I had the pleasure of doing two different hands-on workshops at the Texas Library Association conference this past Thursday and Friday: one entitled Blogging Basics, and one called Extending Your Blog. Doing hands-on at events like this is remarkably difficult, as without very carefully setting up expectations with the participants, it can fall apart fast. I’m happy to say that I don’t think either of these fell apart…although I was personally happier with the Basics session. I way, way over-prepared for the Extending session, and the fact that we had 3-4 different blogging platforms in the room made giving instruction for something as simple as adding Google Analytics code to the template caused us to bog down more than I had hoped.
Overall, I got the feeling that people were happy with the information they got, which is the goal. I’d love to hear from anyone who was in the workshops in the comments, and I can’t wait to see the evaluations.
Here are the slides I used for each session. For the Extending Your Blog workshop, we only covered like 60% of the actual slide content, but I knew that would happen.
