I’m not one who’s known for her organizational capabilities.  I’m a fly by the seat of my pants kinda gal, which means that I tend to wait until the last minute to get things done.  Which is why it’s now mid-February and I’m finally posting the guild’s new year goals.  Fun, huh?

There are some exciting opportunities coming up in 2009 for bloggers in the St. Louis area.  And this is my official plug for the St. Louis Blogger’s Guild.  As a testimonial, I joined the guild because I wanted to learn more about a little thing called blogging.  I did not realize that I would be walking into the company of so many fine and talented people.  If you’re interested in learning more about social media, making new friends and joining a group of interesting and unique talent, then I urge, implore, demand that you join the blogger’s guild.  Okay, I don’t demand it – I strongly encourage it.

In addition to the above mentioned perks, you will also have the opportunity to participate in some really interesting projects that the guild is spearheading this year.  The largest endeavor would be the Interactive Festival, which will take place in early fall.  This is a great opportunity to reach out to the local social media community, make new contacts and hear some knowledgable speakers on topics ranging from RSS feeds to photography and everything in between.  This is a fantastic event and, even if you’re not a member of the guild, I encourage you to think about coming and soaking up the wisdom of the experienced.

In addition to the Interactive Festival, we will also be hosting Business workshops for area businesses who are interested on becoming better educated on how social media can influence their operation.  The topics of these workshops will be varied and will be conducted by some of the top bloggers and podcasters in the St. Louis area. 

We have also recently elected a new outreach coordinator, the lovely Kim, who will be organizing ways for us to give back to our community.  From food drives to tutorials to scholarships for area students, we have many aspirations and visions for how we can benefit the St. Louis metro area as a whole.

Our first big project, a podcast, will launch in just a couple of weeks.  ‘Blogging in the ‘Lou,’ is designed specifically to be a weekly gathering of the great minds in local blogging.  We’ll discuss a wide variety of topics, all pertaining to blogging and social media.  You won’t want to miss it.

The guild meets once a month for a couple of hours so the commitment level is not rigorous.  If you’re interested, please click on the Contact button to your left where you will find all the information you need to join.  We are currently in the process of putting together a new site, which we hope to debut in the next month.  Until then, visit us here to read some of the top writers in the St. Louis area. 

In short, the St. Louis Blogger’s Guild is here to help you, local bloggers, better understand your craft, make contacts in the blogging community and inform you of the current learning opportunites available in the area. 

Please take a few minutes to surf our site and get to know us better, and, if you’re interested in joining us for a meeting before you commit, we will be gathering this Saturday, February 14, at 11:00 at Shock City Music Works, 2200 Gravois.  The meeting is free to members and non-members pay a $5 fee.  We would love to meet you and answer any questions you may have face to face.

Blogging – ever wondered what that means? Seen videos on YouTube or elsewhere online and wondered just what all that is about? Then this is your chance to learn.

This weekend, the St. Louis Bloggers Guild is bringing you Blogging and Social Media 101. The panel is part of InterPLAY: St. Louis’s first interactive conference. It kicks off at 11 AM, September 20 in the Elvis room at Blueberry Hill.

Topics will include:
Blogging – what it is, and can I do it?
Social Media – is sharing really for me? where do I share?
Social Networking – aren’t my offline friends enough?

Featuring Ben Vierck, Tanner Hobin, and Mike Flynn and moderated by Todd Jordan, the panel will discuss those topics and go where the questions lead.

This would be an excellent side track to follow along with the panels on Podcasting and Video Blogging.

Hope to see you there.

Cyberbullying is an ever-growing problem among teens and ‘tweens today. That’s why the St. Louis Bloggers Guild has created a Cyberbullying 101 panel as part of InterPLAY: St. Louis’s first interactive conference. The panel starts at 2 p.m. Saturday, September 20 in the Elvis Room of Blueberry Hill.

There will be a brief discussion on the concept of cyberbullying, as well as the tools used. We will also discuss:

• What can be done to prevent cyberbullying
• The repercussions for the bully
• Parents’ roles, and the schools’ role in this issue

Toward the end of the discussion, we also plan to talk about the new Missouri law in regard to cyberbullying, how it affects us all, and why this law is so controversial.

Hope to see you there!

UPDATED 9/20/2008

Hello! Hoped you like our presentation on CSS. I promised some additional links and here they are:

John’s CSS Primer:

http://interactive.trianglman.dnsalias.com/

Selected Links:

Firefox and Firebug

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

My personal blog – links from the panel:

http://zowiekapowie.anman.net/

 ————————————

I’m on the “Geek Chic” CSS panel at Inter:PLAY, the St. Louis Interactive Festival, so its a good job that I give you some resources you can use to further your experience after the festival is over.

So its time to get your geek on and learn about designing pages the modern way – Cascading Style Sheets, or as we like to call them CSS.

What is CSS?

Before I answer that, let me get some really nerdy stuff out of the way that will help you understand CSS. Cascading Style Sheets are part of something called the Document Object Model, or DOM.

Sounds scary, but all that means is separating the content of your web page from the design and interactivity parts – breaking all of it up into separate files.

Still confused? Me too, and I’m writing this thing! But we’ll try and muddle through.

The content of your page is exactly what it sounds like – the words, man – the information, dude! That lovely screed you wrote about the merits of herringbone versus houndstooth when it comes to Anglophile outerwear – that’s the content part of the DOM.

The interactivity part is the wonderful bits of code written by cube-farmers in darkened buildings that make your page do neat things such as accept comments, post feeds and even log in to your blog to post said screed. They make your blog work, so be nice to them and bake them some cookies.

Have I mentioned that I’m a nerd? (Chocolate-chip, please.)

And now what we’ve all been waiting for, the design. CSS! Cascading Style Sheets. Sounds very relaxing, like a waterfall in a fashionable bedroom. Alas, CSS is just a file that tells your content (remember your content?) how it should look. Sort of a What Not To Wear for web pages.

The Quick and Dirty of How CSS Works:

Admittedly, you’ve got to know a little bit about HTML and if I got into it here, this would be a very long article, and we’re not serving pizza, either! I will give you a two quick examples of what CSS can do, and give you links to some fabulous resources. When you’re done with those, you’ll be able to snatch the CSS pebble from my hand with no problems.

The Box Model

No, it’s not a runway show with women who should probably eat a few sandwiches walking up and down wearing cardboard – it’s CSS!

Think of a cereal box – it’s got an outer box, an inner bag and inside that bag is your cereal – hopefully Cocoa Pebbles, but Fiber One works just as well (yuck).

That’s the Box Model.

What? Relax – soon I will bring order out of chaos.

In a simplistic way, the cereal box is a great analogue to the Box Model.

The cereal is your words, headings, pictures – anything that fits under the umbrella of content. With CSS we can make that cereal look like just about anything from giant flakes to tiny clusters to wonderful, tasty pebbles.

It’s wrapped in its own bag, so we can control the look of your content separately from the box, which we can also control.

For example:

** This is my cereal. **

Looks boring, but with CSS, I can take that cereal and make it look different:

** This is my cereal **

Neat, huh? I can make it look, or style it, any way I want with my stylesheet. Bold, italic, size, even the type of font can be changed with CSS.

Now what about my cereal box? Well, those are the other aspects of the Box Model you can control.

You can have an invisible cereal box, but lets make it visible by adding a border (or box) around my cereal (once again using CSS – this is starting to look pretty usefull!).

** This is my cereal **

Great! And you can make that border as thick as you want and even make it a broken line:

** This is my cereal **

Now that it looks like a box, lets manipulate the properties of the box. Right now, it’s rather tight around the cereal, so let’s give it some breathing room with padding . Don’t get too worried about the technical details of how we’re doing this; I’ll give you some great links for learning exactly how to do this.

Padding is just the space between your cereal (content) and the border (which again, can be invisible). Let’s try it out:

.
** This is my cereal **
.

Nifty! As you can see, there is now space between your content and your box. This space is called padding.

But as we all know, the inside of a cereal box has a color, and so can ours if you so desire:

.
** This is my cereal **
.

Spooky! This is turning into monster cereal (mmm, Count Chocula). This property is called background-color. Mind-blowing, right? See how simple these concepts are? And if the concepts are easy, how hard can the application of these concepts be? The answer is, not hard at all – It’s Jello, not diamonds, kids.

Designing Using CSS or Moving Crap Around

Something else CSS does, in addition to making things look cool, is place them exactly where you want on your page. In the olden days, poor settlers had to put their web content inside tables that were inside other tables to make their pages look the way they wanted. By candle light.

But there are a few bad things about tables. Sure they’re great for budget spreadsheets, but why not for design?

• The stuff you put in your table has to completely load before the rest of your page – if there’s a table of pictures early in your page, the rest of the page has to wait!
• If you use CSS, you can create your page like a regular document, so people who can’t see can have your pages read to them in the correct order by their reader programs. This is also good for search engines.
  • That’s called accessibility – another subject entirely, but believe me when I tell you it’s better not to use tables for design.

But in today’s modern age of flying cars and helper robots, there’s a better way – CSS!

What if I had TWO boxes of Cocoa Pebbles? Terrifying, I know. But if I did, I might put them right next to each other on the shelf:

.
** This is my cerealAlso my cereal **
.

And that’s fine, but I want to put some space in between them, in case they get fighty and I have to turn the car around. The space in between your boxes in the Box Model is called the margin.

.
** This is my cerealAlso my cereal **
.

Ta-daa!

You’ve just taken your first steps into a larger world, Neo.

With CSS, you can take these boxes and move them wherever you want on a page. You can even put them in another box, inside of another box inside of another- you can see where I’m going with this.

You can take your content, break it up into as many boxes as you want, make those boxes and content look exactly the way you want them to and stack, arrange or even overlap them all over your page.

All without changing the order of the information in your content page! (Remember DOM? Go ahead and scroll up if you forget – I’ll wait).

So HOW do I do it?

Well, that’s beyond the scope of this article, but I’m gong to get you to some great information to get you started from beginner to CSExpert.

Print is Not Dead – CSS Books

I learned CSS with this book and it’s great. You can be a rank beginner and not be afraid to crack the spine. When you’re done you’ll just about be a CSS expert:

HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition

And once you get through that, a handy reference is O’Reilly’s CSS Pocket Guide:

CSS Pocket Reference, Second Edition

Free Web Tutorials

http://www.w3schools.com/css/

http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/introduction.asp

Free Web Reference

http://reference.sitepoint.com/css

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

All those involved with organizing InterPLAY, and most of our moderators and panelists, will be live-blogging or live-Twittering the conference. Follow us on twitter @stlinteractive. Please include #interplay in all your Tweets and tag Flickr photos with “interplay08″ so they will be included in the awesomely wonderful aggregate that ToastedRav.com has so generously provided! (Aren’t they fabulous?) From this page you can see all the Tweets about InterPLAY, video, photos, etc. View the page here!

Many thanks again to ALL our amazing sponsors: Screenz, PBS Kids Sprout, Blueberry Hill, KFTK 97.1 FM Talk, ToastedRav.com, RSI Kitchen and Bath, TOTO, Hallmark Stone.

Check out our press:

“Green Options Writers to Appear at St. Louis Interactive Festival“

“Come blog with me: InterPLAY conference links local bloggers together“

At the InterPLAY St. Louis interactive festival in the University City Loop this weekend, I’ll be moderating a panel on search engine optimization and traffic building techniques, for bloggers and others, called Optimize Me: Boosting Readership with SEO. I’ll have the pleasure of presenting two top-notch local SEO experts: Ellen Gooch, from local retail company Soft Surroundings, and Will Hanke.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, is the practice of optimizing the design and content of a website in ways that make it easier for searchers on search engines to find that website.

Good, or white hat, search engine optimization helps three groups of people: searchers who are trying to find information, or are shopping for a product; website editors who want to connect with new readers or customers, and drive more traffic to their site; and the search engines themselves, by helping the engines to return more relevant results for their users.

Bad, or black hat, search engine optimization tries to game the system, misleading the search engines and searchers themselves by using dishonest techniques to drive traffic for a quick profit from product sales or advertising.

We’ll discuss the difference between white hat and black hat techniques at Optimize Me.

Why Do Bloggers Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization?

Search engines are text-based services. That is: a person using a search engine enters text as their query. The search engine, in turn, searches text on a page and tries to find a match to that query. Because the search engines rely on text to return relevant, timely responses to their readers, sites with a good deal of rich, descriptive, frequently updated text are favored in search engine rankings.

The majority of blogs are chock full of rich, descriptive, frequently updated text, which means that blogs often rank highly on search engine results pages. And the business world has begun to take notice of this fact. A growing general realization of the SEO power of blogs has provided bloggers with many opportunities in recent years to turn their hobbies into a business. But it has also exposed bloggers to the threat of exploitation and theft of their work.

Learn how you can use SEO and other traffic building techniques to promote your blog find new readers, and also get some advice on how to protect yourself from internet superhighwaymen at the InterPLAY festival this Friday, September 19th, at 5 p.m. in the University City Loop.

This Friday and Saturday, September 19th and 20th, the first-ever St. Louis-area interactive social media festival will take place in the University City Loop, in partnership with the wildly popular PLAY:stl music festival taking place the same weekend.

InterPLAY events will be held at Screenz, COCA and Blueberry Hill. Wristbands will admit festival goers to musical events at PLAY:stl and panels on social media and the internet at InterPLAY.

Stay tuned for more information on individual panels, speakers and sponsors. We hope to see you at InterPLAY!

All you need to know about InterPLAY: St. Louis’s first interactive conference, including panel times, dates, speakers, and locations, is right here.

We’re fortunate in that several excellent companies took interest in Interplay 2008 in its inaugural year. Many thanks to them for supporting St. Louis’s first ever interactive festival.

Also be sure to listen for our commercials on 97.1 FM Talk next week!

InterPLAY, the first ever St. Louis interactive festival (in association with PLAY:stl and organized by members of the St. Louis Bloggers’ Guild) announces its 2008 video competition.

Those submitting are called to create online videos hosted on sites such as Vimeo or Youtube and create a 30-second short promoting InterPLAY. Bonus points go to the filmmaker who can corner a local celebrity like Mayor Francis Slay, a Cardinals’ player, or local personality.

Check out the official InterPLAY website to read more about the competition AND about an abridged reveal of panels at the September festival.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback and we’re also looking for area bloggers and social media participants to get involved and help us with Interplay. The more the merrier!