Eating My Own Dog Food & Loving It
Whenever I used to hear this less-than-appetizing phrase, I never quite got what the hoo-ha was all about — until now. For those of you less familiar with this expression, it simply means: if you market your products as the best ones out there, prove it to your audience by using them yourself.
When we started planning our Conduit blog revamp, I knew I had to use very strong tools to make the blog the best it could be. I looked long and hard at lots of tools — what worked and what didn’t. In the end, I decided to use Conduit’s tools. Yes, I started eating my own dog food.
First, I created a Wibiya Bar. It literally took me just two hours to create and upload the bar to our blog. Now it proudly sits at the bottom of all our pages, helping the blog go viral. Users have already started sharing posts on their social networks through the bar. And our international users have already translated our pages with a simple click on the bar.
Next, I made a mobile app for the blog. Using Conduit Mobile , I spent about a week creating the app. It took me that long mainly because I insisted on including our Authors page, which needed some basic HTML knowledge because it is a customized page. I’m happy to share the great news that just last week our app was accepted to both Android and Apple app stores.
To top it all off, we were able to instantly turn the mobile app we had just created into a mobile-friendly website. So, now, whenever people go to our blog’s URL from their smartphones, they’ll automatically see our mobile-optimized site.
I’ll eat this dog food any day of the week.
Although I could have automatically used Conduit’s tools, my first loyalty is to this blog, and so I really researched the field. Finding out that indeed Conduit’s products were the right choice for us makes me proud. It’s really something to be able to stand behind my words and market tools that can help even the most ambitious bloggers out there.
I do want to mention that I also used great WordPress widgets to create two new features on our blog. One of the features is an easy way for guest bloggers to submit and publish their posts. I’m excited about this feature because having more guest posts will help us provide an even wider range of voices on many tech topics. The other new feature enables readers to get our daily posts by email — in case they somehow forget to visit us!
Oh, and just a small teaser to end this entry: I recently got a sneak preview of a few Conduit products being cooked up. Let me just say that they made my mouth water.
We’d love to hear what you think of our new and improved blog. Are there any features you think are missing? Do you have any suggestions for how we can make it an even better blog?
