Archive for the ‘General’ Category
by Jennifer Brown Banks on March 22nd, 2010
Last week was pretty sweet.
I had been contacted by a marketing firm as a result of a call for bloggers that I responded to. I had made the initial cut.
You better believe I was pretty geeked to hear from them within 48 hours of applying.
Though I dig blogging about many themes and things, this assignment was “music to my ears.”
The 4-1-1?
I was to pen a piece (500 words or more) on one of several recording artists for a jazz blog. Can you believe it?
So there I was, in my home office, kicked back, with a glass of sweet herbal tea and some chocolate, (too early for a glass of Chablis), reviewing some hot tracks from CDS by musician Boney James! Thinking to myself… it doesn’t get much better than this.
I grooved, whistled while I worked, did some online research, then wrapped it up and invoiced the firm for thirty bucks.
When I later mentioned this gig to a fellow writer, she said, “You get paid for blogging?”
Apparently she didn’t get the memo: Bloggers can earn pay for their say. And you can too. Read More
Categories: General
Tags: Blogging Tips, Jobs
by Darnell Clayton on January 21st, 2010
Yesterday Google (finally) launched pages for blogspot fans, enabling them to create a real about section without having to link to their Blogger profile (or an ancient post explaining who the author is).
This feature is currently available for Blogger in Draft (Google’s eternal beta for Blogger)–or at least it was until Google disabled it after experiencing various bugs.
(Blogger in Draft) Update (1/21 @ 8:54 PST): We’ve temporarily disabled creating & editing pages. You can still view the pages you’ve already created. We will re-enable ability to create and edit pages soon.
Despite the bugs (ranging from rendering issues to blank pages) this upcoming feature should help Blogger convince users to stay and blog upon their platform (instead of switching to WordPress.com and perhaps Squarespace as well).
Although Blogger is currently the world’s most popular blogging platform (WordPress comes in at a distant second) the service still has quite a ways to go in order to match against its smaller rivals (especially in the comment spam arena as CAPTCHA’s are dead).
Hopefully we will see Google continue to innovate this service, which has helped millions of users (this author included) embrace blogging as the norm instead of a hobby performed by geeks.
Categories: General
by Darnell Clayton on January 15th, 2010
After surviving Apple’s draconian app approval process last year, Squarespace was finally able to launch an official iPhone app for their users.
While the company is already making plans on unleashing the next update for the iPhone app (which will include comment moderation–just like their rival WordPress), the company is currently taking a “wait and see” approach when it comes to Android–despite the demand.
(Jeff from Squarespace) To those asking: We do not have plans for an Android app at this time — we’re waiting until the platform is a bit more polished before we jump in. Perhaps a bit later in 2010.
Jeff made these comments in December before Google launched Android 2.1 within the Nexus One.
Hopefully the Squarespace team reconsiders embracing Android sooner, as “Droid lovers” currently have no way to natively blog upon their various Google phones–not even via third party apps.
Categories: General
Tags: Android, iphone, Mobile Blogging, Squarespace
by Darnell Clayton on January 14th, 2010
I seriously hope I am wrong about this, but it looks as if Six Apart, which was one of the first major companies to launch an iPhone blog app (for Typepad nonetheless) may have abandoned their app.
Users have been complaining about errors logging into their Typepad blogs via iPhone for quite some time (which I confirmed after trying to log into my blog and receiving the error to the right).
While users can still access their Typepad blogs via BlogPress, CellSpin and Shozu, it’s sad to see Six Apart (seemingly) abandon their native iPhone app (although to their credit they still support the web interface over at i.typepad.com).
Hopefully Six Apart will reconsider continuing support for the native app (or committing serious resources towards it), as their absence leaves the field wide open for WordPress and Squarespace (not to mention a host of third party apps).
Update: Colleen brings the good news that the Typepad iPhone App is alive and well, with Twitter integration as well!
For those unable to login, try reinstalling the app (as that resolved my problem).
Categories: General
Tags: iphone, Six Apart, typepad
by Franky Branckaute on January 3rd, 2010
Here at BloggingPro we hope that everyone had a wonderful start to 2010 and are happy to announce the winners to our ‘2009 End of Year Giveaway’.
To determine the winners we used a simple PHP random query and selected the winners for every price from all the people who followed BloggingPro on Twitter and retweeted our entries over the last days of the year or who left a comment. Winners will be DM’ed via Twitter and are requested to submit their details ASAP so we can forward the details to our sponsors.
Once more BloggingPro thanks all our sponsors who made the giveaway possible and we are already working hard at organising new giveaways for 2010!
The 2009 BloggingPro End of Year Giveaway Winners!
Elegant Themes
Elegant Themes, maintained by designer Nick Roach, gave our readers 4 club memberships. The winners are:
Templatic
Templatic founder R.Bhavesh was interviewed and gave 3 licenses for the awesome ecommerce theme Store to our readers. The winners are:
Digging into WordPress
Our giveaway wouldn’t have been complete without the popular Digging into WordPress book and we had the pleasure to interview co-author Jeff Starr who gave away 3 copies for our readers:
The winners will all be contacted over the next hours via Twitter and stay tuned for more news, interviews, tutorials and giveaway in 2010! Continue following BloggingPro on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook, future giveaways might be pre-announced exclusively on one of these platforms!.
Categories: General
Tags: Giveaway
by Karlo Licudine on December 31st, 2009
We know that most of you don’t want to be bothered while counting down to midnight (At least, we don’t. Hehe), so we’ve decided to make the final part of our giveaway short and simple.
For today, we will be giving away four club memberships to Elegant Themes, a popular themes club for WordPress owned by Nick Roach. As a member, you’ll get unlimited access to their premium and high-quality elegant themes!
How To Enter The 2009 BloggingPro End of Year Giveaway?
To participate to today’s competition and win one of the four memberships, all you need to do is to follow BloggingPro on Twitter (we will check) and tweet about the BloggingPro giveaway (Click this link to have both links included!).
Today’s competition will be closed on December 31st, 2009 at 23:59PST. Winners will be randomly chosen and announced here on January 3rd 2010!
Simple, ain’t it? Now if you would excuse me, I’ve got to prepare myself mentally both for the booze and the fireworks.
Advanced happy new year!
Categories: General
Tags: Elegant Themes, Giveaway
by Franky Branckaute on December 9th, 2009
When ‘canonical plugins’ for WordPress were announced the post also mentioned that these plugins might have to move to a new structure, setup:
In order to have a system like this, each canonical plugin’s development community would probably need similar infrastructure to WordPress itself, including things like Trac, mailing lists, support forums, etc. These things will be worked out within the development community over the coming months…
If the community decides to open up the platform more this could have great advantages for these plugins but it would only restrict the damage done daily elsewhere. The inconvenience of being a popular open source platform with extensions and themes directory: popular plugins become orphans, themes aren’t updated with the newest features and could break a standard WordPress setup with new releases.
All themes and plugins hosted on WordPress.org are required to be GPL licensed so it would be simple for developers, designers to re-release ‘updated abandoned’ plugins and themes but users would not receive updates in the plugin and themes installer.
Enter GitHub. GitHub is a popular distributed platform used for many opensource software projects. Rails uses it, scriptaculous and Lussumo garden are other popular projects using GitHub. The SourceForge of the modern internet.
Git is a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software.
GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease.
Where GitHub excels is the possibility to follow projects and also to fork a project, all while keeping the project leader informed of contributions.
I am not saying that GitHub the future of the themes and plugin directory is, but GitHub does offer an easy platform to overview many different projects. If a plugin or theme becomes orphaned, chances that someone else has created a fork are big and ‘repository moderators’ could opt to replace the main, original plugin with an updated commit.
A GitHub similar platform would also offer an easy platform for theme designers and child-theme designers to keep ‘connected’. It literally becomes easy to follow a plugin’s or theme’s history (themeline?) and to download new commits.
Could WordPress.org benefit from a similar setup?
Categories: General, WordPress News
Tags: Canonical Plugins, GitHub, Ideas, WordPress.org
by Karlo Licudine on December 8th, 2009
2009 has been a very great year for TypePad. The developers have worked really hard in making the TypePad experience better. Some of the best features they’ve released so far are listed below:
Now that the year is almost at an end, the developers are once again asking the community: What new features do you want to see on TypePad for next year?
If you’re a TypePad user who has something in mind that could improve the platform, then go ahead and leave your comment on their blog by going here. Who knows, your idea might get picked and appear on the next update of TypePad!
Categories: General
Tags: typepad
by David Peralty on July 22nd, 2009
WordPress.tv is growing like mad lately, especially the “how to” section. They’ve got video explanations of all sorts of stuff from getting started with Google Analytics, to rearranging the post editor to suit your liking, to adding paypal buttons to your blog, and, of course, a pile of other stuff.
Just today they added a video about adding twitter updates to your sidebar, which is an insanely popular thing to do these days. Check it out below, and go to WordPress.tv for more.
Categories: General
Tags: google analytics, how-to, paypal, post editor, twitter, video, wordpress, wordpress.tv
by David Peralty on July 16th, 2009
The WordPress for iPhone devs need your help testing a fix for some xml rpc issues. Here’s what they have to say about it…
We’ve implemented a fix in trunk for the XML RPC issue some WordPress app users have experienced. I’m looking for volunteers who have had that problem (not being able to add a blog and getting an XML-RPC type error).
What I need to do is test the fix to be sure I’ve caught any edge cases. This means either A) temporary access to your blog with at least Author-level permission, or B) for you to run the simulator with the latest code.
If you have an iPhone and would like to help them out, you can get more info at the original post, or the related forum post on the WP for iPhone forum.
Categories: General
Tags: development, iphone, wordpress, WordPress for iPhone, xml rpc
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