Along with the new year comes a host of updates for my life that will manifest throughout my online presence. For those that have been checking, my blog has been rather stale lately. It’s not that I haven’t been active online, or that I haven’t been blogging; rather that my online activity has broadened and isn’t reflected on the home page of this blog. Here’s a quick breakdown of the changes: Lifestream As I have become more integrated with communities locally and afar, the types of interaction I have are much more diverse than blog posts. Over the Holidays, I set up Sweetcron to aggregate my online activity into my lifestream. Blogging I’ve learned a ton about how and why I blog since I set up my first blog. When I started, I owned my own company and I was blogging about topics that I thought would increase traffic for landing new business; in other words for marketing. Well, I don’t own my own business anymore and I help a ton of people with blogging these days, so I’m not feeling passionate about writing blog posts to be link bait for potential customers anymore. That doesn’t mean I’m not still interested in blogging about my industry, in fact I’m going to write those posts for the business I support now, Voce Nation. On this blog, I’m going to talk more about the things I care about like Portland, the Ducks, RC helicopters, tequila and such. Home page I am planning to make my home page more of a gateway to my online presence—links to the various places I have accounts online, my lifestream feed, and some basic “about me” info. I’m planning to move my blog to http://www.justinkistner.com/blog/ as blogging becomes a part of my activity rather than all of my activity. Beer & Blog I ended up pulling out of the Legion of Tech elections for their Board of Directors to focus more on Beer and Blog. I didn’t feel like I was going to be able to give them the time commitment they deserve to get from someone else. LoT rocks and I will still help them get sponsorships, attend their events, and help in every way I can because I think what they are doing for Portland is unique and special. I attribute them with the reawakening of the Portland tech scene! Beer and Blog is hoping to bring that same DIY community spirit to more cities throughout 2009. We’re also planning to do more workshops to bring additional people into the community.

As part of our one year celebration, we want to offer the past year’s worth of wisdom that we’ve built up to help you launch your blog. We’re looking for all of those folks that have wanted their own hosted blog. End Bloglessness will be a 4 hour, 4 session workshop. We’ll be meeting at CubeSpace on Saturday, January 10th from 12:00-5:00pm.

Saturday, January 10th from 12:00-5:00pm Session Format Each session will be 1 hour: 15 minute presentation and 45 minutes of assisted help. During assisted help, attendees can raise their hands to get help from one of our assistants. Assistants are folks from the Portland tech scene that have done this process before who can help you with your questions. Agenda

Session 1 - Install your blog 12:00-1:00pm; Session 2 - Configure your blog 1:00-2:00pm; Session 3 - Stylize your blog 2:00-3:00pm; Session 4 - Connect with other bloggers on Twitter, by Kelly Guimont (@verso) 3:00-4:00pm; 4:00-5:00pm will be an open help time to ask help with anything you’d like.

What to expect We are focusing on launching WordPress blogs for this workshop. We’re also focusing on self-hosted blogs, so you’ll need a hosting plan and your access information with you at the workshop to get assisted help. Owning your own hosting account, and therefore your blog, is important and the reason we want to do this workshop is to expand access to blog ownership to more people. By the time you leave the workshop, you’ll have a blog that is ready to go and some direction on how to connect with other local bloggers. We are expecting people from all skill levels, including the technically challenged. Everyone will be treated with respect and will be encouraged. Help us get the word out! Most of the people we’re hoping to reach are either to far outside of our social circles or are offline completely. We could use your help in letting people know about this free workshop to get a blog up and running. We don’t care if your motivation to blog is personal, professional, or political; we’ll help you get one up and running.

Tweet the link to this page http://is.gd/ePLs Email this page to a friend RSVP on Upcoming and Calagator Tell someone in real life using your voice. Crazy, huh?

Why is this free? We’re hoping to make new friends and be good citizens. We don’t want to be an insular group, so we want to enable others to join. And, because we’re Portlanders inspired by other Portlanders to DIY and that Yes We Can.
Help out If you have experience with installing WordPress, we’d love to have you help answer people’s questions. Contact Michelle if you’re interested in helping!

Regular Beer and Blog attendee and founder of Legion of Tech, Dawn Foster, shares the love on WebWorkerDaily in an piece called Where Is Your Community? I also rely on attending regular events where I can interact with people who have similar technology interests. In some cases, I attend events that already exist. Here in Portland, we have events like Beer and Blog, Portland Web Innovators, and many user groups. I also noticed a few gaps, which I filled by working with other people to help start new groups like the Online Community Manager Meetup and PDX GeekChix. Attending existing events and starting new ones is a great way to meet new people and increase your interactions with other human beings offline. Dawn was kind enough to share the love with us, so head on over there and drop her some thank you comments!!

Hi friends! Welcome to the new Beer and Blog website. We’ve upgraded to WPMU in order to offer blogs to the additional chapters. It’s a work in progress, so please excuse some of our broken parts. Also, please welcome our newest and first expansion chapter: Corvallis. Lance Albertson will be facilitating the meet up in Corvallis, Oregon at Block15. A few folks from Portland have talked about car pooling down to the inaugural session this Wednesday the 10th. We’re looking forward to meeting Corvallis bloggers while we’re there! I’ll be spending some more of this Sunday working on the site and as often as possible until the new ecosystem really feels dialed in. We have a few more chapters in the works, and look forward to welcoming them into the family!!