Drawn in Columbus, OH, with guts of wires and a messed up head.

Since being on the road I’m always asked, “so what do you do?” Well, I do many things. One of those things is setting up blogs for creative types. In this particular case, My Name is Trav.

I have many friends who are talented artists, musicians, designers, writers, and athletes. Many of these friends know they should be blogging, but they don’t know where to start. That’s where I come in. I’m their blogging coach, so to speak. Their personal trainer. I get them onto the treadmill of content and show them how to spread their knowledge and awesomeness to the world.

This project is for my friend Travis Turner, a mighty talented drummer. Someday he wants to give drum lessons, but he doesn’t feel like he’s quite “there,” yet. So I told him, “start blogging now, so that when you are ready, you’ve got an audience to tell.” So that’s what we’re doing. We’ll see how it turns out.

Drawn while at the Grindcore House in south Philadelphia, PA, one of the best coffee shops I’ve ever been to.

Drawn in Columbus, OH, while stuffing my face at Buckeye Donuts.

This reminds me of Van Halen’s “brown M&M” clause, about removing all the brown M&M’s from the bowl of candy backstage. If they showed up at a gig and saw brown M&M’s, well, that meant their rider wasn’t read very throughly. If the promoter shrugs off the M&M part, what else could they have skipped? The safety measures? The power requirements?

It’s not being pompous, it’s paying attention to the details.

If a business shrugs off social media thing like this (thinking perhaps,”it doesn’t matter, no one will notice!”), that’s your choice. But it’s my choice to consider what other details you’re skipping over.

(Note: title edited, editor fired)
(Note: there is no editor)

I wanted a daily email list for my Seth W. Robots. It’d be one hand drawn robot, published everyday, then sent to anyone who subscribed. And I wanted it to be as simple as writing a blog post.

Now, because I didn’t want to fill the front page of this blog with daily robot drawings, I though of starting a Tumblr or Posterous blog, just for the robots.

But I really wanted to figure out how to do this in my current WordPress install! I just needed to find a way to keep the daily robot drawings from displaying on the front page.

This is how I set it up.

1. Make sure you have something that people would want everyday, like a recipe, a fun video, a how-to or tip. I’ve been selling a few Seth W. Robots on Etsy lately, so I figured it’d be fun to have a free offering for my fans.

2. Assign a category for your new daily email in WordPress. In my case, Daily Robots.

3. Get the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin. Download, upload via the WordPress admin and tell it what category you want to exclude from the front page. Easy! (Note: Since I wanted it to show up in a “feed,” I made sure I didn’t exclude it from feeds in the options menu).

4. Copy and paste the URL of the new category, Daily Robots, into FeedBurner. That spits out a feed page like this or this.

5. Click the Publicize in FeedBurner and activate the Email Subscription feature. Now you’ve got a link for people to subscribe, which you can see here.

You’re done! I published that link in the ride sidebar, so friends can sign up and get a robot in their inbox everyday.

But wait – why stop there?

Twitter: You can use FeedBurner to publish this feed to Twitter, too. In FeedBurner just click Publicize, then Socialize. Enter your Twitter details and the next time you publish a new post it will get sent to your Twitter account.

Facebook: I used RSS Graffiti to publish the this Daily Robot Feed to my Seth W. Robots fan page (which you should totally like).

Have questions? Reach me via @sethw or email.

This robot wants to be your friend.

Drawn at Kafe Kerouac in Columbus, Ohio.

Once you’re set up, you’ll have 2GB of storage “in the cloud,” meaning, it’s not on your computer, it’s just somewhere else.

For instance, you can click this link and download a file from my Public Folder. Look at you, you’re working in the cloud!

Some other uses for Dropbox:
Upload your vacation photos and share the link with family members.
Musicians, send your rough mixes to your band mates.
Bike nerds, upload PDF bike maps of cities you’ve ridden in.
Upload your most recent resume so you can access it from your crappy job.

Once you have your file uploaded, you can then share it with someone. Read “How do I link to files in my Dropbox?” and you’ll be slinging files in no time.

Install the Dropbox App on your iPhone and you’ll be able to shuffle documents around when you’re out of the office getting coffee.

You might even get a raise.

Give it a shot. The first person to send me something via Dropbox (my email is seth.werkheiser@gmail.com) will get one of my Seth W. Robots. (US only, sorry. Offer ends Feb 29th, 2012 at 11:59pm EST)

Read the stories that are published in the tech blogosphere tomorrow. Are most published because the writer put in a lot of work or original thought? No, most are published because more — more — more content leads to more — more — more pageviews.

Replace the words “tech blogosphere” with “music blogs” in that quote and it still applies. More content, more pageviews. More controversy, more comments (which means more pageviews).

There will be 25 stories about Google TV or something else tomorrow which will all say basically the same thing. Maybe one or two of those stories will have actual insight or information. Maybe none will. If any do, it’s the exception, not the rule.

Replace “Google TV” with “the new Meshuggah single, Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion.” Seriously. I can name at least five metal blogs who will all embed the video, write a few lines, and hit publish. Trust me, I’ll do the same.

I hear over and over again things like, “did you read that post on FILL-IN-THE-BLANK-BLOG? — Interesting, huh?” No, it wasn’t interesting, it was bullshit. That author had no fucking idea what they were talking about. They probably wrote it in 20 minutes and never thought about it again. If you asked the author about it now, they probably wouldn’t even remember half of what they wrote.

And just like Siegler said, “I was just as guilty of this as anyone.”