Friends sharing their blogging experience
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Loading ...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.
This post isn’t so much a tip, trick, or idea, but a call for help. I was using PodPress for a short while on my personal movie blog and it did some funny things to the RSS feed. The one thing I was most unhappy with was it changed the author on every post to something default and not of my choosing. After uninstalling the plugin and upgrading Wordpress to 2.5.1, my feed still looks like it did when PodPress was installed. Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this? I thought upgrading Wordpress would have fixed that, but maybe it’s something in the database.
The reason I want the author field fixed in the feed is because it’s a multi-author blog and people deserve credit for their stuff. Also, I don’t like what it automatically put in there on its own.
blog - http://branfeld.com/movies
For you Joomla users out there: have you ever wished for something more than the default blogging tools in Joomla? They sure leave a lot to be desired - they make for some pretty ugly blogs, and you have to install extra bits even to have commenting!
Chalupa runs his lebowskipodcast site on Joomla. It’s not a blog in and of itself - it’s become a fan site for an awesome movie. It does, however, have a blog. Chalupa posts almost daily, and he’s got a lot of people reading. Unfortunately, Joomla’s blog tools make it difficult to read, and the commenting add-ons are ugly and cumbersome.
We’re in the process of updating the site - making it easier to get around in, and more aesthetically pleasing overall. One of the biggest changes that we needed to make: clean up the blog and make it more… useable.
Enter mojoBlog. The folks at joomlify have created a rockin’ Joomla component. It’s Wordpress for/in Joomla! And just like Wordpress, it’s free! Doesn’t get much better than that, folks, especially since before this component, you had to pay. For crappier stuff.
The install was smooth as can be, but it took a little doing to get the admin menus to display. A note to any of you who want to install this: install as the main Joomla admin, not under a secondary Super Admin account. It’ll save you headaches and it’ll keep you from having to mess around in your userID tables and caches…
If you’re running Joomla and looking for an elegant blog tool/solution, mojoBlog is your tool. When we get lebowskipodcast up and running with its new threads, I’ll post a link so you can check it out.
Personal Saviors or Angels of Death?
I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Automated things are just so easy and great to use, right? Well, sometimes. If they truly are all they’re cracked up to be, they’ve usually gone through some heavy testing, usage, and many revisions. This past week I decided I was finally going to upgrade to the new version of Wordpress on my personal blogs. I also decided to try out this nifty updater plugin they were promoting.
I first tried it out on my personal blog, ran into a lot of permission issues, and gave up. Then I played around with it some more, and gave up again. Fast-forward a few days and I decided to give it a third try, cause that’s the one that’s always supposed to work. This time I decided to try it out on my movie blog. Same problems, yet this iteration I did a little homework and tried changing some permissions around. I eventually got to the very end of the installation, but had pages and pages of errors and my blog didn’t work…at all. Part of the updating process was to create a backup. I tried to open these files and could not because Microsoft Windows had deemed them to be unsafe.
By this time I’m sure you can image my frustration and annoyance at my self-perceived stupidity at 1)trusting an auto-updater to fix my blog, 2)not doing my own backup, and 3)not trying this out on something I don’t care about. I think it’s fair to say I’m above-average when it comes to technical things, but I don’t have that much experience troubleshooting web issues. I’m going to have to recommend most of you bloggers out there avoid this upgrader unless you’re very comfortable with file permissions, and tracking down errors within specific lines of PHP code. Even if you are comfortable doing that kind of stuff, is it really worth the risk of having to spend the time on it?
I’m sure some of your are like me and have moved, or attempted to move, from one blogging tool to another. I started off with good ol Blogger before it was bought out by Google. I wasn’t too hip on Blogger Beta when they were making the changes so I decided to bite the bullet and figure out Wordpress. Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress is a mostly smooth transition, however, one thing I immediately noticed was my permalinks weren’t quite the same. Then I found a plugin to help me fix that.
Justinsomnia.org has created a plugin called wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks. Pretty self explanatory, right? Just download, install, and click a button in your settings. Not much else you have to do.
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:
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!
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
Cons
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.
If you’re doing some kind of reviewing on your blog and would like to attach a star rating system to posts, you might want to check this plugin out. Here is a link to the website.
Downloading and installing are very straightforward, using it is a little more difficult because the readme file is pretty vague. After you install and activate, the only thing left to do is add those stars to your review. To do this you’ll need to type this”[rating:x/y]” where x is the number of stars something received and y is the total number of stars possible.
For example, if I wanted to give a 3/5 rating I would insert, “[rating:3/5]” at the end of my post. You must include the brackets and you must have the plugin activated for this to work. Other than that, it’s a piece of cake. If you’d like to see an example of this in action, I’ve been using it on my movie blog.
If you started using Google Adsense or already are, I hope you’re not copying and pasting the ad-code into custom text boxes for your blog. There are several plugins out there that make the job so much easier. One I finally settled on using is Adsense Manager. Other than installing, you’ll just need to copy/paste your Adsense account number under Options…Adsense Manager.
Once you do this, you can go to Manage…Ads and create new ad content for your blog. Instead of logging into Google and choosing colors, size, type, etc…you can manage it all easily from your blog. After you create something here, you can save your options and then add it as a widget under Presentation.
You might have heard some news in the past year or so about Adsense Manager being blocked by Google. I’m not sure exactly what was happening there, but whatever was happening has been cleared up. One thing to check though is under Options, where you enter your account number, there is a thing at the bottom about donating a small percentage of your ad revenue to the plugin creators. This is not required to use the plugin. If you’d like to donate some money to them, I’m sure they would appreciate it, but that’s up to you.
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