Best Practices: Promoting your Blog through Google+

Google+ has been around for awhile now, and if you’re at all like me, you still don’t really know what to do with it. Sure, it has a great video chat, and somehow links up with my email, but I know it does a lot more. In the world of blogging, Google+ is that janitor at MIT just waiting to solve complicated mathematical equations left on the chalkboard. The truth is Google+ gained users faster read more
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Tumblr Tuesday: Pittsburgh is Beautiful

Welcome to Tumblr Tuesdays, where we feature a Pittsburgh Tumblr every Tuesday. What is a Tumblr, you ask? Tumblr is a super simple blogging platform where you can quickly post photos, text, videos, and what have you onto your personal page. This week we’re featuring PittsburghIsBeautiful. “Pittsburgh is Beautiful” finds the everyday charm of the Steel City. Detail oriented, with an eye read more
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DIY Parks and Public Spaces (and a related TED Talk)

I noticed that the Cincinnati blog , Urban Cincy,  wrote a post about a recent New York Times article on public spaces - A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza.  This same article was retweeted last week by Bill Peduto who just won the primary election for mayor of the city of Pittsburgh. RT“@pghomes: #Pittsburgh could use more of these -A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public Plaza nyti.ms/19sJU6O” read more
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Local Link List – HackPad, GitTip, Thinkero.us, & IDoneThis

One of our favorite bloggers, Swiss-Miss, puts together a post each Friday of interesting links.  I thought I would do the same but with some links that might be of interest to local bloggers. Here are some cool tools & useful websites that I thought were worth sharing: HackPad - I learned about this last week from the National Day of Civic Hacking website. HackPad is a super easy to use read more
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BikePGH Advocacy Success: Community, Design and Local Websites

Last week,  I attended this presentation organized by the Saxifrage School - Making Pittsburgh a more livable city through Bicycles and Advocacy: a discussion with Bike Pgh. The Saxifrage School is an interesting project that is working to rethink the how we are currently approaching higher education.  You can learn more on their website here and check out the Saxifrage School blog here.  If read more
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Projects From ThinkathonPGH – A National Day of Civic Hacking Event

This weekend, June 1 & 2, was the National Day of Civic Hacking which is an iniative started by the White House.  Over 95 events were held all over the country, you can see the complete list of events here. The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, read more
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99 Twitter Accounts to Follow to Learn More About WordPress

If you are looking to get lots more WordPress wisdom then check out this list that WPMUorg has put together - Who’s Who of WordPress: 99 Twitter Accounts You Should Be Following. We were only following a few of these folks and are happy to discover lots more WordPress lovers on Twitter. Not on the list but we've found to be helpful is @wpBeginner If we were to create a list of 99 local read more
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Tumblr Tue: Treading Art in Pittsburgh, PA

Another one of our favorite Pittsburgh blogs happens to be a Tumblr blog - Treading Art.  Treading Art offers content about arts and culture in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania.  Treading Art was founded by Christine Smith and Melissa LuVisi, both of whom are transplants from Northern California.  Christine and Melissa offer information on everything from photography to food to local events. Each read more
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Pittsburgh Food Bloggers

We are working on a better way to display blogs by city and topic on the BlogLocal map - and we would appreciate your feedback on how you would like to sort and browse blogs (do you prefer lists, pinterest-style images, something else?) Anybody out there have a list of food Bloggers and wine Bloggers in Pittsburgh? Putting together a meet and greet during wine festival — enophiledude (@enophiledude) read more
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Map of US Based on Where’s George Data

One of the things that goes hand-in-hand with local are maps.  BlogLocal is committed to building a maps of blogs with local content (if you haven't check out the blog map yet, you can see the map of blogs here). NPR's Blog Krulwich Wonders has a fascinating post with some maps of America that show regions based on where we spend our money. Dirk Brockmann, a theoretical physicist from Germany read more
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