Archive for the ‘Blogging Tools’ Category
by David Peralty on June 12th, 2009
ScribeFire is a great Firefox extension that adds a pile of blogging related features directly into Firefox.
It allows you to create (and edit) posts, set (and create) categories and tags, and generally does most of what you’d want to do when creating a new blog post directly from within Firefox at the click of a button.
Here’s a list of the blogging software and services it supports…
* Blogger
* Drupal
* Jeeran.com
* Livejournal
* MSN/Live Spaces
* Performancing.com
* TypePad
* Wordpress
* Wordpress.com
The newest update fixes a small handful of bugs and adds a few features, such as support for custom post slugs for WordPress and the ability to export/import blog settings to and from other installations of ScribeFire, making it easy to setup multiple blogs on more than one computer.
One thing it’s still missing that I would really love to see in a future update is the ability to set the “parent” for a page in WordPress. It allows you to create pages, but if you want to set it’s parent you still have to go into the WordPress admin panel.
Still, it’s a great tool with enough features that most people probably would hardly ever need to use the built-in post editor for their blog again.
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: blogging, blogging tool, firefox extension, scribefire, software
by jim on August 28th, 2008
Social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia.com is opening its doors to the open-source world. They have announced at Gnomedex 2008 that they would soon distribute their code publicly, akin to how WordPress.com has done for WordPress.org, the latter being a website that the public can download freely the full WordPress code.
This is a much anticipated move for the Ma.gnolia.com team as developments in technology are striding faster than the Ma.gnolia core tech team can handle. With their move to open-source, we will soon see a much improved service offering. Ma.gnolia’s Larry Hallf at Gnomedex 2008 says the following:
Some of the things to look forward to in this next version include:
- A new stream view that shows you the freshest bookmarks of people you’re friends with on one single page.
- Support for both OAuth and OpenID, with the latter making it easier for people to sign into hosted builds of Magnolia.
- Sidebar customization
- Theming
The open-source version won’t be available to developers until sometime in September, with a beta version (read: consumer friendly) on track for December and into the first part of 2009. In the meantime, if you’re a developer looking to get your mitts on the code it will be made available here.
Categories: Blogging Tools, Interesting
by J. Angelo Racoma on August 4th, 2008
Daniweb.com has published a short piece on what Google’s Website Optimizer can do for your website or blog.
Tom Leung, product manager for Google Website Optimizer, says it’s not always easy to know what drives traffic without a tool like Website Optimizer to help. “In the old days, you would just make [your] changes and hope for the best, or you might look at your traffic the next week and see if there were any changes in your web analytics dashboard.” The problem with that approach, Leung explains, is that you don’t really know why you saw a traffic change. Was it due to your design change or maybe you had a really popular blog post that week?
Leung says where Website optimizer fits in is that it lets you make those improvements with some scientific certainty. “Now I have a tool to evaluate which changes are good, which are neutral and even more importantly, which are bad,” he says. Website Optimizer includes two experiment types: A/B, which switches between two page designs and multivariate where you can test multiple elements such as different headlines and pictures to see which one works best.
Part of Gogole Analytics, the Website Optimizer lets you test different versions of your site, to see which best serves your purposes in terms of user interface, traffic, conversions and whatnot. So instead of blindly making guesses on which layout is best for conversions, for instance, or perhaps the length of time each visitor spends on your site, you can back these up with figures.
Google has recently partnered with content management vendors, to supposedly implement Website Optimizer as built-in features. I wonder if this can be done with WordPress, too, to negate the need to paste code onto pages being tested. Plugin, anyone?
Categories: Blogging Tools
by jim on July 28th, 2008
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.
A version for Firefox 3 is found here:http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7031
Categories: Blogger Tools, Blogging Tools
by J. Angelo Racoma on July 27th, 2008
If you’re on the lookout for a place to collaborate on your next social media application, then zembly might be the solution. Dubbed “a grand experiment in social programming” zembly lets users collaborate on building software for various social media applications, web apps and even mobile phones like Facebook, meebo, Google docs and the iPhone.
zembly is the place to create social applications, together.
With zembly, you easily create and host social applications of all shapes and sizes, targeting the most popular social platforms on the web. Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, meebo apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.
Our team brings deep experience in building Internet-scale web applications, growing large open-source communities, and pioneering innovative software development tools and techniques.
zembly is currently in private beta, but you can ask for an invite by emailing support@zembly.com.
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: apps, collaboration, programming, web apps, zembly
by jim on July 24th, 2008
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!
Hee, hee.
Categories: Blogger Tools, Blogging Tools
by J. Angelo Racoma on July 23rd, 2008
WordPress has recently released an open source app for managing WordPress-powered blogs via the iPhone. Dubbed WordPress for iPhone, the application can manage both WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WP blogs.
Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.
I don’t have an iPhone, so I cannot check it out for myself, though. Has anyone tried this new app? I use a Nokia E51 running Symbian Series 60 version 3. While there are various standalone applications that I can use to manage my WordPress-powered blogs, I usually prefer to just open the admin panel using the built-in browser. Somehow I feel it’s faster that way. I wonder which gives the better user experience in managing blogs–the WP app, or the iPhone’s built in Safari browser.
Categories: Blogging Tools, WordPress Tools
Tags: applications, iphone, mobile, software, wordpress, wp
by J. Angelo Racoma on July 17th, 2008
LogiXML has recently launched Widgenie, a web app that lets users upload data from spreadsheets, CSV files, or Google Docs (among other sources), play around with them on a GUI and then output the results thru by embedding on blogs and social media apps.
Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can publish data in the places you already know and love, places like iGoogle, Facebook, WordPress, and even your own website. We combine all the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget.
While most bloggers won’t probably be needing to present any data visually, I think this would be useful for presenting survey results, traffic stats, trends, and the like. Business or corporate bloggers would perhaps find Widgenie a useful tool in sharing data with colleagues and/or readers in a visually appealing presentation.
Categories: Blogging Tools
Tags: software, tools, widgets
by jeff on July 2nd, 2008
I just received word that version 2.2.8 of the popular FireFox extension ScribeFire has been released. The new version sports a couple of new fixes with the inclusion of a preference for limiting image width in posts. Here are the bug fixes at a glance:
Changes since version 2.2.7 include:
- A fix for the “body of post not published” bug
- A fix for delicious auto-login
- A fix for the conflict with the Universal Edit Button extension
- Display fixes for the Ping Settings section
- Addition of a preference for limiting image width in posts
Head on over to official Mozilla add ons page for this extension to update. If you already have this extension installed, opening a new FireFox session will generally notify you of the update.
Categories: Blogging Tools
by jeff on June 29th, 2008
Forums have been around since the Internet was created. Although they weren’t called forums back then (think BBS) they have always been the place of conversation. Today, forums are as prevalent as ever. If you can think of a topic, chances are, there is a forum dedicated to it with a big following. All sorts of discussions can take place on a forum, including discussions about you or your blog. Twing.com which is a new service still in beta hopes to aide in the discovery of community surrounding your content.
Twing’s aim is to provide access to the wealth of information flowing through online communities, and to make it easier and faster for users to find.
Forums are usually a good place to find deep conversations related to specific subjects. If your blog covers one of these subjects, using Twing to find out which forums are talking about you would be an excellent way to figure out which communities you could join to actively partake in those discussions.
There are three ways in which to search Twing. Either by posts, topics or forums. When I typed in BloggingPro into the search box for posts, it was great to see that some of the articles written on this domain were being discussed within a number of forums. The posts feature of the Twing search engine searches for the keywords within posts on a forum. Simple enough right? When I searched Topics for bloggingpro, Twing responded by telling me there were no results found. Obviously, no one had placed bloggingpro into the actual title of a forum post. The last way of searching (Forum) also netted zero results. However, when I placed a space inbetween blogging and pro, I saw a large number of results for the keywords (pro blogger) which is completely different from blogging pro.
I understand why Twing is still labeled a beta. Their website leaves a lot to be desired with missing sections on the Community Buzz page. The Twing How-To does little to help you use the service as the page is blank. The last post on the Twing.Blog was on June 9th so the company looks like it’s still alive.
The more forums that allow Twing to crawl their content, the more useful Twing will be. I think the idea behind Twing is a good one considering it deals specifically with Forums and nothing else. Of course, the same content Twing crawls is the same content Google crawls which begs the question, “Why would I use Twing over Google”? Because Google gives you everything related to the search query while Twing is focused on highlighting communities that are engaged in your content.
Give Twing a try and let me know if it’s picked up any good discussions related to your blog.
Categories: Blogging Tools
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