Hi
Just thought I’d pass on a quick update about some changes on the blog.
Move to self-hosted blog
As of early June, we moved from hosted WordPress to a self-hosted blog. The main reason for moving was to take advantage of some of the great customizations available on the self-hosted software.
The old blog content is still available — http://onproductmanagement.wordpress.com — and will be there for some time. There’s 3 years of links around the web that point to that blog as well as a lot of search engine juice. It still receives hundreds of hits a day, but we are monitoring it and slowly changing links to point over to the new blog.
Broken links on this blog?
Unfortunately our move to a self-hosted instance wasn’t seamless. WordPress is a great piece of software, but the process of going from hosted to self-hosted created a number of broken links in some of the blog posts. These are mostly in older posts, and we will correct them as we come across them. If you run into a broken link, please leave a comment on the corresponding page and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.
Submission Forms for Events, Blogs
We’ve been maintaining a fairly extensive blog list of relevant blogs. You can see various lists here:
If you know of a blog you think we should add (including your own!), to make your life easy, we now have a form you can fill out with necessary information.
https://onproductmanagement.org/blogroll/submit-a-blog/
We’ve also done the same thing for our events page. The list of upcoming events is here. And the form is:
https://onproductmanagement.org/events/submit-an-event/
If you know of any events, ProductCamps, local PM or PDMA or other meetings, relevant conferences, seminars etc, let us know and we’ll add them to the Events page.
We’ll be adding submission forms for some of our other pages, such as Associations and Resources over the next few weeks. If you want us to add something to either of those pages before then, go old school and leave a comment or use the Contact Us form! 🙂
Changes to the look and feel of the site
Over the summer we’ll be experimenting a bit with the look and feel of the site. We want to continue to have a clean, simple look, but will be trying out some theme changes and some new plugins for the blog. So don’t be surprised if interface elements change or come and go once in a while.
As an example, we recently tried the Odiogo plug in. It’s a great little piece of technology that automatically creates an audio file — via pretty good text-to-speech technology — of any blog post published via RSS. It also embeds a nice audio player in the web page.
It’s actually pretty good for what it does, but has some limitations that made it unacceptable for us for the time being. As much as we’d love to provide audio for all our blog posts — and good audio at that! — the limitations meant we couldn’t keep it on our site.
But, we’re going to keep trying to improve the blog, and would like suggestions from you.
You ideas are welcome!
Are there article topics you’d like to see us cover?
Do you want to submit something yourself? We’ve had quite a few really good guest posts already.
Are there other resources or reference pages (beyond Events, Blogs etc.) that we could add?
Do you know of any good blog capabilities we should consider?
Let us know – via comment or form — and we’ll look into it.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Saeed