

New, Old, and Online Media panel, photography by Annawithlove

"I learned everything on the job, by being willing 
to pick up new challenges and work hard." Margot Austin

"When shelter magazines were shutting down 

we saw an opportunity to make our own fun, in the way we had always wanted but couldn't do before. " Rhonda Riche, Covet Garden

I heard it in Keka DasGupta's charming and energizing session on working with agencies, and I heard it in Karen Bertlesen's frank and hysterical session on monetizing your blog.

Keka DasGupta, photo by Annawithlove

"State of mind matters.  Be confident, be sure. 

Recognize what you are bringing to the table!" Keka DasGupta

Karen Bertelsen, photography by Annawithlove

"Creativity is the key to success - 

when you can do whatever you want and have fun doing it, 

you will be your most authentic." Karen Bertelsen

All in all, it was a thrilling Saturday, and I am exhausted!  I met so many amazing people, doing so many amazing things - I wish everyone could have that kind of soul-enriching experience.  I can't wait to see what other great things Jen can dream up for next year!

How to Add Social Media Icons to your Blog

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was inspired and energized by the most recent Blog Podium.  I am not quite ready to rush out and book advertisers, but I am making some changes with that possibility in mind.  One of the points made at Saturday's session that stuck with me was the importance of having a professional-looking blog.  I have started compiling a list of blogs that I feel strike the right balance between personality and professionalism for inspiration.  For me, this means above all clean, un-cluttered, organized, and easy to navigate.

Another important piece of advice was to stay well-connected to the community you are in and be able to demonstrate that you have your own little niche of expertise.  Blogger makes it easy to link up to your other social networking profiles with widgets and gadgets in your blog's sidebar, and I already had many of them in place.  However, I love the look of a simple self-explanatory row of icons, so over the past couple of days I added this at the top of my sidebar:

It connects readers directly to a whole bunch of my other profiles but uses a minimum of real estate.  Win-win!  It was easy enough to do, but I ran into a few snags, so I thought I would outline the process here in case anyone else wanted to do this as well.  (There are many other tutorials out there if mine is confusing!)

1.  Find your favourite icons, or make some yourself in Photoshop and save as a .png file.  I got mine from the lovely Carrie Loves blog, where she has a ton of colours.  Isa Maria of The Academy also did a lovely series based on the Pantone colours of the year.  For MANY more options, you can google "Social Media Icons."  Once you find the ones you want, save them to your computer.

2.  Upload your png files to Flickr or Photobucket.  I didn't want these to show up in my Flickr stream, so I signed up for Photobucket and highly recommend it!  To get the URL for each image, which you will need later, you just need to hover over the image and then click on "Direct Link" which makes it super easy.  I will definitely be using Photobucket again!

I ended up uploading my icons three times, because the size I downloaded from Carrie was much too big and it took me a couple of resizes in Photoshop to get the size I liked!  You may want to start with one to see how big it is and then adjust them.  In the end mine were 28 pixels x 28 pixels.

3.  Add HTML gadget to your layout.  To do this, look up to the right hand corner on your Blogger dashboard and go to Design, and on the screen below click Layout, then Add a Gadget.

Scroll down the provided list until you find the HTML/JavaScript widget.

4.  Once you have the gadget open you can add the following code for each icon:

[a href="YOURSITEURL" target="_blank"][img src="YOURIMAGEURL"][/a]

If you copy and paste the above code, you will have to change the brackets:
replace [ with < and ] with >
(I couldn't figure out how to type code into my post without it turning into a broken link!)

(It would probably be helpful to actually write all the code in Text Edit and copy it into the content section of the HTML gadget instead of flipping back and forth to the different sites and the gadget window like I did!)

Now when I did this, everything looked fine in the code, but when I tried to click the link it added www.wickedandweird.com to the beginning of the address and wouldn't work.  I could not figure out why it was doing this. Drove. Me. Batty. After much searching online, I discovered that it was because the quotation marks I had copied in the code were curly quotes and not straight quotes. Go figure.  So make sure you have straight quotes in your code!

5. Repeat the above code for each site and each matching image until you have them all.

6. Remove all the other social-media-linking gadgets you had cluttering up your sidebar and admire your new streamlined blog.

7. Pour yourself a drink.

I hope that makes sense - leave me a comment if I have left something unclear!

FYI - the target="_blank" part means the link opens in a new window or tab.  I was going to go back and add this to all my links, since the all seem to drive traffic away from Wicked & Weird - and I have a lot of links!  Then I noticed in writing this post that there is a little box you can check when adding a link that says "open in a new window"...  duhhhhhhhhhh!!! Better late than never I guess. :)