Blogging Sueblimely » Blogging Platforms

Blogosphere News 1st August

Sueblimely — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:30:58 +0000

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

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 1st August

Injader - A focused project

BenBarden — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:29:56 +0000

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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Injader - A focused project

Blogosphere News 2

Sueblimely — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:18:02 +0000

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!

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 2

Blogspot Blogger Beginners

Sueblimely — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:37:56 +0000

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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogspot Blogger Beginners

Get More Comments with KeywordLuv

Sueblimely — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:16:37 +0000

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?

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

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Get More Comments with KeywordLuv

Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert

Sueblimely — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:26:13 +0000

Table of contents for Navigation

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



Link2
Link2
Link3
Link4
Link4

Menu Bar

CSS

Tabbed Menu

CSS

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:

      To:

Or:

        Change

      To: 

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 "" 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.

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

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert
 Previous in series

Blogosphere News 17th March

Sueblimely — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:47:32 +0000

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

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

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 17th March

Contest - Win a Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Sueblimely — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:26:18 +0000

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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Contest - Win a Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

Yahoo Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress

Sueblimely — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:28:04 +0000

I have been trialling the Wordpress ‘Yahoo Shortcuts‘ plugin for a week or so now. As I found it a little tricky to come to grips with, I thought I would give you a bit of a run down on how to use it and a review based on my experiences. The images and popup links in this post have mostly been embedded using the plugin.

This plugin uses Yahoo Shortcuts to add Yahoo search popups and Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos to blog content.

The image to the left is an example of a Yahoo Shortcuts “badge”.

As you are writing your post, the plugin searches for media relevant to your content. A message, at the top of the sidebar in your post window, alerts you to the number of ‘Shortcuts’ that have been found, allows you to review the post and choose whether to include all or some of suggested links and images:

The information suggested is based on various Yahoo search topics and services. A ‘Shortcut’ may lead to a Flickr image, a financial data, stock quotes , a map , a news item or information about specific companies, products, and people. More services are to be added (maybe maybe sports, movies, and music?)

If you want to view and add what has been suggested for inclusion in your post, click on the “Review this Post” button. You will be taken to an edit screen, which shows your post with the suggested shortcut ‘keywords’ underlined with a blue dotted line and a small arrow icon to the right of them. Hovering over the underlined word gives you a preview of the link suggested. Clicking on the arrow brings up options based on the type of content suggested. From here you can delete the link. Where graphical representations are available you can choose to convert the link into a badge, which embeds an image instead.

A section at the bottom of the Yahoo post review window post shows Flickr thumbnails based on keywords in your post. If there are no images to your liking, a search function allows you to browse for more within the same window.

Hovering over a thumbnail will produce a popup window showing you a larger version of the image. If you decide to include it, clicking the “Add to Post button in this window produces another popup window where you can choose the size of image. Pressing “Submit” here will insert the image into your the review post window. Once you are happy with the shortcuts included, press save and you will be taken back to your post window.

Opinion:

Flickr Image placement - if you wish to move the image from its automatically embedded position at the top of the post to somewhere else, care has to be taken that your post layout is not messed up and that text is not floating in places you don’t want it to go. Center placement may be the safest. This image came up for the words “Flickr Image” and he is cute so I thought I would leave him here:

I have not found much use for the linking and badge features, but it was only its Flickr image capabilities that initially attracted me to the plugin.My blog topics do not lead to many automatically suggested and relevant Flickr images. I can, however see this feature being of great use to some blogs.

Once I got used to the interface the plugin became much quicker to use.

Let me try some words to see what the plugin comes up with:

“Funny Sign”‘

“Chocolate”

That is too tempting, I feel a chocolate attack coming on.

Links:

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Yahoo Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress

Add Widget-ready Sidebars to Wordpress Footers

Sueblimely — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:42:54 +0000

Now I have removed my Christmas theme formatting, I am ready to work more on my blog design.. Having made the move to Wordpress from Blogger not long before I added the festive colors and images, I had not spent any time on the real theme. I know I am doing this backwards - most sane people would decide on a theme before showing their blog face in public. The reason, I want to talk through the process I am going through as I do my design as a way of teaching anyone who may be interested.

To alleviate the problem of those resource hungry social networking widgets making page load time slow, I have now relegated them to the footer. Not being a php expert - (not much past the “hello dolly” stage) I had to search for a way of doing this. I had to piece together various bits of information here and there so I thought it an idea to put it all together for your edification and delight. (I am wondering how many left after reading the last part, thinking how boring). Anyone using anything other than Wordpress may as well take their leave at this point too, although I would much rather you click on recent posts or archives and stay a while longer on this blog of course.

Rather than having to add widget codes directly into my footer.php, I have added “sidebar” elements into the footer. This means I can add widgets to them from the Wordpress dashboard widget page, which gives me more flexibility if I change their content..

How to add a sidebar to a Wordpress footer

Firstly I had to tell Wordpress to insert new sidebars into my theme by altering the footer.php file.

As I already have two sidebars and wanted 3 columns in the footer, I needed to let the Wordpress architects know that instead of two sidebars I now needed 5. (the architects are those that work on the basic structure and design - in my imagination that is). For this I had to alter the functions.php file in my theme folder.

Edit functions.php:

Find the section in your theme folder’s functions php file that says something similar to the following- except the number will not be 5 yet:, it may be 1 or 2. Change the number to reflect how many sidebar elements you want in total (that is the number of sidebar(s) in your sidebar area plus how many you want in your footer) . If you do not have a functions.php file but have a widget enabled theme create the functions.php file including all of the code below.


if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
    register_sidebars(5,array(
        'before_widget' => '',
        'after_widget' => '',
        'before_title' => '',
        'after_title' => '',
    ));
?>
Now the architects have drawn up their plans, the construction team come in to put the new sidebars in place. They need to build the new “sidebar” elements into the footer. I added mine at the very top of the footer straight after:

Add to footer.php:

   
     
      || !dynamic_sidebar(3) ) : ?>
     
   
   
     
      || !dynamic_sidebar(4) ) : ?>
     
   
   
     
      || !dynamic_sidebar(5) ) : ?>
     
   
 

I gave my new elements the id of “footer-sidebar” but you could call them anything you like as long as the name is unique - that is, different to any other id name you have in your theme.
That done, when your site loads, the builders come in and add the sidebars into the footer. Imagine how busy they are grabbing all the bits needed to put your page together.
The problem is the building is is still very basic. Now we need some interior designers to add a bit of style and finesse. Crack open your style.css file and pretty up the sidebars so they sit side by side of a width that is going to suit the sort of content you want in them. I made mine all the same width, measured so they stretch the full width of the footer: I gave the whole footer a border. I could have added borders around each sidebar, added background color etc, but wanted to keep it simple for these instructions.
Add to style.php
#footer-sidebar {
  border: 1px solid #cccccc;
  display:block;
  height: 260px;
}
#footer-sidebar1 {
  float: left;
  width: 300px;
  margin-right:20px;
  }
#footer-sidebar2 {
  float: left;
  width: 300px;
  margin-right:20px;
 }
#footer-sidebar3 {
  float: left;
  width: 300px;
 }
Note that the divisions have the same names as I gave them when adding them to footer.php
As, by the time you read this, I may have altered the formatting of the footer once more to add extra styling elements here is an image of what it looks like after adding the above styling.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely
Add Widget-ready Sidebars to Wordpress  Footers