Archive for April, 2008

FireFox Add-On: ScribeFire

Published
by
Tara
on April 30, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 2 Comments

A couple of days ago, I downloaded the ScribeFire add-on for FireFox. It’s a blog-from-your-browser tool that allows you full control over your posting to any number of blogging platforms. I’ve only really tested it with Wordpress, but it’s been working like a charm - I have no doubt it plays well with other applications. Bonus: it’s compatible with FF3 beta!

There are two parts to the add-on:

An in-browser (as an adjustable frame) editor with its own sidebar and tab bar:

…and a toolbar for the browser that only displays on your blog page(s).

From ScribeFire, you can:

  • Write posts AND pages on multiple blogs (rich text/CSS, with images, videos, etc.)

  • Edit existing posts and pages - even ones you didn’t create using this tool

  • Tag, categorize, re-date content

  • Share the posts and pages (in various sites/social networks)

  • Etc.

ScribeFire auto-saves everything you type, so you can close and open the window at will without worrying about losing info - great if you blog on the fly, on breaks at work, etc.

If you’re lazy like me (I hate logging into Wordpress), or want to post without using the blogging software’s interface, this might be the tool for you. Those of you who give it a whirl, let me know how you like it!

Wordpress 2.5 Fix

Published
by
Smitty
on April 27, 2008
in Blogging Platforms
. 0 Comments

I completed my first install of Wordpress 2.5 this past week and much to my amazement, I had a small problem.  Everything went fine, untill I tried to upload a file using the new AJAX uploader. I looked at all the permissions and after a quick Google Search, I found that I needed to add the following line to my .htaccess in my root folder of my Wordpress install.

This is what I added.

<ifmodule mod_security.c>
<files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</files>
</ifmodule>

Cross Posting and Self Promotion

Published
by
Kacey
on April 25, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Getting Started
. 3 Comments

Having only recently started up my WordPress blog, one of my first concerns (beyond the normal woes of “What am I going to write about?” and “Why am I even keeping a blog?”) was how to make sure all the people in my other social networking circles were kept up to date with my newest blog. Having been on LiveJournal for the last seven years, I didn’t want to abandon all the contacts I had made there, but I didn’t want to go through all the work of duplicating every post from my WordPress blog over to LiveJournal. Similarly, I’ve been on Twitter since shortly after its inception, and wanted to make sure that my new blog posts were broadcast to my Twitter audience as well.

—

LiveJournal, being my larger audience, was my first priority. After some Googling and searching on the WordPress Plugin Directory, I finally came across the plainly named LiveJournal Crossposter. As a rule, I am wary of any plugin or application that hasn’t been updated in over a year. Status such as that rarely indicates that the plugin is “perfect just the way it is” and more often means its “abandoned, because I just don’t care to work on it anymore.” Never the less, it was the only option I could find short of setting up a bulky RSS feed that I would then have to force my LiveJournal friends to subscribe to, so I downloaded it and started setting it up. LiveJournal Crossposter appears under the Settings menu and has a nice feature set with a user friendly interface. Connecting it to your LiveJournal account is as easy as simply putting in your username and password. No confusing codes or authentication links. Additionally, you can set the plugin to post to a community if that is your preference. You can customize a marquee of sorts (as a header or footer) that will refer your LiveJournal readers back to your WordPress blog. There are a series of custom options that the plugin will configure for you, or alternately, you can create your own full custom marquee using a series of context tags and so forth.

Other options you can set are default privacy settings; how comments are handled (readers can either comment on the LiveJournal cross post or be forced back to your WordPress); tag transferral, how extended text is handled (either with an LJ cut, a link back to WordPress, or simply ignoring it and posting the whole entry); and filtering by WordPress Categories. All of these settings are simply to configure the default options and can be changed on the Create New Post dialogue within the WordPress dashboard.

The plugin is extraordinarily efficient and throws the new blog entry up to LiveJournal almost as fast as your WordPress updates. Even when you edit a post after publishing it, the LiveJournal mirror is immediately resubmitted. It is in the editing of entries, however, that I found the only issue. When you edit an entry, it physically removes the post from LiveJournal and uploads a new version. This will lose any comments you may have already received at the LiveJournal end. This can be avoided, however, by simply forcing your LiveJournal friends to post all their comments on your actual WordPress blog. Easy peasy.

—

A reliable Twitter publisher was actually more difficult to find. Not because it was hard to find a plugin, but because there were so many it was hard to find a good one. I ran through two other Twitter plugins that either did nothing, or made a rampant mess of my twitters, before discovering the final, successful plugin. While some of the earlier options had more configuration settings and lots of variables, they weren’t worth the effort and usually failed to work anyway. I actually gave up on it for a couple of weeks and just used TwitterFeed, portaling an RSS feed from my blog to Twitter. It worked, but it was slow. It scrapes every 30 minutes and when it pushes your post, can often reinterpret the title or cut off text. I still use it for LiveJournal and Flickr, but if I could get away from it completely, I would. Which, in the end, is why I was so excited to finally come across Twitpress. Twitpress loads under the Manage tab and is about as simple a plugin as you’ll ever see. You simply put in your Twitter username and password to initiate the service. You can also customize the message format with a few defined variables listed on the page for you. Really, it doesn’t have to do much; but what it does do, it does well. There are no filters, limited options, and basic configuration. Its a straightforward service and it works perfectly, and quickly!

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The final plugin that I wanted to briefly mention, is one that’s actually in use here on BloggingAmigos, but isn’t featured in any of the previous entries. When I was reading the latest greatest from Chalupa, I noticed the ShareThis link and icon at the bottom of the post and was curious. I’ve seen a lot of different mechanics for Digging, Stumbling, or Del.Icious.ing content on the internet, but I hadn’t had the pleasure of the ShareThis experience. Feel free to scroll to the bottom of this entry and click on it to see what I’m talking about. What I like about ShareThis is that its compact, because I’ll admit, I love collapsible spaces in web pages. It takes up very little room on a page, and yet expands out to be very functional. From one plugin, users can share your content with several other social bookmarking sites; and with minimal effort.The system is very customizable as well. Starting at the ShareThis home page, you first create an account which will inevitably provide some nice tracking stats for your click-throughs. Once your account is created, you simply build your button in the ShareThis for Publishers section. The WordPress section has the download link for the plugin and the button configuration options, which allow you to choose what all social linking is included on your pop-out window. You also have limited ability to change the menu colors to better match your WordPress layout.

All of this customization generates a code that is then reciprocally inserted into the plugin management page, which is loaded under the Settings menu on your WordPress dashboard. Also, default adding options are managed in the settings page as well.

Once everything is set up and running, you will want to go back to the ShareThis site and log in to your My Account page and register your domain. It takes about 24 hours for your domain to be validated, but once it is, you can visit a reports page that shows how the ShareThis button has been used on your blog. Some nice, additional, usage tracking for your blog.

—

I hope you find some of these plugins useful and use them to try and drive a little extra traffic to your blog. So enjoy, and be sure to let me know how they work out for you!

Podcast RSS Buddy

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 21, 2008
in Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

In my last post I talked about podcasting and I figured I’d continue. RSS feeds are something that are important to me. If you’re creating content for the internet, having an RSS feed that has accurate, up-to-date information, and is something you’re comfortable with is very important. You might remember the main reason I didn’t like podPress is because of what it did to my RSS feed.

Since I have a Joomla installation for my podcast website, I needed something to create an RSS feed for iTunes. A co-worker of mine suggested Podcast RSS Buddy. This is a cheap, somewhat easy to use program that includes five free uses, then it costs about $20 to purchase a license. This program is made for iTunes so it has the proper fields all ready for you to fill in. Having this feature is one step up from just using the auto-generated feed from your blog.

I used this tool for almost 15 months until I decided it was time to move on to something more complicated. If you’re not very tech savvy, this is a program I think would work well for you. I like to tweak things and sometimes start all over and rebuild something I’ve created. This is where I ran into some problems.

When I formatted my computer and re-installed the software, everything worked fine until I tried to import my feed. When I imported the feed, that Podcast RSS Buddy made, it couldn’t find several of my items, put several items out of order, and some of the data wasn’t correct. There also appears to be no way to re-order items within the feed. Another problem I ran into was that changing or updating the podcast information would sometimes make some of my episodes disappear. After I fixed the missing episodes, my updated podcast information would be gone. To be fair, the program is still a work in progress so there are some bugs to still be worked out.

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Built-in fields for iTunes
  • Cheap (with 5 free uses)

Cons:

  • Data doesn’t transfer well between machines
  • Import function does not always work
  • Some bugs still present in software

If you’re wanting to just try something, I would suggest giving this program a whirl. You get five free uses. If you’re planning to be creating a podcast feed long-term, I would suggest maybe looking for another program to fit your needs.

Wordpress 2.5 brings some fresh air

Published
by
Nathan
on April 18, 2008
in Blogging Platforms
. 3 Comments

If you spend any amount of time around software developers, you will invariably hear the phrases “software bloat” and “feature creep” bandied about. They are problems that lots of software projects have to combat. Over time, in an effort to make their program more appealing, developers will add more and more features to their project until it becomes almost unusable. The original scope and goal of the program is lost amid the desire to add features to attract more users. The problem is that people stop using the software eventually, because it gets too difficult to keep doing the tasks they’re accustomed to.

Wordpress is a blog package that some might argue had succumbed to “feature creep.” There were just so many cool things that could be done, so why not do them? Automatic RSS, widgets, pings, trackbacks, categories… there was quite a list of features. The problem was that each new gizmo or doohickey that was added to Wordpress was treated with the same relative importance. Looking at the software’s administration panel was rather intimidating, because there was just so much stuff.

Wordpress 2.5 is a major overhaul of the package; so much so that version 2.4 was skipped. Web standardista Jeffrey Zeldman was brought in to help work under the hood. The result is an appealing bit of software, one that makes me glad to use Wordpress again. The first thing you might notice upon upgrading to 2.5 is the new, default template for the blog administration area. It feels much “lighter,” and reflects some of the more appealing (in my opinion) trends in web app design these days.

The dashboard has been streamlined. Upon logging in, you’re instantly presented with a choice between one of the two things you probably logged in to do: write a new post, or write a new page. Some general blog stats are also presented, such as the number of posts, comments, categories, and tags. Below that, there are overviews of recent comments and incoming links. The dashboard is actually a useful page now, as opposed to something you instantly navigated away from.

Gone are the somewhat ambiguous tabs that lined the top of the old design. In their places are Write, Manage, Design, and Comments — which represent the major tasks you would need to do in writing a blog. A small text bubble icon will hover over the Comments tab if comments are waiting in moderation. If you’ve ever used blog software before (or even if you haven’t), you won’t feel any confusion about how to do things in Wordpress.

After working with your blog for a while, you might get the impression that all the extra features that Wordpress is known for have disappeared. Don’t worry, they’re still there… just put in less prominent places. For instance, you can still modify the author, timestamp, and privacy settings of a post, but you’ll have to scroll down the page for those options. You’ll never need them the majority of the time, so why put them on equal footing with other important bits (like writing the actual post)? All the “Wordpress News” articles are still on the dashboard, but below the more important things.

If you’re a blogger running Wordpress, this version is a no-brainer upgrade. The process is dead simple as well: simply copy the new WP files into your web directory, click the “Upgrade Database” link that appears, and you’re back in business. Wordpress 2.5 streamlines the creative process so much, you’ll never want to go back.

Spring Cleaning

Published
by
Smitty
on April 15, 2008
in Content and Editing and Templates, Themes, and Design
. 2 Comments

Spring is here, it might not be exactly warm right now here in Michigan but, nonetheless it is spring. With that said, this is a good time to spring clean your blog.

I would suggest the following…

Make sure you are up to date on your…

  • Wordpress Version
  • Plugin Versions
  • Theme Version

Over time software and themes will be updated to fix vulnerabilities.

You could also…

  • Clean up your categories and tags.
  • Revise your static pages to be current.
  • You might also think about altering or changing your theme to keep it fresh.
  • Filter through your comment spam and possible start using a plugin like Askimet.
  • Start submitting your entries to sites like Digg and Delicious to help in marketing.
  • Lastly, think about your readers. Email several and thank them for reading your blog.

PodPress review

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 14, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 3 Comments

For those of you out there podcasting, there sure are a lot of available tools. One easy and free way to get this done is with a blog. Links to audio files can be placed inside of your posts and the automatic RSS creation for the blog itself can serve as your podcast feed. This is a really simple way to do it. There are also some plugins and other tools you can use to do this - one of them being podPress.

I have one real podcast, Lebowski Podcast, and one sorta-podcast, Chalupa’s Movies. The first is being hosted on a CMS and the other is just my movie review blog with a few audio reviews popped in there. I installed podPress a few months ago to see how I liked it and this is what I found.

Pros

  • Inserts a player into your blog entry
  • Stats for the feed, streaming, and downloads
  • Settings for iTunes and other podcast directories
  • Customizable feed options
  • Customizable player options

Cons

  • Takes over your RSS feed completely
  • Makes changes to your feed that you can’t specify or change
  • Only one author on all posts (My movie blog has several contributors and they aren’t being credited in the feed now)
  • Annoying default image on your feed unless you have something to change it to
  • Inserts backslashes in front of all special characters that actually show up on the web and looks tacky

Even though there are some nice features to podPress, I don’t think it’s working out for me and my movie blog. I have plans of uninstalling it soon. Even though the player and statistics are nice, the changes being made to my RSS feed are just unacceptable. If any of you know of a good plugin for podcasting, let us know and we’ll try to check it out.

We’re legit!

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 8, 2008
in BloggingAmigos
. 0 Comments

I’m proud to announce we’re becoming legitimate.  BloggingAmigos has been getting hit with porn-spam-comments the past couple weeks..  That’s right folks.  Apparently enough people read this that it’s worth someone’s while to try and trick you guys into going to a porn site.

Emails

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 7, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Other Software for Bloggers
. 0 Comments

This isn’t earth-shattering or new, but I thought I’d share with all of you how I handle some of my email. If you’re hosting your own Wordpress blog, you have most likely bought a domain that it’s being hosted on. You probably also have an email address setup there like admin or your name or something. Personally, even though I’m good buddies with the guys that started the Squirrel Mail project, I find most email systems a little clunky and not fun to use. I’m a Gmail man myself and have forwarded my emails for my blogs over to a Gmail account.

This probably sounds like extra work and not a big deal, but it keeps me from having to log in somewhere else to check it. I should also add that I have 1 personal blog, 1 movie review blog, this blog, a podcast website and blog, and another blog I don’t post to very often anymore. So if you count alerts, notifications, fan/hate mail, etc….that can turn into a lot of email. So what I’ve done is setup forwarding on all of those mail accounts to one Gmail account of my choice. I’ve also used filtering and automatic labeling so I know exactly where these emails are coming from, and what they are for. I also have some of them auto-archived so they don’t clutter my inbox. Another cool feature with Gmail is I have the option to reply to these emails as the sender it was originally sent to. That means it looks like I logged into one of those accounts and replied. Add on the fact Gmail has lots of storage and great searching capabilities and what more could you want?

I know some people prefer email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. Most of the people I know using these kinds of programs also download all their mail to one computer. I’m not a big fan of that because then I can’t check my mail from wherever I am. You also have the potential for losing all of your mail and contacts if your drive crashes. I know there are other email solutions out there and I know some of you are using them. Let us know how you like to manage multiple email accounts.

Time for blogging

Published
by
Smitty
on April 3, 2008
in Content and Editing
. 1 Comment

So if you are like me you are going in a million directions at once. I’m trying to be better about simplifying my life. I’m getting better with help from sites like LifeHacker and ZenHabits.

Here are a few of my tips for making blogging easier and efficient.

  • Keep it short - Blog posts don’t have to be long to be effective. I find my self skipping the long blog posts when they show up in my feed reader.
  • Keep it regular - Either once a day, once a week, or when the spirit moves you. Make sure to pick a schedule that fits your schedule. Start small like once a week and build it to maybe every other day.
  • Blog during off times - For me this is during lunch, while I’m making dinner, or while my wife is watching some snoozer of a chick flick. If you have a cool iPhone you could blog while waiting at the doctor or waiting somewhere.
  • Passionate Blogging - Make sure you are blogging stuff you are interested in, otherwise you end up falling off the bandwagon. If you are passionate about your subject matter you will be more likely to make time for blogging.

If you have some more tips drop them in the comments, we’d love to here them.