• Your turn – if you have written or have read something that may interest readers here or come across a new site worth a look at let me know; by leaving a comment here or via my contact page. (The latter may be best if it is your own post so that others do not perceive it as being spammy) I will only publish comments that include links if the links are relevant and useful. (covering myself here in case I get spam!).

  If you are a regular reader you will know I try to feature posts from some of the lesser known blogging blogs and those who write excellent posts about blogging but do not have that as their main topic.

  You likely check out the more popular blogging blogs yourself but I do also include links to these if the content is of particular significance.

News

• I know a lot of my readers are mums so Moms Group Manual may be of interest. – this blog is a "Mom’s Guide to Connecting with Other Moms" both online and in person.
• Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online. Millions of pages of news articles will be digitized. These will be searchable by using Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. This may come in very handy for research purposes for some bloggers. Read more on the Official Google Blog.
• Come On In The Web Is Fine has started a campaign to encourage sites not to play music on loading. I was recently asked by a client to add Christmas music to their site this year and I had to politely say "no way", that is not a good idea. I feel a post coming on about this topic so will say no more for now.

Blogging Tools

• 8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

Cyclo.psis a stock photo site search engine that "brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location". Search once. See it all – no binocular vision on this site folks Joking, I think the name clever.

Social Networking

• Sweetcron- I am looking forward to get onboard with Sweetcron, a new lifestreaming application. Similar to Friendfeed in that it collects together your activities on sites such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg. The difference is that you install and run Sweetcron from your own server and in a graphical format. A good example can be found on YongFong’s Sweecron site – not surprising as he is the application’s creator. Cha Cha France gives more details at Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software
• CMS Wire discusses whether Jaiku, which now allows its members unlimited invites, has missed the boat in Microblogging with Jaiku: Too Late to the Party? I must check Jaiku out again. If anyone wants an invite let me know, seems I can now invite anyone I like.
• Dwigger – threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. The idea sounds promising although the content does not show this as yet – No breaking news here. Top voted tweets today being largely about Talk Like a Pirate Day e.g." talk like a pirate day? shit, i forgot."

Blogger

• Antonio Lupetti from Woork has published some excellent tips for tweaking a blogspot template in 7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger.

Wordpress

• So you want to create WordPress themes huh? 16 beginner tutorials from wpdesigner – more advanced lessons to come.
• 68 Unique Wordpress Themes from CSS Leak
• wordpress plugin : my profiles download page
• Smashing Magazine have written a great post for those interesting in doing some Wordpress tweaking and coding, with links to articles and tutorials. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox I wish I had thought of that post!!
• Web Tools Collection takes a First Look At WordPress 2.7
• 2.7 brings the option of adding SSL security to protect your blog from hackers. To activate go to Edit Profile in the My Account menu of your dashboard and then to "Browser Connection". Choose “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages.”

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Blogosphere News Sept 27th

• 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

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Blogosphere News 1st August

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!

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Blogosphere News 2

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.

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Blogspot Blogger Beginners

Table of contents for Navigation

1. Navigation Menus 1 – Appetizers
2. Navigation Menus 2 – Entrees
3. Navigation Menus 3 – Main
4. Navigation Menus 4 – Dessert

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.

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Navigation Menus 4 – Dessert

It seems that Google does take account of what we have to say. Very wise considering the downturn in comments on Blogger blogs and the number of people talking of leaving for a different blogging platform.

Here is the announcement at Google’s Blogger Buzz – BlogYou Blog, We Listen

Thanks Colin of Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe for alerting me to this change. At this stage not all Blogger blogs have been changed to this system.

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Google listened – Blogspot Blogger comment form allows URL link

More significantly for bloggers:

Unless you use blogspot Blogger, your blog url is not linked to. This is in addition to the fact that blogspot default linking is set to nofollow; which means that links were not counted for pagerank purposes anyway. Google is penalizing bloggers once again, after so recently downgrading pagerank for those using paid for links. I am really peeved that my freedom in using the internet is being eroded once again and do not like to be controlled in this way.

This move goes against the basic nature of blogging, that of bloggers linking to each other in the spirit of give and take and community building. How can you build up a relationship with another blogger if you do not know where to find them. This move is bound to reduce the amount of commenting on Blogger blogs. Therefore ALL bloggers are being disadvantaged – both blogspot and non blogspot users.

What can we bloggers do about this? I have some suggestions:

• Non blogspot bloggers can leave their blog url in the nickname field of the Blogger comments form. The usual nickname could be used to sign off the comment itself. I prefer this solution to leaving the url in the body of the comment as, under normal circumstances, this is considered spammy.
• Blogspot bloggers can change their comment form message, suggesting that non blogspot users leave their url as their nickname or in the body of the message. To do this go into the Settings/Comments area of your dashboard. Add your message to the ‘Comments Form Message’ section. Example:

• Use Haloscan , which replaces the blogspot comment system. Haloscan allows external linking as well as having a trackback feature which is missing from Blogger. This is not an ideal solution as older comments are not retained by Haloscan but it is better than nothing.
• All bloggers, whether Blogger users or not, contact blogspot using their suggestion form and ask them to allow users to leave their blog url in the comments form once again.
• If like me you have left blogspot for another blogging platform, sign up for another gmail account in case you want to leave messages on blogs that do not allow anonymous comments. This will prevent your email address leaving a link back to your old bloggger blog.
• Blogspot users could move to another blogging platform. Wordpress.com for example allows you to import all your posts and comments from blogspot. Either that or consider using your own domain. There are many other reasons to move away from blogspot. You can see my own reasons here Reasons I moved from blogspot Blogger.
• Set up a Blogger blog with one post which links to your non blogger blog. I am sure spammers will be doing this – is Google encouraging spam?? If you have a blogspot address that you do not want to link to, sign up for a new gmail account and new blogspot address to match. Consider using an email address such as yourwebname.dotcom@gmail.com to further publicize your blog name. You can divert any mail to this account to your email address of choice in gmail Settings/Forwarding and POP/IMAP/Forward a copy of incoming mail to .. This will save you having to login to this gmail account to retrieve your mail.
• Post about this issue yourself to register your disapproval.

If anyone is now considering a move to Wordpress and need more help and information than I have given so far in this blog, please leave a comment or contact me via my comment form. I will either write posts myself or point you in the right direction to find clear instructions.

Google’s power is starting to concern me and I am going to find alternatives to their services, even though this may not be so convenient. Do you think I am overreacting here or justified in my concern?

If anyone can think of any other solutions to this recent violation of our rights as bloggers, please let me know.

Update:

Blogger users could use the Intense Debate comment system to replace Blogger’s. I have seen this in place on a couple of blogs and the option is still there to enter a blog url when leaving a comment.

Related Posts:

• Using your own Blog URL as your OpenID
• What is an OpenID

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Blogspot Blogger comment form change unfair to ALL bloggers

Having been critical of Blogger I feel a need to make some amends. After all it did serve me very well for a few years. I prefer it to the other hosted blog platforms for a number of reasons:

• It is easy to learn and use.
• The new blogger has introduced features that make it very simple to add extra features or page elements. More are being added as time goes on.

Click on image to see all page elements

• You can host the classic blogger on your own domain.
• There is plenty of support for those just starting out as well as those who want to make more complicated changes – Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta, Blogger Hacks Wiki
• There is no expense involved using a hosted platform.
• Spam protection measures keep the pesky spam down without having to add any extra.
• My blogspot blog was ranked quickly by Google.
• Blogger was voted the ‘Best Weblog Tool’ in the 2006 Weblog Awards
• Basic styling can be done through the dashboard just by choosing colors. More advanced styling is quite simply achieved with changes to the stylesheet.
• I have chosen the following as examples of blogs that are very individually styled.

Would you know these were blogspot blogs if were not for the Blogger bar and the favicon images?

However, It is possible to style the Blogger bar (which runs across the top of blogspot pages to match the color of the rest of the page to help it blend in or to remove it completely (although that is probably against blogspot rules).

The favicon icon can be changed as on laketrees blog. I think that is leading me nicely into an idea for my next post as I am going to start styling this blog top down and I will explain how it is done.

If you think other blogspot blogs that are worth a mention because of their styling, please let me know.

Related Posts:

• Reasons I moved from blogspot Blogger

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Advantages of blogspot Blogger

Google’s Blogger site is being used by malicious hackers who are posting fake entries to some blogs. The posts attempt to lure readers to what is purported to be a legitimate link or a YouTube video but instead leads to booby-trapped downloads that could infect a Windows PC. The virus, named the Storm Worm or Virus is also hitting inboxes worldwide. I have had quite a few of these nasty emails myself.

A Google spokesperson said: “The blog posts are likely from users’ whose machines have been compromised by a virus…. Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users’ mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail,”

Please go and read more on the BBC News site, where I originally read about this. A text box on the right hand side of the article gives some examples of the kind of text being used in the posts and emails:

I did not want to add the text myself as I do not want to appear in a Google Search as being one of the blogs that contains this vile content! People may think I am infected but don’t worry I use good methods of protection.

Blogger-Virus alexa

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Blogger virus attack – a storm is brewing.