Archive for July, 2008

Mobile Blogging

Mobile blogging just got better, the Wordpress app was just made available on iTunes. A full review will be posted in the near future after some testing.

Mojo overview

As Tara mention earlier, I’ve been using mojoBlog for a Joomla blogging tool.  So far I’ve been really enjoying it.  The tool is basically a stripped down version of Wordpress.  I don’t have all the features, plugins, or template options, but it’s eons better than trying to use the Joomla content system for blogging.  The only real modification I made was to go into the template and modify the RSS links in the footer section.  They’re setup to go to the default feeds, I wanted to redirect them to my feedburner links.

Supposedly you’re supposed to be able to bring in some Wordpress plugins and whathaveyou.  There’s a disclaimer saying some will work and some won’t.  I’ve only tried one plugin and it didn’t work.  I’d be interested to hear if anybody has successfully installed anything.

Five Link Friday: Commenting

Here are five links about commenting - how it can help your blog, and how you can become a better commenter.

  1. Lifehacker’s Guide to Weblog Comments
  2. How to Comment Like a Pro
  3. What’s in a Name?
  4. Blog Etiquette and Commenting
  5. Rethinking Comments

Wordpress 2.6

Wordpress 2.6 has been released. Time to upgrade.

Cool new features

  • Post Versioning
  • Press This button for easy blogging
  • Captioning for images
  • Live preview of themes, before committing
  • Google Gears integration
  • Word count
  • Gallery sorting, with drag and drop
  • Plugin interface update
  • New Avatar options
  • Shift click to select multiple options

Photo Editing

I’m not anywhere near into photos and photography as Tara and Smitty are, but occasionally I do post a picture or two.  Since I’m not a “photo person”, I don’t have any fancy software to crop, edit, or tweak any of the pictures I might have.  Two freebies I wanted to mention to you are Irfanview and Picnik.

Irfanview is something I’ve been using for probably three years or so.  It’s a great tool for easily cropping, resizing, resampling, reducing red-eye, etc.  Another great feature is that you can do batch processes on any folder or group of files.  So anything you do on one, like changing to grayscale for example, can be done to any number of photos with just a couple clicks.  Renaming can also be done with the batch tool which can be very handy when standardizing a bunch of files that have crazy names from a camera, scanner, etc.

Picnik is a tool I just learned about last week.  It’s similar to Irfanview in that’s it’s free and easy to use.  This one is web based and I think the interface is much more simple to use.  For my “day job” I train faculty and brainy people with PhDs how to do things on computers.  We’re always trying to find simple, easy-to-use tools and applications for them to use.  These are two we’ve had success with, and I’m sure you’ll find easy to use as well.

Five Link Friday: Writing

Here are five links to posts about writing - what to do and what not to do:

    1. Bloggers are terrible writers?!
    2. Suffering from writer’s block?
    3. Blogging is about writing!
    4. How long should your posts be?
    5. Here are 10 tips on writing a post.