I’ve heard a few leaks (here and here) about WordPress setting to release it’s very own native application for the iPhone. Glorious that they’re tweaking it to work with WordPress.com and the standard installations. And quite frankly, with the current trend of iPhone prices vis a vis its features, I think the addition of a “WordPress-able” feature will set the icing on that great cake. I really like the tag “WordPress and the iPhone… your blog everywhere”.
It’s bringing your blogging craves anywhere… anytime! Got the urge to write about that sunset you’re viewing now, well just pop out your iPhone and write about it. Publish it in seconds alongside that sunset picture too (!) no problemo.
I know, I know… pro-bloggers who blog like crazy may find the interface a little (ok, MUCH!) on the downside. I’d imagine myself typing a 200-word blog post in say about 15-20 minutes VS. the 5-minute usual post publishing I do. BUT STILL, you’d agree that the iPhone-WordPress merge does have it’s own sweet advantages. I chuckle when I imagine popping out my notebook to blog about the sunset AND THEN running off to find a hotspot to publish it. Hee hee.
Oh, it’s not available yet, no release dates have been said, all I saw was the video below… check it out!
Just a few steps to create that blog post eh?
Type in the blog details (the title)
Type the actual post
Add pictures from your iPhone or media library
Type in blog settings like (categories, published date, password protection etc.)
We are now proud to announce that we have struck a new deal with Iceeocket, and our search is now powered by Icerocket’s technology. We’ve found out that while Google is the biggest (and arguably the best) search engine out there, when it comes to blogs, it’s still best to use specialized search solutions. And you also get that warm, fuzzy feeling ™ knowing you’re partnering with fellow blogging enthusiasts.
While Google’s Custom Search functionality was, well, customizable, we found it limited in terms of focusing the searches on blogs. And so we found an opportunity to partner with Icerocket again, and here we are with them powering BSE’s search.
Now you might be wondering why search using Blog Search Engine instead of going directly to Icerocket or Google Blog Search or other blog search tools. Blog Search Engine’s value-added is its daily posting of a featured blog review, which readers can rate and vote on. So aside from being a blog search tool, BSE also has a blog rating and ranking functionality. If blog reviews are your thing, then you can also submit your blog.
DashBlog 1.5 is a FireFox plug-in I’ve been waiting for! You see, as a blogger, it takes a long loop of processes for me to get a photo in a blog post. I’d shift-printscreen, open up microsoft’s photo editor, crop that picture, save it in a folder, fire up the wordpress blog… hit a couple more buttons and (puff puff) click the OK button to post the photo right there. DashBlog 1.5 takes all those work from me. Thanks a lot! I’m downloading it now.
DashBlog has been out for quite some time already (almost a month). Funny I haven’t heard the news resonate quickly though.
Do you like video? Do you like to blog, tumblr or twitter? Then dashblog is the plugin for you. It’s the fastest and easiest way for you post video, text, quotes, images and songs to your blog, tumblr and twitter (all at the same time).
Plus there’s more – with DashBlog you can do a screen capture and then draw, comment, crop and post all with one simple click.
Dashblog currently works with:
WordPress
Blogger/Blogspot
Tumblr
Twitter
Know more about DashBlog 1.5 right here. You can download DashBlog for FREE right here.
Just dug up an informative article by the guys/gals of www.mashable.com. They’ve compiled 300+ of their most useful WordPress plugins. Some of them are in the same usage league, so it is up to us to check it out ourselves and see which tool among them works best for your need. Check it out right here. They also have related articles here and here. (and all the WordPress newbies, like me, say hooray!) :) I really appreciate people who takes time to list great stuff, kudos Mashable, you guys rock! It’s interesting that they have categorized it in a helpful way too… check it out, they have grouped it as follows:
Plugins for the blogger
Plugins for your readers
Plugins to fight spam
Plugins to encourage commenting
Plugins to improve appearance
Plugins to enable rich comments
Plugins to enable avatars
Plugins to show off comments
Plugins to allow better conversation
Plugins to moderate comments effectively
and many more….
Got you interested, didn’t I?
For newbies, like me, it is an overwhealming list. But I still do appreciate it nonetheless.
Many among us manage, or write on, several blogs. Sometimes it isn’t easy to monitor your blogs or your entries. There are many awesome statistic plugins such as Google Analytics or the Splashpress owned PMetrics. Lately I have discovered a new tool to monitor my blogs or the blogs I write on: aideRSS. Much has been written about aideRSS already, mainly about it’s usage as a feed filter, but I have discovered that the free tool can be used for another purpose as well.
aideRSS uses the PostRankTM algorithm to rank entries. What is PostRankTM?
I look at the number of comments, number of bookmarks the visitors made, and the number of trackbacks. I collect this information from the internet and then normalize each post against the average for the blog in question – if you always get 15 comments, then you getting 17 comments doesn‚’t affect the ranking as much as, say getting 15 comments when you usually get 2.
Some months ago we discussed the Blog Metrics plugin for WordPress. This little aid will show you how often posts by every author are viewed, but unless you’re the newest Nick Denton around the block, you might want to assess your authors on more than just pageviews: number of comments, votes on social bookmarking sites and backlinks in Google. This exactly is where aideRSS comes into the game. Have a look at the following screenshot and you’ll immediately understand what I mean [Click for enlarged view].
For this screenshot I built a stream of some of Splashpress’s major blogs: The Blog Herald, Performancing, Wisdump, 901am and your own BloggingPro. As can be seen, aideRSS displays all the information concerning number of comments, backlinks and conversations in twitter/bookmarks in del.icio.us. But things get even better when you want to analyze a single feed [Click to view enlarged display].
In this screenshot I have restricted the aideRSS analysis to the last 7 entries here at BloggingPro. It now is easy to asses both the importance and popularity of every single entry. Which one has the most comments, which ones has been bookmarked most, etc.
Remarks: As can be seen in both screenshots, there still seem to be some errors with the aideRSS algorithm:
After some days the number of comments isn’t updated anymore, although the number of social bookmarks and Google backlinks are;
When using a 3rd party Twitter client, aideRSS might not recognize the link (I twat twice about my entries, using Twhirl and Snurl);
Subsequently the PostRankTM isn’t updated correctly.
Still, aideRSS has become part of my daily workflow, more even than pageview statistic programs have.
Franky writes in his free time at iFranky and can be followed on twitter.
If you’re running your blog from a hosted platform, such as wordpress.com, Typepad or Blogger, you probably don’t have to worry about database (and/or PHP) servers choking and bandwidth running out. For folks who run blogs on their own hosting accounts or servers, this is a possibility. Yet then again, for the average blogger bandwidth and server resources shouldn’t be an issue. Even the most inexpensive hosting account on most providers these days can give enough for most folks (some hosting providers I can point to are our very own Colorteck and one of our sponsors, Cirtex).
This only becomes a big concern when you become really popular or when you get rare DIGG or Slashdot-effect traffic spikes. Or perhaps your server is a bit low on resources, and is serving up your site slowly. To address these, you can use caching plugins. We have been using several caching plugins on some of our bigger blogs like the Blog Herald and Forever Geek. Not only are traffic levels there consistently high, sometimes we also get frontpaged on DIGG, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and other social bookmarkers.
WP-Cache is one good plugin. Another one is WP-Super Cache, which is actually built upon WP-Cache.
We’ve recently switched to the latter, and so far we’re satisfied.
How caching plugins work
Basically, caching works by generating static files on your server, such that database requests are no longer required. This lightens the load on your database server, and makes loading faster, too.
According to the WP-Cache profile:
It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.
And WP-Super Cache improves on this:
[WP-Cache 2 still uses] the PHP engine to serve the cached files.
WP Super Cache gets around that. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP. How fast can your site serve graphic files? That’s (almost) as fast it will be able to serve these cached files. If your site is struggling to cope with the daily number of visitors, or if your site appears on Digg.com, Slashdot or any other popular site then this plugin is for you.
Pros and Cons
Great! So caching plugins help make my site load faster AND it takes the heavy load off the server by minimizing PHP execution and database queries. However, one big disadvantage of caching is that essentially your site will be static, and any dynamic elements might not work.
Sure, everytime you publish a new post, the cache is refreshed. And everytime someone posts a comment, the cache for that particular post is refreshed. At least it’s supposed to be that way. But how about those instances when you need rotating content or images. For instance, some themes use rotating headers. And sometimes, like with several blogs in the Splashpress Network, we use rotating ads (links or images that share the same spot, supposedly alternating). Another issue is when you pull feeds from external sites, like we do. See those three boxes at the rightmost sidebar? Those are feeds pulled from some of our blogging resources.
I’m not sure if caching plugins support this, but I’m assuming they don’t, since the premise with caching is that static files are served until (1) they expire; (2) they are refreshed with new posts or comments or (3) they are manually reset.
For most folks, this is not an issue. And perhaps we can resort to measures that can help resolve these. But what I’m looking for is a plugin wherein you can define which areas of your blog to cache and which not to. Hopefully that won’t be too complicated.
Download Squad has put up a post that brings you through creating a more professional Blogspot blog, step by step. I am not a big fan of the service, but I do think that if you are a Blogger blogger, you should read this guide and take everything to heart.
It starts with simple things like removing the banner at the top of your blog, to more complex layout and feature changes that you can make to create an enjoyable reading experience for your readers.
But while Google offers a handful of widgets for customizing your blog, if you really want to make your web site your own, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty editing your blog template and adding some HTML and JavaScript code. Fortunately, you don’t have to know much about HTML or CSS to implement the tweaks in this guide. As long as you’re handy with the copy and paste keys, you should be all set.
I implore you, please read this guide if you are on Blogspot.
iBegin has announced its latest web app releases: iBox v2 and iBegin Share. iBox is the second iteration of a popular open-source script that lets web publishers display image (or HTML) overlays using lightweight JavaScript code.
iBox is a lightweight script that lets you overlay images and documents in a small dialog without a page reload. It’s built to be easy to install and use, while offering great flexibility.
iBegin Share, meanwhile, is seen as an innovative way by which a publisher can help readers save or share content on any site. Users have the option to share it via some of the more popular social bookmarking (or networking) sites, or save it to his own computer in different formats. One can even print the content directly through the iBegin Share interface. WordPress users would be happy to learn that iBegin provides a ready-made WordPress plugin as well, for convenience.
[W]hile we originally started with email to spread and share, we have come a long way. Social bookmarking websites to keep things organized. Social news websites, where everyone collaborates to report on the news. Social networks to keep up to date with everyone else. Offline programs to keep our links and contacts organized. Printing out documents to pass to others.
So we went ahead and built a simple to use share tool. It can easily be expanded to include SMS, phone calls, IM, and so forth. We’ve done it ourselves. Since they are all pay services, and since we don’t want to pick one service over another, we opted not to include those. The code is easy to work with to add those.
Again, both are open-source, which means users are free to build on the software, or add services to it, as they see fit.
Om Malik has highlighed a new content publishing service called Weebly. Their site looks simple enough, but with $650,000 in Angel investments, and a person from the YCombinator staff, could they compete against the big hosted blog platforms like WordPress.com and Typepad?
Well Om has put up his opinion on that, and I agree with him:
The AJAX-based interface allows you to add (or subtract) different types of elements to the blog — text, pictures, videos, Google Maps, AdSense (currently in development, not live) — thanks to a widgetized architecture. You can get going in less than an hour, though it won’t allow you to set-up a personal domain just as yet. (That is coming soon.)
While the service is impressive, Weebly faces some considerable if not insurmountable challenges. Scaling the hosted blogging business is quite a challenge, as some of the more established players have learned. The company still has to figure out a viable business model. Rusenko thinks it can work on white-label versions for internet service providers, though that is easier said than done.
I have to admit though, having played with it for only a few seconds, it does have some interesting ideas powering it, but it is no WordPress. We will see how they use their money and time. WordPress.com came from no where to have nearly a million users, so it’s not impossible that Weebly could come in and be the next big thing. I will definitely be watching.
Lorelle, as usual, puts together an all encompassing post on the WordPress plugins you can use to monetize your blog.
Covering everything from adding Adsense ads to adding ads to RSS feeds there is a wealth of information in this one post.
There are a lot of ways you can add ads to your WordPress blog. As part of my month long series on WordPress Plugins, I thought I’d take a glimpse into WordPress Plugins that help you monetize your WordPress blog.
WordPress Plugins that add ads to your blogs may assign advertising blocks to specific areas, or allow you to customize where they appear. Others will automatically inject them between blog posts or within the post content itself.
I haven’t tried most of these plugins myself, but I am thinking of giving a few of them a go in order to better monetize a few of my own blogs. Big thanks for Lorelle for organizing such a post.
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Many among us manage, or write on, several blogs. Sometimes it isn’t easy to monitor your blogs or your entries. There are many awesome statistic plugins such as Google Analytics or the Splashpress owned 
