Blogging Sueblimely

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
• Awesome Gmail Trick To View Contact Conversations
• 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.
• Do You Suffer from Blogger Imposter Syndrome? by ProBlogger

Blogging Tools

• How To Embed an RSS Feed On Your Website or Blog? In case you want to add a separate webpage to your blog that you are going to update and want people to be informed about it when you 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).

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ) has just approved key proposals to relax the rules on domain names which opens the way for more customization and flexibility. Domain names will now be allowed to use any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin characters.

Top level domain (TLD) names (the 2 or 3 letters after the dot) will not have to conform to the existing name conventions. So instead of .com we may be seeing .blog, .xxx or .sex to identify a site. Second level domain names (the bit before the dot) could use a TLD as a keyword giving more options for creativity in naming – .travel, .hotel, .photo. craft, .shop, .safeway. Towns and cities would not have to just rely on a country TLD name – .melbourne .waggawagga. The possibilities are endless, although a name will have to be either memorable, descriptive, distinctive or follow conventions taken up by similar niches to be of much use.

This opens the floodgates to domain name registration. Popular .com keynames words suddenly become free again to be recreated with a different TLD extension. Interesting thought – I wonder if ing or ed will become popular – twitter.ing, digg.ing, learn.ed stumble.ed, flickr.ed. We will not see these particular examples of course because of copyright on the second level domain name (the bit before the dot). So we will not witness google.oogle, msn.acronym, abc.def, windows.liveordead, microsoft.hard nor ICANN.ucannot ask.andlearn. I could go on forever making up names like that but will restrain myself and leave you to come up with some for yourself

There are advantages for users as well as domain name owners. Users will be able to distinguish what a site is about more easily if it has a distinctive TLD. I hope search engines and browsers will come up with a way for us to easily filter out certain TLD names. For example, it would be good to filter out shopping sites if we were just looking for information rather than to buy or vice-versa. I can see it now – a Firefox extension called shopaholic. Search engines relying on advertising revenue may not be so keen on this idea, however. Another advantage of this could be easier filtering out of adult sites to safeguard children although I imagine some of these sites would want to draw unsuspecting visitors in by having a special extension as well as one that does not distinguish it.

Here is an quick explanation by the BBC on the changes:

You can read more about the ICANN recommendation on their site

For Australian readers: The rules on transfer of an Australian domain name were relaxed as of 1st June this year. Now domain names are not strictly attached to businesses. Previously a name could not be transferred unless the business changed hands too. There will be a 6 month cooling off period before a sale can be finalized. It sounds as if you do have to have a good reason to sell however as the rules state that “It will not be allowable to register a domain name for the sole purpose of resale or transfer to a third party”. I would imagine an allowable change would include a situation where a domain name defines a product or service that a business no longer sells. More information is available on the The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) site.

Searching for an easy to use, flexible blogging and Content Management System (CMS) for a new site I am creating for a client, I came across Majestic, created by web development company Injader.

I need to create a site which will allow multiple users to easily add news and additional pages, upload photos to a gallery. I have created a number of sites using the Joomla CMS system so that their users could update the sites themselves once I had set them up. Each time the sites have either remained unchanged or I have had to to the updates myself ; the admin interface was too hard for them to learn.

This time, WordPress was my main preference; with plugins and tweaks I could get it to do what was needed. It was not ideal but it was the best option that I was aware of – until I found Majestic. Majestic’s inbuilt features immediately attracted me, providing all the functionality I needed, and a simple admin interface means my clients will be able to start blogging without a steep learning curve. I was sueblimely happy with my discovery Not only does Majestic provide a simple blogging solution but has extras that even WordPress cannot provide, such as more flexible user permissions. Plugins being developed by Injader will also provide more advanced uses if you need them. Apologies if this sounds like an advertisement, I do tend to be enthusiastic about such finds.

Another discovery I made was that Majestic has been developed by Ben Barden, whose blog I have been reading for quite some time and who I know from the Aussie Blogger’s Forums as a knowledgeable and helpful contributor. I have asked Ben to write a guest post to give you more info on Majestic and an opportunity for you to have your questions answered – so if there is any more you would like to know about Majestic please ask in the comments here.

News

• Daniel of Blogging Tips has initiated RSS Awareness Day to take place 1st May. The objective – to get as many people as possible talking about RSS and its benefits. Read his blog for More details on how to get involved.
• If there is a web article that you do not have time to read there and then consider using Instapaper which, via a browser bookmarklet, saves the details for reading later. You could, instead, just leave a multitude of tabs open with the intent of coming back to them, slowing your browser down until it eventually crashes (I don’t recommend this although I often use this method!) or you could bookmark or favorite to a folder called “read later”.

 

• Liz Strauss – SOBCon08 and Utterz announce the
  GET MY MESSAGE Contest!! Do a Commercial for Your Blog.

Reading

• Blog Profiling Sites Declare War! Who Wins…? It seems BlogCatalog is gaining favor and MyBlogLog is declining. I personally favor BlogCatalog since the new features were introduced.
• The 100 top Web apps for 2008
  These are the 100 best Web 2.0 applications, chosen by Webware readers and Internet users across the globe. Over 1.9 million votes were cast to select these Webware 100 winners:

Blogging Tools

• 55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your Feeds! – the title says it all.
• Fontcubes is a free font site in beta.

Social Networking

• Oziwi is a Ning based social networking site for “Connecting people Down Under all over the world”.
• SocialVibe is an online popularity contest that turns corporate advertising into money for charity. Add ads to your profile and gain points for the number of views. Review on ReadWriteWeb
• Shiftr - a new RSS aggregator service which is bad news for bloggers as it allows comments via their service rather than on our blogs. Read more at the Blog Herald: The Shyftr Saga

WordPress

• Wordbook - a plugin that lets you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Your Facebook profile will also show your most recent blog posts.
• Free, Premium and custom WordPress themes are available at Blog Oh!Blog I thought the free Tutorial theme interesting.

Image via Wikipedia

News

Darren Rowse is holding a Speed Posting weekend on Problogger – It is a long weekend here in Australia because of Friday’s Anzac Day public holiday so I am not certain if the “weekend” is starting Friday or Saturday – it could even be Friday in Australia but Saturday in USA

Darren has gathered 20 questions from his Twitter followers and will be providing a short answer to these and then throwing them open to readers to add their own responses. Sounds like there may be some real communication going on in the comments. As an added incentive Darren is giving away prizes to 3 readers who comment.

It is Darren’s birthday on Sunday so let us give him a gift by making this a bumper commenting weekend for him. Happy Birthday, Darren.