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Episode #12: DVD Giveaway to Start Your Passion

Dean Soto — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:29:22 +0000

Okay all of you awesome Catholics out there. The Church needs you, and the world needs you to get out there and start talking about your passion. We are all designed by God for a specific purpose, and there are too many non-Catholics out there that are leaving us in the dust when it comes to living out our purpose. We need Catholics out there that are not afraid to do what they were made to do. As I’ve said many times before, not all of us were made to be theologians, but all of us were given special talents from God – and now is the time to start using them and get a free DVD (and possibly a book) at the same time!

Watch the video for the details about the contest:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rules recap:

Start a blog around your talent/passion (Not a theology/philosophy blog unless you are better than Scott Hahn, or Peter Kreeft)
Write a blog post that explains who you are, what your blog is about, and why you love your blog topic. Put a link on that post back to this post.
Get 5 people to leave a comment on this post with a link back to your post and why your blog rocks.

The first 4 people to accomplish this will get the DVD, The Call of the Entrepreneur. The DVD is produced by the Acton Institute, a Catholic organization that tries to close the gap between economics and religion. Check out the trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Out of those 4, the person with the most votes will also get Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, “Crush It!“ Good luck!

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, Catholic Entrepreneurs, christian, entrepreneur

Tumblr Adds Video to Their iPhone App

Dean Soto — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:19:10 +0000

If there wasn’t enough reasons to love Tumblr over Posterous, they finally sealed the deal with me when they released their latest addition to their iPhone app – video blogging capability! For those of you that don’t know what Tumblr is, it’s a quick blogging platform that aims to allow you to blog your life as easily as possible. It’s very simple to start up, and has a lot of customizable features. Best of all, Tumblr makes it super-easy to reblog other Tumblr user’s posts through their aptly named – reblog feature.

One of the things that attracted me most to them was their iPhone app. It made it a snap to keep your Tumblr blog updated (you can check out my Tumblr blog here). However, for some reason, they lacked the ability to upload video, which is absolutely essential for us iPhone users that don’t want to write all of the time. Thankfully, just today they released that capability, and ooooohhhh man is it cool!

There is one downfall though, in order to actually upload your videos to your blog, your iPhone needs to be connected via wi-fi. That kind of sucks, especially when you can upload YouTube flicks all day over the 3G network. Oh well though. The app is free, and beggars can’t be choosers.

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, tumblr, video, vlog

Support a Catholic Speaker 2009 is Over, Done, Finished!

Dean Soto — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:37:17 +0000

If you are deep into the Catholic blogging community, then this post will be of no surprise to you. So, over at Fallible Blogma, Matt Warner had a really cool idea about Catholic bloggers supporting Catholic speakers by writing about who they were. At first I was like, meh. I’ve heard a lot of Catholic speakers and I had a group of favorites so I wasn’t that excited about writing about a lesser known speaker (especially since one of my favorite speakers was already taken). However, I decided to do it anyway.

I ended up being surprised – to say the least – at how much I enjoyed the speaker that I supported. His name was Michael Cumbie, and he was an ex-Southern Baptist minister that came to the Church. I am not going to go into his story in this post, but you can check out my review of him here.

Basically, the point of this post is to say that you should check out all of the speakers and bloggers that supported this. It’s pretty amazing, and a great resource if you are looking for some great Catholic media.

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, Blogging, catholic, catholic cpeakers, catholic speaking, michael cumbie

Build a Blog and Impress Your Friends

Dean Soto — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:00:12 +0000

I got a question from a fan named Laura – who also happens to be my cousin – about her need to express herself. Her question goes a little something like this:

“Dean, I need my own blog…….STAT! I have things on my mind that I need to get out! Help a sista out!”

Needless to say, helping a sista out is where I excel. Okay Laura, you want to enter the 21st century and hop on the web 2.0 bandwagon, girlfriend? Well, here is how you are going to do it.

There are two ways to go about this: the easy way, and the hard way. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but what content you expect to produce will determine the route that you should take.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to create a blog is to use one of the many web hosted platforms that are out on the interwebs. There are quite a few of them, and all of them have their own strengths and weaknesses (go figure). But the cool thing about all of them is that you really don’t need any technical experience to use them, they are absolutely free (for the most part), and they usually have mobile apps that allow you to post from anywhere around the world using your phone or email. I love free…

Tumblr – This platform is quickly becoming my favorite. It’s light, it’s a social network, and it’s very customizable. The great thing about Tumblr is that it allows you to reblog posts from other Tumblrs, which is great for community building and getting traffic to your blog. They also host custom domain names (i.e. www.queenlaura.com).
WordPress.com – WordPress.com is another free platform that is decently customizable and pretty user friendly. I like it, but never really got into it.
Blogger – Probably the most well-known free blogging platform out there. It’s good, but whenever I run across a blogger site I have a negative reaction to it – I am not sure why. Maybe it’s because most of the templates used are so similar.
Posterous – Very easy blogging platform. You email your posts to Posterous and it does the rest. Although it’s great, I prefer Tumblr and I gave my reasons for my choice in a previous article. Plus, Gary Vaynerchuk from tv.Winelibrary.com agrees with me too (I just finished his book “Crush It!” and I’ll be doing a review on it soon!).

The Hard Way

Sometimes you want to have a bit more control over your content. In that case, I recommend a self-hosted WordPress blog (this is not the same as a WordPress.com blog). With a self-hosted blog you can customize themes any way you want to, have your own domain name (i.e. www.laurarocksdahouse.com, instead of www.laurarocksdahouse.blogspot.com), and you can do pretty much whatever you want. It’s harder, but anything that is worth doing is going to be difficult. Without going into great detail, here is how you do it:

Purchase some shared hosting – I’ve been using Bluehost and they’ve been pretty good, and their customer service is great. They run about $5-$7 a month.
Buy a domain name from a hosting service – I know that Bluehost will give you one for free, but they typically cost around $8-$15 a year.
Log into the Cpanel at your shared hosting site and use Simple Scripts or Fantastico to install WordPress.
Check out 140+ free WordPress templates that you could start off with.
Go to http://wordpress.tv/ and start learning how to use it.

Okay, I’m done. Hopefully that answered your question!

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, creativity, ideas, imagination, simple blogging, Web

Why I Chose Tumblr Over Posterous

Dean Soto — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:20:30 +0000

I recently started another blog that will basically act as the hub for all of my blogging and entrepreneurial ventures. The site is www.deansoto.com and it’s a place that I can let my hair down (so to speak) and be a little less formal than I am on this blog and at Pro Sulum.

Anyway, the platform that I am using for my new project is Tumblr. Now, there has been a recent battle between Tumblr and Posterous about which platform is the better “simple” blogging tool. Late last week I was asked by Mark Alves of ChurchMojo about why I chose Tumblr over Posterous. Well Mark, the answer to your question has drawn nigh (and deserved a video, no less).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, blogs, posterous, simple blogging, tumblr, Writing

Learn How to Use WordPress from the Pros

Dean Soto — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:13:44 +0000

Makeuseof.com has a great article that displays some of the latest and greatest tutorials about WordPress. If you don’t know what WordPress is, it is basically only the best blogging platform out on the Interwebs. If you are a blogger and are not using a self-hosted WordPress blog, you are seriously missing out. There is so much packed into this absolutely free piece of blogging software, it is crazy!

Anyway, my love for WordPress aside, there is a relatively new site out there called WordPress.tv. Now, rather than having to rely on sifting through a plethora of documentation, you can watch recorded video tutorials from the developers and elite users of WordPress. It’s a great way to get started, quickly!

WordPress.tv – The Best WordPress Tutorials Ever! via MakeUseOf

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, tutorials, web, wordpress

26 WordPress Plugins That You Absolutely Must Have for Your Blog

Dean Soto — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:00:48 +0000

The best part about having a WordPress blog is having access to some of the top plugins found on any platform. The only problem is that because there are thousands of plugins to choose from, it’s hard to find the best ones. Well, now your search is over, here are 26 of the best plugins that WordPress has to offer – and I use them all on my blog!

Photos By J/F/Photos and BillaDay

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – One of the best ways to let visitors find content that is relevant to what they are looking for is to offer them some related posts. YARRP is very customizable, and you can make related posts as accurate or inaccurate as you desire.

WP Super Cache – If you are hosting your blog on a shared server (which you most likely are), if you write a post that brings in a rush of visitors it is likely that your server will not be able to accommodate all the requests and will likely go keel over and die. Well, not with this plugin. It serves static HTML files on pages with high volumes of traffic rather than processing PHP with every request.

WP-SpamFree – An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. It also has a handy contact form too!

WordPress Popular Posts – Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them with your own formatting. Popular posts are usually one of the most clicked on items by new visitors.

WordPress Mobile Edition – A lot of people have smart phones now. So you might as well make your blog more accessible for people on the go. This plugins does just that.

WordPress Database Backup – Unless you want to find all of your hard work gone one day, you might want to install this baby. You can schedule regular backups of all your stuff and have it emailed to you.

WordPress.com Stats – Google Analytics is great, but sometimes you need something a little bit more simple. WordPress Stats lets you see see a condensed version of all the visitors to your site on your dashboard.

What Would Seth Godin Do – Let new visitors know they are welcome, and let loyal visitors know that you still love them. This plugin sets a cookie and let’s you give varying messages to new and returning visitors. You can see a demo of this at the top of this post.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – Easily display embedded video from all of the major video sites. You can also adjust how the video player looks on your blog.

Simple Tags – Simple Tags helps you to find the appropriate tags for your post. You can get suggestions from Yahoo and other tag generators, or use your own.

Referrer Detector – This plugin detects where your visitors are coming from and gives them a message accordingly. If you are visiting this page from a major social bookmarking site, there is likely a demo of this plugin at the bottom of this post.

Ozh’ Better Feed – Customize your RSS feed any way you want. This is one of the coolest RSS plugins out there. If you want to make your subscribers feel special with content that only they have access to, this is the plugin you need.

No Self Pings – Stop pingbacking yourself in you comments when you are trying to bring people to other great links on your site. This plugin is a must if you won’t want to look self-centered.

Nofollow Blogroll SEO – Save your SEO. This plugin tags all of your blogroll with the “nofollow” tag. That way you can give your friends link love without sacrificing your pagerank.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Keeps you from looking like a ping spammer every time you update a post. Ping optimizer only pings the addresses in your ping list when you first publish your post or if you manually make Ping Optimizer do it.

Google XML Sitemaps – An AWESOME plugin that not only makes sitemaps for going and automatically submits them, but also Yahoo, ASK, and Bing. Very easy to use, and great for SEO.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Let’s you track everything on your site using Google Analytics. Very good if you really want to see what users are doing on your site.

Get Recent Comments – Just as the name says… this post gets recent comments. You can display recent comments in your sidebar too, which let’s your visitors get some face time and link love.

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This is a popular one. Basically it lets you redirect your RSS feed to Feedburner so you can track your subscribers better.

Enforce www. Preference – Keep your site from confusing Google. This one redirects users to either www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com. This prevents Google from penalizing your site for creating duplicate content. (A big thank you to Nathan Snell for this one.)

DISQUS Comment System – I’ve tried IntenseDebate and I hate the default wordpress commenting system, so I went with Disqus. The cool thing about it is that Facebook and Twitter users can use their respective accounts to login. Also, mobile users can do the same. It’s been great so far. One thing to note is that it breaks XHTML validation. So if you are sad about invalid XHTML, sorry.

Comment Redirect – Redirect first-time comments to a page of your choice. Great for if you want new visitors to see certain material.

Broken Link Checker – Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.

All in One SEO Pack – Hands down the best SEO plugin there is. It gets better with every update and is pretty much usable upon installation.

Akismet – Pretty much everyone knows this plugin. It’s a great spam filter. Use this with the aforementioned WP-Spam Free and you will have pretty close to 99.99% effective spam protection.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – The best looking and most comprehensive social bookmarking plugin. The only problem with it is its incessant self promotion. Other than that, it’s great.

Hopefully this list helped out! If there are any other plugins that I should have mentioned – or that I absolutely must use – please let me know in the comments!

Other posts that you may enjoy:

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© Dean Soto for Productive Catholic , 2009. | SOTO9438 | Read the article at the blog! | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, blogging, plugins, web, wordpress, wordpress plugins