Perhaps five years from now, the issue of typography would have been solved already– that is, web designers and blog template designers will be able to select any font of their liking and use it on the fly. (This is probably when the font-face property has received wide-spread support)
There’s probably a dozen fonts out there and there are three that I think should be worth considering:
Arial – A can’t miss font that has good readability and people are already quite used to this. This is the same font that Google uses, and majority of computers carry this font.
Georgia – This seems to be the font of choice when it comes to serif typefaces. This is because the alternative is Times New Roman, which looks dated and has very little character
Verdana – Very similar to Arial, but I think this has better character width. This works well with bigger line heights and a good match for templates that utilize larger screen resolutions.
Your blog’s font can help your readers scan and read the content better. Better take a little time to find out which ones look good and help your readers. :)
The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…
If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.
According to the developers the plugin is designed to;
Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.
Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).
Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.
Not a bad indirect benefit at all.
To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.
This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.
That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…
Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.
You can find out full details and download the plugin below…
Those who have switched microblogs from Twitter to Plurk have been disappointed at the lack of Firefox add-ons available. Need proof? Off the top of my head, without googling, I can name a few Twitter add-ons for our favorite browser: Twitterfox, Twitbin, TwitKit, Twitterbar and so many more. Plurk, on the other hand, has very little selections to speak of.
Personally, I’m not a fan of Plurk’s horizontal timeline scheme, and I try to use the mobile interface as often as I can. In fact, I was able to devise a way to use the mobile interface solely. I installed Mozilla Prism and made an application out of Plurk. But constantly updating it manually can be a pain. Read More
I’ve been a huge fan of GrooveShark for about a year now. I’ve never experienced being unsuccessful at finding a song or an artist everytime I hit its page. While I usually go to it through TinySong, I end up using GrooveShark Lite for my immediate online music needs.
Just today I’ve noticed something new. Before when I hit a song’s title, I get to add it to the GrooveShark lite playlist. But today after hovering the song title, I noticed a little icon fade in… saying “embed”. Hmmmm… that caught my attention. Ok so I pressed it… wow!
A page popped out to guide me through the “embedding process”. Starting from a basic widget appearance you are able to fix width, border, add more songs… AND THEN finally choose where to embed the widget at. There are around 50+ embedding possiblities from Friendster to Hi5, from TypePad to WordPress.com, Multiply, MySpace, Blogger, you name it. I’m thinking if you’re sharing a song on the web there is high chance GrooveShark can do the sharing for you.
Check it out for yourself. The only “drawback” I noticed is that I think it’s not WordPress widget sidebar loadable. You have to feed it your WordPress site address, a unique login and password and it will post the widget out for you… as a post! Umm… made me squint.
Try the basic embed option and choose “other sites” and you’d get an object and a java code to embed into your WordPress site or a regular site for that matter.
I’ve heard and read about people cramming to get their very own DropBox. I figured, “hey what’s that all about”, shrugging it off to a weekend check-up. Well it’s the weekend now and all I’ve done is head-off to the public beta site of DropBox to view their About Us video. See below:
I love it! I’m off to get my DropBox, pronto!
If you’re frequently sharing files, and like me you use services like YouSendIt or others… you’d find DropBox a breath of fresh air. Features include:
Honestly, this new feature reminded me a little bit of the Twitter environment. I say that because I first saw this type of feature at Twitter.com :) BUT NOW, it’s Blogger.com’s new Followers gadget. This gadget allows you to see who’s following/reading your blog AND has become a fan of it by adding it to their list of favorite blogs to visit. As you could see above, it uses their blogger.com avatar as part of the gadget display.
Take a peek at what you see as the blog owner in your blogger dashboard:
A neat summary of how many followers you have AND the ability to “pay-back” by following your followers blogs too. Now isn’t that useful? :)
At the dashboard you are given the ability to follow other blogs too, even if they’re not hosted at blogger.com. Just head on to your dashboard and click “add”, then type in the blog address to quickly add it to your favorites. If the blog you just followed is hosted at blogger.com your avatar will be included in that blog’s followers list.
Haven’t seen this added to WordPress 2.7 features yet. I hope the widget developers can also make a WordPress version soon?
Wordpress.com announced that they have extended their support hours from 9AM to 4PM PDT to 24-hours weekdays… to 24/7! That is one huge commitment that this team has put on and I think deserves a standing ovation. Kudos to you guys!
When you send a support message to wordpress.com you’re assured there’s a real human being replying. If you send a support question and you don’t have a blog hosted at wordpress.com, it will be ignored. This is solely for wordpress.com hosted blogs. They’ve said that they would respond to any wordpress service question, so fire away. Just please be sure that you’ve exhausted time into their FAQs and FORUMs before you do. There’s a high chance that you’re question has already been discussed in length by experts and users like you.
I really think that support will define the successful online tool. There are many online products available and some are hands-down so useful that people like me use them (even if support is not good). Wordpress.com is so spot-on in looking after the well-being of it’s users. I’m sure they’d get a ton of happy people blogging away. And because wordpress.com is ad-driven, the new support system will ultimately result in more blog pages to attach those ads to… good thinking guys! And congratulations.
When I log into my WordPress site I usually skip scrolling down the dashboard, quickly pressing either “write” or “manage”. Last night was different, as I was enjoying my hazelnut flavored java I scrolled down to see what was down below. I seldom do that, so I thought, hey… let’s see what’s down there.
Interesting.
One of the most popular plugin downloaded, Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, has been recently updated to version 1.2. I posted about automatic upgrade plugins before (here and here), but that was about the zirona automatic upgrade tool. I am still using Zirona on most of my blogs, but also thought that you may want to know what WordPress Automatic Upgrade offers.
Here are the fixes for version 1.2:
Fixed a major issue where plugins could not be activated, due to WP installation logging users out after upgrades.
Fixed a issue where users were not being able to download backup files when WordPress URL and Blog URL were different.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade will only run if your WordPress is out of date.
WPAU now uses Snoopy to download files rather than using regular PHP methods.
Added a WPAU Nag where users will see a message to start automatic upgrade if a new version is available.
Automatic Upgrade option will only be visible to Administrators.
Disabled Automated Mode.
Few other minor changes.
And something to look out for for version 1.3:
A better user interface including verbose output where users will see what’s being done in real time.
Ability to skip certain tasks or run tasks on demand, so users can run file backups, database backups etc selectively.
Ability for users to choose the language of WordPress they want to download from.
Complete Internationalization support.
Cleanup of code to make WPAU more faster.
I do appreciate what’s offered in version 1.2, but man, version 1.3 is something to look out for. I totally want to select what tasks are to be done by any WordPress upgrade plugin. It maybe just me, I feel helpless when I press the “upgrade” button and just watch what is being done. But I know there’s a flipside to wanting even a little control. Even so, I hope version 1.3 nails this feature spot on.
When I blog I literally have a lot of IE or FireFox tabs open. These tabs would normally be my info sources, a few research items, a dictionary tab, the search engine, my online bank access, paypal page… the works. You guessed I’m too multi-tasked a person to be limited to just one tab!
Fortunately, and I’m still on my blogging tools roll, we have a FireFox add-on to make your tabs world a little less awkward, specially if you’re too quick to press the ctrl-w button to close a tab you’re using. Instead of doing the standard step to hit your browsers history-today window… check this out.
Undo Closed Tabs Button 3.0.3 was recently updated June 20, 2008.
Click the image one time to undo the last closed tab. Three times to open the last three closed tabs and so on. Click the drop down arrow to see the list of last previously closed tabs and select which one you would like to undo.
If you find yourself blogging too often while in the office, hey, this works as a quick hide-the-blog-tab from the boss. Just don’t you dare rat on me when he finds out where you got the tip ayt? :) Kidding.
You might want to check out Tab Mix Plus if this is too basic for you.
Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager.
You may be interested to update or build-up your Firefox browsers with IE Tab 1.5.20080618 . It’s a valuable tool for those who apart from writing posts, well, tend to go “under the hood” as well. Well, we all would like to know how our blogs look in either Mozilla & IE. I’ve had my fair share of side-stepping from IE to Mozilla. Horrors if I forget to check! Ugghh… not a nice feeling to get caught blind-sided with a client call saying “Why is my blog so damn ugly today!”. :) Oh my!
Recently updated last June 2008. Tried to download and install… and wadayaknow, it took me less than 10 sec to get this baby in my FireFox (after a FireFox re-start).
Hmmm… let me re-start FireFox right now… hold on…. :)
(after 4 minutes)
Isn’t it too cute of Mozilla to save all my open tabs and give me the option upon Mozilla reboot to re-load all the tab URLs again. Thanks for that.
OK, after the reboot I was soooo looking for The way to invoke/switch any of my current open tabs from the Mozilla engine to the IE engine. Took me a little more time to figure out that to do so you must click on the small browser icon at the lower right area of the status bar. Yes, that Mozilla icon… click it and it will turn that tab to be viewed thru IE’s engine.
Neat eh?
Yeah… you figured it right, right-brained me wouldn’t just dare read the FAQs first!
9 Comments
I’ve been a huge fan of 
When I blog I literally have a lot of IE or FireFox tabs open. These tabs would normally be my info sources, a few research items, a dictionary tab, the search engine, my online bank access, paypal page… the works. You guessed I’m too multi-tasked a person to be limited to just one tab!
