Blogging Sueblimely

The reports of Sheila’s whereabouts are quite right, she has been visiting me in Melbourne.

Sheila in Melbourne – Source Flickr – poetic licence by Photoshop

She was a little shy at first, tentatively peeping around the front door when she first entered.

Once she found aspects of the house that she could relate to she soon started to feel at home:

More mug shots – Feeling at home among the other cups

Family members were impressed by her warmth and soon got close to her:

I have succumbed to curiosity and temptation to become a Nuffnanger. I don’t think I need explain Nuffnang – the rather large ad in my sidebar says it all. Blogging Sueblimely has become monetized; at least until I come to the conclusion that I am not making any money from it or the size of the ad block is too intrusive for me to stand any longer.

You may be wondering why I have Nuffnanged after I have so far resisted urges to join other ad networks; this blog has not previously been blemished, (or should that be embellished) by even the tiniest adsense block. So am I – if anyone has any idea I would be pleased if you let me know

Maybe the name Nuffnag appeals to me or the fact that it is the first all Australian ad network I have come across or maybe that ad content is meant to be matched to a blog’s content and readers – all three of these combined perhaps. I have never been keen on advertising products or services that either have nothing to do with what I write about or would be of little interest to readers.

Then again it is probably pure avarice – I want the money, as the lure of visiting family in England again is getting stronger – seems to be a kind of 7 year itch with me. Nuffnang bloggers will also be able to enjoy exclusive discounts for various goods and services. If I resist buying products I don’t need I may even be able to add some more cents to the piggy bank.

The company has been doing well in Malaysia and Singapore and its advertisers, to date, include Nike, Citibank, Nokia, F&N, Walls, AirAsia and Honda. Prizes are to be awarded too – perhaps for blogging about Nuffnang? Maybe I should delay this post until there is a prize within reach – no I don’t win them anyway.

As I write this I have been trying to answer my own question. Why did I join Nuffnang. What was it that that tipped the scales in its favor? The answer is Community – I am a sucker for sites that aim to develop a social community. Nuffnang is going to either fully pay for or substantially subsidize blogger outings, get togethers and events. Some movie nights are already in the pipeline. I likely won’t attend but the idea appeals to me.

Nearly forgot to mention – if you have no ads from any other Asia Pacific ad network you automatically become part of the Nuffnang Glitterati. This is appealing to me not only because Glitterati Nuffnangerswill earn more and be eligible for preferential treatment but because I have never been part of any “rati” before.

I will be curious to see what ads start appearing in my sidebar and, if nothing is forthcoming, I will choose the option to show charity ads as a placemarker, rather than the current default ad for Nuffnang.

I have had to return from my self imposed (need to get a website finished) blogging exile to let you know about Ivy and show how bloggers when they join together in one voice can have a powerful effect.

Today has been an emotional day for me. The relief of having found out that my son has been accepted into our first choice of adult day centre for next year was great. I was over the moon. He has a disability and I was so concerned about his future in an adult world, post school.

Tonight I read about Ivy, a poor little mite who has suffered so much in her first years of life. I have been following her story on Tiff’s (her mum’s) blog, Three Ring Circus, always hoping to read that she is improving, but her auto immune disease rarely seems to let go of its grip. Ivy was being denied a drug that could improve her life, reduce her pain and allow her to do things and go places like any other 2 year old.

A petition was organised by Veronica of Sleepless Nights and I was intending to write about this to gather your support. In fact, feeling outraged and sad, I had already jumped right in and started to write this when I read, with delight that Ivy is now being allowed to have the medicine she desperately needs. I was so pleased I went back and altered the “is” to was as I still wanted to share this with you.. The voices were heard! Isn’t it wonderful news?

Now I am returning to the depths of a WordPress theme but hope to find my way out again very soon, although I then need to delve further into the database – if I am missing for too long please send out a search party. I hear it can be scary in there and I may be hiding behind a table.

Apologies if you have been visiting here in the last week looking for new posts. A website I am working on has been taking up a fair bit of time. The site is powered by WordPress but I have had to create a theme with quite a few tweaks to turn it into a CMS system that does what I want it to do. It has been a good learning experience and I am now getting my head around PHP – the simpler WordPress sort at least. However much I have enjoyed this, it has not stopped me getting regularly sidetracked and wandering around the web looking for things of interest. Here are a few things I thought you too may find of interest.

Reading

• 20 Myths About Blogging That Many New Bloggers Actually Believe
• Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know Aboutby digital inspiration. What interested me most in this was the ability to subscribe to searches via RSS. I use Google alerts which sends me results by email but wanted to display a feed of specific search results for a website that I am building. I am going to compare the results for a particular search term from Windows Live Search RSS feed with Google Alerts.
• Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days
  – Vectordiary has just finished posting 30 days of tutorials teaching beginners the basics of Illustrator. If you would like to learn how to create your own illustrations, design your own logos and create special effects these will be very useful to you.

News

• Google’s own browser. Chrome, not an unexpected addition to their suite of services has just been released. I will likely write about this further once I have had chance to look more closely at its features and had longer to try it out. The fact that each tab is isolated to prevent one tab from crashing another appeals to this multi tab browsing person. Multi tab bars in Firefox 3 do tend to keep me in check though – when I get to the third I realize it is time to start closing some tabs. Google’s cartoon announcement is a good place to start to find out about Chrome. My son read this yesterday and reckons it was really effective as he was able to remember and reel off its contents to me hours later. Even if you do not want to use the browser it is wise to view your blog in it as the Tech Herald reports that there is at present an issue with some fonts not displaying correctly.
• Yahoo Buzz – has just been opened to all publishers, six months after initially launching. Buzz, with its wider subject areas, will produce serious competition for Digg which still appeals more to those interested in technology. I am working on a tutorial, which I will publish soon, giving you more information and details on the various methods of adding Buzz buttons to your blog.
• Something For Your Time – Monetizing Video Phil Butler reviews Zadby on Online Public Relations . Zadby is an "online marketplace where advertisers, marketers, and brand managers can connect with freelance video producers to create innovative product placement videos tailored for sites like YouTube, AOL, and MySpace". If you already create videos for your blog perhaps you may consider taking more advantage of your talent.
• HowToBlog has come up with an innovative idea for members of its site to promote their own sites – a Review Exchange System. Add your website to the review directory and review other blogs. Those that review the most appear higher in the directory, giving more prominence to their own website.
• The HowToBlog also alerted me to news for those using Google Adwords that Landing page load time now affects keywords’ Quality Scores- This may be old news for some but, not using Adwords myself I was not aware of this.
• What’s new in Picasa & Picasa Web Albums For those who use Picasa for your photo albums or because you use blogspot you may wish to check out the new Picasa interface and features, which include adding name tags to photos and adding photos via email. Picasa Web Albums (the desktop image managing tool) has a new etouching tool and new Sync functionality.

Blogging Tools

• Mozilla’s Snowl — A Unified Messaging Interface – rj3sp from ClipsToNote reviews an experimental firefox extension that gathers all your inbound communications from email, RSS, Twitter, social network updates ….
• If you use IE, Opera or Safari and would like some of the editing features allowed by the Firefox Firebug exension then the new Firebug Lite is for you.
• Text Link Checker Tool by Bad Neighbourhood scans the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, alerting you to possible problem areas which may affect your standing with search engines. The scan will bring up some sites that you do not need to worry about because of keywords it discovers and the number of links to blogs etc so please read the Bad Neighborhood Clarification post in conjunction with the first search you do to set your mind at rest.

Blogger

• Followers is a new graphical Blogger Widget that is being rolled out to all users as from the end of August. It allows people to follow your blog and for you to see who is following you. A new "Blogs I’m following" tab on your Dashboard allows you to read the posts of those you follow. I will be looking out for it on the blogspot blogs I visit and will add them to my follow list. I will start off with blogspot users who comment here – hopefully a bit of encouragement for you to talk to me:-) Thanks to Tech Flaps, who wrote a post which alerted me to this new feature.

WordPress

• Yoast Breadcrumbs pluginConstructs customisable breadcrumb navigation for single posts and pages. This allows “ease of navigation for your readers as well as providing an additional way for search engines to determine the structure of your site”. Yoast also has an extensive guide on WordPress SEO Tested up to WordPress 2.6. Review on Blogging Tips

A couple of question for you – do you think I should date these news posts or give them a number? Do you think having multiple posts with the same words in the title could be bad for search engine purposes? Would Google bot get all confused and think it was spammy?

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