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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
The true identity(ies) of John Cow have been revealed . I am not sure why this was of so much interest to me. Perhaps it is because I was keen to know the past experience of those involved in managing to continue/rejuvenate the success of JohnCow.com after they took over from the original John Cow, Bob Jones. I am not surprised to learn that there is considerable experience between the three men who play the cow (not in the pantomine sense) : the front end of the cow is Jason Katzenback (i.e. the voice of John Cow for the past 3 months) and, at the rear-end, Jason Potash and Marc Quarles. All three are owners of the company Archon Media based in Texas.
They are jointly or singly responsible for:
trafficKahuna - A set of Online Marketing and Promotion Tools - a snip at around $150 a month although you do seem to get advice and help too.
Video Post Robot - a tool for posting videos to multiple video sites
Orwell Pro a content finder and publishing tool - grabs content from content article directories etc.
Content Rover - searches for content from content article directories etc
PortalFeeder - a “suite Of Proven Web Business Building Software, Site Promotion Tools, Training, Mastermind Think-Tanks, Article Syndication & Link Exchange Networks, 71+ 648 Blog Network, And The Insider Secrets” with a brashy clashy sensationalist “Grab Your Seat And Join The Most Sought After, Elusive, Under The Radar, Group Of Web Marketing Superstars…” website.
I would say they are very qualified in teaching us how to make mooney online - as the ‘cow jumps over the mooney the little dog laughs all the way to the bank”
They are again sharing their wealth by holding a competition with prizes ranging from a 26” LCD TV/Monitor to a 1970s Disco Party Mac Daddy Pimp Costume - yes you read right. The only requirement to enter for the draw is to register to download a free ebook. JohnCow.com and Garry Conn had a contest of their own recently where they each launched a brand new domain and competed to see who could build a blog and sell it on sitepoint.com for the most money, all within 30 days. The “Cows” shared their strategy and gave us tips as they went along. The ebook is a compilation of this - a full start to finish case study.
I occasionally divert from the topic of blogging and take advantage of the power of blogging to spread the word about important causes. This one is especially dear to my heart as my third child, a son, is fully affected by Fragile X Syndrome. I am a carrier and had a 50/50 chance of passing carrier status or the full mutation on to each of my children, although I did not know this before he was born. I have not been able to trace any other instances of it in my family although I know my mother was a carrier too and either her mother or father passed this on to her.
I have written a post over at the Aussie Bloggers blog which gives more specific details on the Syndrome and will add links for more information at the end of the post so I will talk here more in terms of my experiences.
When my third son was born, I knew there was a problem almost right from the start. Although I was told that I should not compare his progress to that of my other children, who tended to be early in their milestones, my little Fraggle was behind in everything. On top of this he was allergic to so many foods, threw up constantly, had recurring ear infections, had problems with a turn in his eye and had the strange but endearing habits of flapping his hands when excited. He did not seem to have a lot of physical strength but could get into positions that would make a contortionist proud. At age 18 he is still so flexible that he chooses to sit watching TV with is chin propped up by his foot! We seemed to spend half our life visiting doctors when he was young. I know now that all of his symptoms added up to Fragile X Syndrome. He has an intellectual disability, autistic and ADD (attention deficit disorder) symptoms and sensory defensiveness particularly to smell and sound. Recently anxiety has become a problem. He loves the footy but cannot attend matches because of the crowd noise.
He was not diagnosed until he was nearly 4 because at that stage even pediatricians had not heard of it. Since then it has become more widely known thanks to the efforts of those involved in Fragile X groups and organizations around the world but there is still a way to go.
You may ask why you need to know about Fragile X if you do not have a family member or a friend’s family affected by it.
For a start you may know someone who is affected but this person does not have an intellectual disability. Affected girls may be average learners at school with a weakness in maths. They may be shy, have difficulty with eye contact and suffer from anxiety. Up to 6% of children diagnosed with Autism have Fragile X Syndrome. If a child has developmental and learning problems with autistic symptoms but not enough to be diagnosed with Autism it could well be Fragile X. Although there is no cure for Fragile X, as yet, the therapies and medications used to treat it can be very effective in reducing many of the problems associated with it. Diagnosis is very important.
You or someone you know may be a carrier, with none of the symptoms that characterise someone with the full mutation of the gene. The Fragile X gene seems to work overtime to compensate in carriers whereas the protein it produces is absent or in short supply in those affected.
Female carriers can have problems with irregular, infrequent menstrual cycles and early menopause and they have a greater chance of having twins. They have a higher tendency to suffer from anxiety, depression and shyness. As a carrier I am familiar with all of these, as was my mother. One in 256 women are carriers! Being aware of the reasons for it all, being treated appropriately and making some lifestyle changes made a huge difference to me. I read last week about a study showing that Fragile X can result in sleep problems because of a lack of a Circadian Rhythm. I am not sure if this applies to carriers too but it has always been the case with me. Working from home allows me to not have to worry about not having a sleep pattern. It comes in very useful when building web pages for overseas clients and I can converse with them during their working hours
Older male carriers have a high incidence of a condition called FXTAS (Fragile X Associated Tremors). If they are unaware that they are carriers this is often misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease.
I have started a Fragile X group on YouTube to gather together Fragile X videos made by professionals and families of people with Fragile X Syndrome. Here is one of my favorites:
There are quite a number of parents of children with Fragile X blogging - you can find some of them via the Fragile X Webring and on the blogrolls of these sites.
I would not normally ask this but please consider informing as many people as you can either about this post (or a Fragile X Site) to help this awareness day is be successful.
Congratulations to Jon Pfeffer and his father Steve on the completion of their mammoth bike ride, starting in Brisbane 4th May and finishing today in Broome. The Journey from east to west Coast Australia was over 5,000km so this is no mean achievement! Training and planning the event began back in October 2006. Jon’s stepbrother-in-law, Nick, joined them for the first 1,000km of the journey.
Steve and Jon have been riding to raise awareness for BeyondBlue and and awareness and funds for Plan Australia, which respectively work to fight depression and child poverty. They have been blogging about their preparation and journey on their Brisbane to Broome Charity Bike Ride site.
Romance was in the outback air when Jon proposed to his girlfriend Emelie, when he met her at Mt Isa airport on 30th May. The sign on the ground says “Will you marry me?”. Many congratulations Emelie and Jon.
If you want to offer your congratulations you could do so via the Brisbane to Broome Facebook Group. Donations to show your appreciation of the effort and dedication of these intrepid travellers and to support the work of Plan can be made on the Brisbane to Broome Everyday Hero Page.
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.
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.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:
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!
You can probably tell by the length of this list that I have not been posting this, what is meant to be a weekly news feature, weekly. For someone who advises on blogging I sometimes do not adhere to my own advice. I have been having fun and a few headaches coding and designing a CMS site, using Wordpress, for the newly amalgamated National Fragile X Association of Australia. I am not ready to give you the link to it yet as it is still full of Lorem ipsums. Even if you could read the Latin it is tedious and repetitive
To save you from eye strain and the possibility of losing concentration from a long long post, I am splitting my news into two this week. In any case you may find something of interest in the links, follow them, and not come back here to read the rest.
News
Influential Blogger is running a writing project which aims to identify The Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs in 2008, blogs that started after 1st July 2007. Entering the project requires that you write a post with your choice 10 (or less) of emerging influential blogs. The Cut-off date and time for submission of entries is July 30, Wednesday, 5:00 pm. More details and lists of previous weeks submissions can be seen on the Influencial Blogger site. Even if you do not enter it is always interesting to find new quality blogs.
Blog Catalog is conducting broadcasts at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/blogcatalog every other Monday night. The first two broadcasts were “Twitter for Beginners” and how to increase your blog’s traffic using social media tools. The next broadcast, 30th June explores the World of Online Streaming Video. I am rather late publishing this aren’t I!
Have you heard about blogger Vlad being sued by eperks for comments that were made on a paid review he did? (the comments would you believe!) Andy Beard and others have been supporting Vlad through his ordeal.
Andy’s post also gives us a good way to search for up to date posts and the latest news about a particular subject - simply by doing a search on Friendfeed. Here is an example using the query “eperks”
100 Awesome Webmaster Blogs by and for Women I came across this one via a twitter message. I will leave it to you to decide if the blogs are awesome - I cannot be objective as I am included in the list
How to Create a Rock-Solid Tagline That Truly Works - Copyblogger gives us some useful tips on creating taglines or slogans that capture the essence of your site. This is something I have always struggled to do.
Twingly Blog Search - promises to be a spam free blog search engine. Twingly search excludes spam by working “outwards from selected high quality blogs, discovering and including only those that are linked directly or indirectly to the quality “seeded blogs.”
Tomorrow I will post the other regular Blogosphere News sections:
Social Networking News
Search Engine News
Blogger and Wordpress News
It is part of my dastardly plot to get you to come back and visit me, as I miss your comments when I do not post as frequently as I should. (my Technorati ratings have been slipping too - you really have to keep grinding away to retain those ratings don’t you? There is often no rhyme or reason to them at times? I have however gone up in Alexa’s eyes and am now no 6 in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Bloggers list (the list is now being hosted by crazy meezer) but have slipped down 3 to no 25 in the Top 100 Australian Blog index. Google Analytics reckons I was getting between 3-4000 unique hits a day in early June and now it is less than 200. (A Google Gaff I think as I do not believe the 1000’s and do not want to believe the low 100’s).
Sueblimely |
Category: Blog in Unity |
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The true identity(ies) of John Cow have been 
