Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

At the end of 2009, Cllr Ken Hawkins and I worked together to set up a new website that Ken uses to write about issues in Elmdon and Solihull in his role as a councillor at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.

Screenshot: cllrkenhawkins.co.uk

Ken was already blogging on Google’s Blogger platform. However, following a few sessions at a Social Media Surgery, he was keen to do more with his blog both in terms of content and presentation.

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My last post was on how to update your Google Docs settings so you can track published documents in Google Analytics.

Currently, only documents can be tracked in your Analytics reports; views of published spreadsheets and presentations are not tracked. I’d really like Google to add support for tracking published spreadsheets, in particular. Here’s why.

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Browsing this morning, I discovered that you can track views of your published Google Docs using your Google Analytics account.

A published Google Doc is one that you have chosen to openly share with anyone on the web.

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I’ve been a little lax at posting, so here is the first of two updates on recent WordPress projects I’ve produced at the end of 2009.

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The Birmingham social media surgery for voluntary and community groups is now one year old. Huzzah! The first surgery took place in October 2008 at the BVSC and since then has developed into something quite special.

Here’s a video capturing the essence of what the surgery is and how those taking part feel about it (video by John Popham and questions from organiser Nick Booth).

James Wood recently set up his own business specialising in recruitment and executive search within management consultancy and professional services. He wanted a simple CV-style site that clearly explains what he does. I designed this one page, all type, site for him. View the live project at www.jameswood.eu.

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Photo by benjibrum

It’s almost a year now since I first went along to a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham. The surgeries are thriving and it’s great to see new surgeries sprouting in Lozells, Acocks Green and now Solihull.

One of the things I love about going along to these surgeries is that I never know who I’m going to meet or what topics will come up. The randomness is refreshing, it keeps me on my toes while meeting motivated folk who really want to improve their communities is good for the soul.

This social media lark is wide. Those coming along to the surgeries for advice may want to talk about anything from how to start a blog, attracting more readers to their website or making new contacts using the social web – and that’s just the start.

So, what really happens? What do we talk about?

Here’s a summary of a chat from a surgery in Fazeley Studios on 19th August between Esther Boyd, Paul Hadley and I.

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When embedding Flash objects such as flickr slideshows in posts on the free WordPress.com blogging platform, you may well run into difficulty. You grab the embed HTML code from the source site, paste the code into your post in WordPress, save your draft then—hang on a minute—where’s the embed code gone? The code gets stripped out.

I was stuck trying to embed this flickr slideshow a few weeks ago so I asked for help on Twitter. Josh R and Warren Pearce pointed me in the right direction, mentioning a workaround using Vodpod to convert the slideshow to video and then posting the video to WordPress.

After some further digging, I found a solution I quite liked within this post by Geeky Coder.

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