Blogging Sueblimely

Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

Reading

• JimmyR.com - a mashup that puts all the best rated sites of today on one page. Includes BBC Today in History, del.icious, Digg, Fark, Google MP3 Search, Google News, Lifehacker, Reddit, Stumbleupon, YouTube, WikiHow. An archive page links to previous days listings all the way back to the beginning of 2007. I discovered it because my Best Stock Image Sites post appeared on the site - Yeah. Similar sites - POPURLS and THEWEBLIST
• NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers
• Firefox Privacy Protection
• Jason Calacanis Retires From Blogging, Listen Up Bloggers – This Means Something I did not put this in news as for me this post relates more to the author’s impressions of how blogging has changed. There is a lot to be said for the pre stumble, digg, fav, friend me, add me days.
• Will blogging have an impact on our children? Some food for thought here. Will our words come back to bite us? Could mommy bloggers cause their children embarassment or is this a just recompense for the challenges they cause us
• 5 Security Tips to Protect Wordpress Blog
• If you have ever considered applying for a job as a blog writer have a look at the extensive list of skills that may be expected of you! Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?
• Blog Bloke has had an unusual problem with Feedburner pinging his Wordpress blog so much it caused his host to take his site down until the problem is fixed. He can be found using his old blogger blog for now. I am interested in reading what caused the problem.

News

• Features Planned for WordPress 2.7 2.7 looks promising with inbuilt functionality to replace some plugins and more.
• Delicious has finally been redesigned and some new features added. Now that I have moved over to diigo with its even more advanced features, including automatic posting to Delicious, the new features aren not enough to compel me to move back again.
• Opera - Pownce and Digg have been added to the Services available to the People Sidebar. Even if you do not want to use Opera as your main browser it is worth using it as a way of monitoring/ interacting with your social networks, feeds, chat programs and email and for uploading images and videos to online services.
• Gmail to No Longer Auto Add Contactsinstead adding addresses to a suggested list for you to choose whether to add them to your contacts. I did not realize I had so many gmail ‘contacts’ until recently when my list was somehow compromised and spam email was sent out to the whole lot of them. Apologies to those who received this and did not get an apology email. I think more of the apologies were rejected than the spam email itself - maybe because it was the second email in as many days ‘I’ had sent out to a big list?
• BNet Australia reports on the draft rules for blogs compiled by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission: New Rules for Blogs . Unfortunately, with the increasing number of bloggers being sued, Associated Press trying to stop bloggers quoting from their articles and bloggers not being given attribution by the main stream media, maybe this is inevitable and necessary. More information on the DBKP blog: MSM Stealing Blog Content: Times Online Joining Growing MSM Trend?

Blogging Tools

• Tools to help you mark up your posts semantically to be read by the few but increasing search engines that cater for semantic markup.
  These are produced by Clearforest
  who have recently been acquired by Reuters.
  • Calais Marmoset - enables your site to automatically provide microformat metadata to Yahoo and other automated metadata crawlers.
  • Tagaroo Wordpress plugin - Tagaroo analyzes the text in your post and suggests intelligent tags for the things and events you’re writing about.
  • Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader - Lorelle tells us about a Greasemonkey script that enables commenting via Google Feed Reader and another that adds feed icons to a page identifying and allowing you to subscribe to the choice of feeds available.

Blogger

• There are good Blogger templates to be found on Blogger Tricks. Thanks to snos of Life in the Country for letting us know about these via the Aussie Bloggers Forums

Popularity: 7% [?]

Guest Post by Ben Barden creator of Injader

In the 10 years I’ve been online, I’ve used a lot of software, some of it good, some not so good. Every now and again I come across a system that seems to be offering something totally different from its original focus - and I ask, “it used to do this, didn’t it?” Straying from your original focus is a dangerous thing to do - you lose touch with the people who were interested in you in the first place.

All systems have their benefits and drawbacks, along with their conventions and quirks. Some of these systems are extremely complex, but they do pretty much everything you could ever want. From being in the business for so long, the providers of these products know their stuff, right?

But then there are people who start asking for more and more from a system, and the software vendor gets worried. If they don’t give the customers what they want, will they move to another system? So they add more and more features, not daring to say “no” if something doesn’t fit with the product.

The product slowly becomes more and more bloated, it might be more prone to issues, and the vendor starts to lose sight of who they are focusing on. Who is their target audience? For instance, if you want a decent message board, are you really going to start with a blogging system? Maybe it’s good for existing users of that system, but one system can’t do everything. That’s why other systems exist!

Would you blog about every topic under the sun?

Think about how you run your blog. If you’re an authority in your niche, chances are you’ve established yourself as a writer of a particular type of content. It’s hard enough to get your blog noticed without trying to write about anything and everything, right?

So when a system comes along that has a clear focus right from the start and doesn’t plan to make a sudden shift away from that focus, is it fair to say that system has a good chance of delivering something really special?

Bend it, break it

WordPress is a very popular choice for blogging, and I don’t doubt it’s a great blogging platform. The problems occur when you try to bend it to do what it wasn’t originally intended for. Sites with a complex hierarchy of content, a photo gallery or a forum can all be created with WordPress, but how easy is it to do?

Technically speaking, WordPress is a content management system, but it was created with the blogger in mind. That’s OK. Simple blogs are not going to run into major difficulties here. If you want a more complex site, that’s when I believe there’s a case for Injader - an open source content management system that I’ve been working on for three years.

Less of the jargon

I maintain a “blogging tips” blog but instead of littering my posts with endless jargon, I take a moment to explain what all the jargon means. Actually, I try to do the same in Injader - it’s the system from the technical guy who tries to write without a lot of jargon. Bit of a mouthful, but it’s quite a unique selling point.

My website also contains my music, my photos, along with some tutorials and a carefully organised Blogging Guide to help beginners get started in the blogging world. Trying to shoehorn those into WordPress is probably doable, but I’m not convinced the solution would be particularly elegant. With Injader, I can do all of this with ease.

Sure, some WordPress plugins are great, but the other day my wife installed a plugin for someone just to change the “reply address” on the contact form. That’s ridiculous. One plugin for that? No offence to the plugin author, at least people have the option to do this now, but this is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be a plugin at all.

Who is Injader aimed at?

Anyone who wants to do more with their blog but doesn’t want to install loads of plugins for basic functionality. Anyone who’s sick of having problems with their themes when they upgrade. Anyone who wants to upgrade their site with ease. You may still have to upload files via FTP, but it’s faster and easier to upgrade Injader than it is to upgrade WordPress.

One thing to remember

No system is perfect. If there’s something you don’t like about Injader, or there’s something it doesn’t do yet, please take a moment to let me know. There’s a contact form at Injader.com where you can send your feedback. I do listen to all feedback, and the vast majority of upcoming changes are based on comments from existing users, rather than my own personal wants and needs.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see some more people trying out Injader!

Footnote by Sueblimely - Thanks for agreeing to this guest post Ben. I wish now I had used Injader instead of constantly breaking Wordpress in my attempts to use it as a more advanced CMS system than my almost non-existent PHP coding skills allow for.

Popularity: 7% [?]

As promised here is the second part of my Blogosphere News post following on from Part 1 last week.

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature - Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator - you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic - currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook - share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

Wordpress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• Wordpress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• Wordpress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines - Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines - 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country :-). If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

Popularity: 6% [?]

I have restarted posting to a blog I began a couple of years ago, now called Sueblimely Blogspot. I began the blog when the “new” templating system came in, then called ‘Blogger Beta’, to explain its new features and how to use it. As other blogs started covering this in depth I decided to leave it to them and concentrate on this blog.

My daughter has just started a blogspot blog so I am now aiming my own blogspot blog at beginner users. If you are a newcomer to blogspot and blogging. or know of someone who is I welcome your questions over there.

If any of my regular readers wish to do a guest post on that blog aimed at beginning blogspot users or have written tutorials that I could link to please contact me.

Popularity: 4% [?]

A new Wordpress plugin has to be unique and useful for me to write about it. The KeywordLuv plugin by Stephen Cronin of More than Scratch the Surface is just that. It is one of those “I know I have too many plugins, but I must have this one” plugin.

What KeywordLuv does is allow for the inclusion of a name and keywords in the title field in the comments form. I see this as being useful to include your blog title alongside your name. Those who are familiar with your blog title but not your nickname can associate the two or vice versa. For those who do not know you at all your blog’s title may be an added incentive for them to visit you. The plugin has the potential to encourage more comments too.

Your keywords do not have to be your blog title and can be blog topic keywords; but care must be taken that you do not come across as being spammy. Where I can see the plugin useful is where there is something for which you want to become known for. An example that springs to mind here is Kim from Laketrees who could publicize her Top 101 Top Artists’ Blogs list, as this list is of benefit to other bloggers. I would not consider this spammy.

What do you think would constitute spam in a KeywordLuv name?

• KeywordLuv Download page
• More information from Stephen

I have installed the plug myself. Please feel free to give it a try (even if you haven’t must to say).

To use:

In the name field of the comment form add your name in this format: name@yourkeywordtext

Example:
Typing in “Stephen@More than Scratch the Surface” (without the inverted commas) will appear as:
Stephen of More than Scratch the Surface

- although I do not see why you would want to use any one else’s name

Popularity: 5% [?]

Today is the fourth course in my series on blog navigation menus - dessert. Some ’sweet’ menus for you to copy - suitable for Wordpress and Blogger.

Here is the html code you will need for all the examples:

HTML

<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li class="selected"><a href="http://www.your home page.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>

Menu Bar

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a {background-color: #8AAADF; color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li {padding: 0; margin: 0;} #menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; }
#menu li a { background-color: inherit; display: block; padding: 0 10px; border-right: 1px solid; border-right-color: #ffffff; }
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #B9CCEC; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; border-right: 1px solid #537495; border-right-color: #5B80A4; }
-->
</style>

Tabbed Menu

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a { color: #000000; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em;
line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li { background-color: #FFFFFF; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
#menu {border-bottom: 1px solid; border-bottom-color:#83E292;}
#menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; margin-left: 10px; }
#menu li a { background-color: #83E292; display: block; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px; border:0;}
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #A0E9AB; color: #ffffff; margin: 0; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none; border:0;}
-->
</style>

You will of course need to change the links to your own: Copy the code for your chosen menu into a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad and alter the links to point to where you want them to go. This means altering not only the link text - e.g. Sausage Links - but the hyperlink too. Change http://www.your link.com to the address you are pointing the link to. (remember that blogger does not use the www prefix so you homepage will be something like http://yourbloggeraddress.blogspot.com)

These menus, styled using CSS, are infinitely changeable. If you wish for a thicker menu bar change the height and line height values (currently 1.5em). Change the colors to suit the rest of your blog by changing the values for "background-color" and for text "color".

How to use them in your blog:

Blogger

You can do this by adding an "html/javascript" page element. Firstly you need to make sure you are able to add the page element in the place you want it.

Go to your layout/html section and backup your current layout. Tick the "expand widgets" box. You can alter either of the following two tags (you may not have the crosscol wrapper so will need to alter the header section.

Change:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"no"'

To:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"yes"'

Or:
Change

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>

To:

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'>

If you already have 2 widgets add another and so on.

Now go to your layout/add element area and add an HTML/Javascript element to the header or cross column section. Copy and paste the CSS and the html code from your chosen menu into this. Alternatively, add just the html code to your html/javascript element and put the css into the style area of your template. Because Cascading Style Sheets cascade you may find the font size of the menus too larage or small so change the "font-size" in the html.

Wordpress

You can approach this in two ways. If you already have a horizontal navigation menu built into your theme then you can just style this. The default Wordpress menu is already called "menu" so the only changes that are needed are to the your style.php file. From the menu examples above only add the CSS styling portion (the code between the "<style type="text/css"><!–" and "–>
</style>" tags), replacing any tags of the same name.

If you do not have a horizontal menu bar already you can add one by adding the html code to your themes header.php file - just below the header division.

If you want to get fancy then instead of your home page address you can use this line instead.

<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>"></a></li>

The next and final course in this menu tutorial will be made of a variety of fresh ingredients to tempt you to indulge yourselves.

Popularity: 7% [?]

News

• Join in Conversation Week 2008, March 24-30 discussing the Top 10 Questions in the World Today…
• Pop Culture Heroines is a new multi author site dedicated to the promotion of strong female characters in popular culture. Writers from all backgrounds are invited to submit a request to write articles for the site. A forum is being considered too, so if the subject interests you, you can vote in the poll currently taking place.
• Alltop, a news aggregation site that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. Review by Guy Kawasaki - Announcing (Formally) Alltop
• On Imaginif blog - WIN $50.00 cash. Write a blog post about Child Safety by April 3rd to coincide with:
• Blog Against Sexual Violence Day April 3rd
• Snoskred has created another set of feed icons for free download - Introducing The Green Collection- Thanks Snos, they are great.
• From Znet -In-flight Internet cleared for take-off and AOL acquires Bebo for $850 million; Social networking field narrows
• NOTCOT Inc is a growing network of design sites currently including NOTCOT.com, NOTCOT.org, TasteSpotting.com, NotCouture.com - "a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements". Definitely a site for sore eyes

Reading

• Top 10 Personal Health Blogs
• 11 Ways To Create Your Own Traffic Jams by Blogtrepreneur
• The Sisterhood of the travelling Bra - follow the Bra’s progress as it travels around Australia courtesy of All for Women
• 16 Top Social Media Strategies for Success
• 99 Free Online Classes on Business and Entrepreneurship
  
• The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs

Blogging Tools

• Round II - 50 Directories With Good Google Page Rank To Submit Your Website (No Reciprocal Link Required!) from Blogging Tips

Social Networking

• Trusera is the place to tap into real world experience about people and their health. Stay awhile and tell us your story.
• I have been using Friendfeed for a week or so now, since it opened up to the public. The name describes the service nicely - a kind of social networking aggregator. Add your friends/friends of friends and receive an online feed of their activity from their blog’s RSS feed, on twitter, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, picasa, vimeo, netflix, jaiku, last.fm, pownce, reddit, tumblr, zooomr, ilike, status updates from GoogleTalk. Once I am able to find more of my friends on their it will be very useful. Here is my pageif you want to find me. More info from
  SheGeeks FriendFeed is THE Next Big Thing 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed
• Kill Them With Kindness - guest post by Saphrym on CK Marketing Blog

Wordpress

• How to Setup Gravatars for your Blog - Plugin Free!
• Free WordPress Icon Pack

Search Engine News

• Topicle is a new search engine community.
  Every Topicle search engine only searches handpicked URLs, instead of the whole Web.
  Members can create new Topicle search engines and maintain all existing ones.
• 10 Tips to use sitemap file for faster crawling and indexing of your site pages
• Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP
  

Popularity: 4% [?]

I have been searching for magazine style Wordpress themes for a new site I am planning and could not find a free template that totally suited my needs. I am impressed by the Revolution Themes which are very adaptable clean and, clear but they are premium themes currently costing $79.95

I then discovered a contest, being run by The Success Space, the winning prize being a free copy of the not yet released Revolution Pro Media Wordpress Theme so this post is by way of letting you know about the contest as well as entering it myself. The Success Space is a resource for Wordpress themes and plugins, social media, affiliate marketing, and more.

If you too want to be in the running for the free theme here are the instructions:

• Write a brief post about this contest on your blog.
• Be sure to include the following in your blog post:
  • A word or two about the Revolution Pro Media magazine style theme (optionally, include the image)
  • Link to the Revolution Pro Media Wordpress theme
  • Link to the Success Space’s contest post and after posting leave a comment there to let them know you have entered.

The winner will be announced on 15th February so entries need to be in before then.
Good luck if you do enter.

Popularity: 2% [?]