I am developing and running a blog training course starting next September 25th for IT@Cork.
It will be a 5 week course, one hour a week (6pm Monday evenings) in the National Software Centre in Mahon. It will be open to non-members and members of IT@Cork alike. The course fees will be €50 for IT@Cork members and €100 for non-members.
The entire proceeds of this training will be going to IT@Cork.
A very rough outline of what I will be going through each night is as follows:
Week 1. Intro to blogging and RSS
How to set up a blog
Hosted vs non-hosted
Free vs. paid
Week 2. How to optimise your blog
FeedBurner
Spam prevention
SEO
Week 3. Your blog content
Links
images
RSS searches
Week 4. How to Promote your blog and posts
Week 5. How to Podcast
Hosting
Marketing
This outline is open to suggestion and change - please feel free to suggest any topics which you feel are missing and/or under-represented in the comments to this post.
I have created a Google Calendar for this training course - you can subscribe to the calendar and see any changes to the course outline as it becomes firmed up.
Here is an RSS link for the training calendar.
Here is an iCal link for the training calendar.
And here is a static HTML link to the training calendar.
Email [email protected] to book your place.
UPDATE - In response to valuable feedback from Keith and Paul in the comments I have added in RSS and images to weeks 1 and 3 of the course. The Google Calendar has also been updated
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Hi Tom,
Catherine in IT@Cork told me that you can register for the course & pay online here
Are you going to publish the materials to this site as the course progresses? If so, that would be goodness personified.
Hiya Tom
Looks good. I have tendered to run blog training here in Kilkenny with the CEB - here are the main elements I will be covering:
* Please explain what a blog is! (and why they are different from an internet site)
* RSS feeds – why they go hand in hand with blogs
* RSS feedreaders
* Some good examples of blogs. And some bad ones
* Setup your own blog.
* Etiquette
* Blog search engines
* Blog software tools
* Imaging for blogs
So you have podcasting and I have Imaging for Blogs! The latter might be good for you - mine is just 15-30 minutes on reducing jpgs in size and definition using IrfanView. (I have not considered Mac’s yet - I will based on demand). As for podcasting I cannot offer that as I do not do it - and I suspect that may be a step too far for my audience anyways.
If you are interested we can swap material? I do not have dates for mine yet - should I get it the delivery is over two evenings with 2.5 hours per night.
keith
keith
Hi Tom,
Any chance you could arrange for the same course in Dublin? There was some discussion around the blog awards time from people who would like this. I can provide the venue.
Mary
Dennis - that’s not a bad idea - I imagine, however, the course content will be a tad basic for you!
Keith, The focus on RSS at the beginning is a good idea. Understanding RSS is absolutely fundamental to understanding the power of blogs. On the images, it hadn’t occurred to me but it is a great idea. I’ll work it in. I’ll show people how to use Flickr to embed images, however as this seems like a simple way to do it to me (as well as saving on disk and bandwidth).
Mary, I would certainly consider running this in Dublin, as well if there was sufficient demand.
The course content wouldn’t be a tad basic for me.
What is RSS?
How on earth do I put a photo on my blog?
But if you use words like “embed” images, you’ll convince me this is an advanced course.
But what a great course to be running, so needed.