Blogging Sueblimely

Following up from my last post about tasks to complete before and after publishing a blog post, Post Writing a Blog Post Post, as promised I am going to talk about my favorite tools that you can use to automate or speed up this process:

Spelling and Grammar

To automatically check your spelling and grammar “After the Deadline” is available as a stand alone plugin for WordPress or as an add-on to the Tiny MCE plugin, as an add on for Firefox and Chrome and as an OpenOffice.org extension.

Keywords and SEO

A WordPress SEO plugin is a must have to ensure you have the optimal information and keywords to help your post be listed and found. I use either WordPress SEO or All in One SEO.

Layout

I write and preview my posts in Firefox but to make sure that nothing is breaking the layout in the, not yet totally compliant, Internet Explorer I use the View in IE Firefox addin. This adds a “View in IE” item to the right click menu; click on this on any webpage and IE opens with the weppage loaded.

Sharing/Bookmarking a Blog Post

There are many tools available for sharing your post on bookmarking and social networking sites; some are browser toolbar buttons, some full toolbars. Use of a button or toolbar is a matter of personal preference although too many toolbars can slow your browser down and reduce your viewing area although Buttonizer for Firefox hides/displays your toolbars easily. I like the functionality of toolbars but only add a few and use different profiles with different toolbars for different internet uses (personal and business).

Don’t forget to make full use of tags where they are available to further enhance your keyword optimization.

• OnlyWire If you take the time to join up and add the supported bookmark and social networking sites this tool automatically sends your posts to all your services. A great time saver. The disadvantage is that if you are a free member you have to add the OnlyWire share button to the bottom of your posts. but you may have other share buttons that you prefer to use. OnlyWire works with most blog platforms by using a script and there is a plugin that adds it for you in WordPress.
• If you use WordPress and don’t want to use OnlyWire you can add a different share this type button that shows on each of your posts. You can make full use of this yourself and submit your own post. I am trying Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share as well as OnlyWire on this blog right now. Shareaholic and Add This for Firefox are other tools that allow you to submit your post to a wide range of sites at the click of a button. For links to these and to more resources for Firefox only please visit my Firefox Collection Sueblimely Social Networking Tools. This includes bookmarklets, toolbars and utilities for Stumbleupon, Digg, Facebook, Twitter and more. Please bear in mind that certain sites such as Stumbleupon do not approve of you submitting too much of your own content.
• I use the bit.ly url shortener service and their toolbar bookmarklet to share posts on Facebook and Twitter. Creating a free account allows you to add your FB and Twitter accounts. Clicking on the bookmarklet when on your post page will open bit.ly with your post title and the short link already entered in a box that you can add to or edit.. Click on publish and your message will be published to your choice of the FB and Twitter accounts you have set up.
• Delicious bookmarklets for all browsers and a toolbar. There are also various Firefox add-ins that have functions such as showing your bookmarks in the sidebar.
• Diigo tools – bookmarklets and toolbar available for FF, IE Chrome
• The Rockmelt browser had many social networking tools already built in to it. I use the browser although, because of the inbuilt updates from my friends, it can be a distraction if I am working.

Social Networking

Visit your blogging friends and contacts and leave a comment. This is one of the most pleasant sides of blogging. You get to know other bloggers, read content that interests you and, signing in to comment, automatically adds a backlink to your site. To speed up this process you can add a browser bookmarks folder or RSS reader folder that includes these blogs. Blogs that have a higher ranking are the most useful to comment on (such as this one with a rank of 3 – it was 4 until the latest Google update). I will do this for SEO purposes but most often comment on a blog because of its content and author. I enjoy giving encouragement by commenting on brand new blogs too.

As I have not had time to post about what is happening in the world of blogging and social networking or report on my own web building research and activities, I have not blogged at all. Facebook and Twitter have become my way of communicating in my online world.

As I miss the social networking that blogging brings I have decided to keep on blogging but on matters that do not take me hours and hours to research.  It was always my aim to be original and to offer something to my readers that they could not find elsewhere. As “how to blog” blogs have become  so commonplace now, I do not want to merely talk about issues that have already been covered. I can use my twitter account for posting links to articles I think are useful. I will continue posting about tools and resources that I use, those I think will be useful to you too, but not spend time trying out everything new that comes out just so that I can report on them.

It took me a year or so after it came out to see through the spammy applications and their endless updates to accept Facebook for the communication tools it offers. I have connected with family I have not seen for 30 years (who live across the world) and joined in an active international online support community for Fragile X Syndrome, a condition my son suffers from.

Creating Facebook pages has given me the opportunity to work on raising awareness of Fragile X and linking to resources for parents, carers and therapists so they can find their way through the maze to find the most useful information. This is not only part of my role as a Fragile X Association of Australia committee member but a passion of mine. It took me nearly 4 years to get a diagnosis for my son as even the medical profession had not heard of the condition so I had to set out and find out myself. The situation has improved but many remain undiagnosed, leading to problems for them in regards to getting the correct therapy, medication and funding at school. Did you know Fragile X is the leading known proved cause of Autism? Did you know that 1 in 126 women are carriers and carriers have problems with conceiving, early menopause, anxiety and depression. Male carriers develop a condition called FXTAS and are most often incorrectly misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and not given the right treatment.

Facebook personal and community pages are also good for promoting blogs of course. I do not recommend merely posting links to your blog posts but to develop a substantial list of “friends”, including other bloggers, and interact with them. Send them messages, share some of their links and respond and press the like button on their messages.

Coming up:

• Tools for posting to Twitter and Facebook,making it less time consuming, and how to create a daily user subscribe email message of your posts.
• A rave about versatility of the default Facebook Theme “TwentyTen” and making child themes.

Collections are a newly introduced Firefox site feature that allow you to save lists of your favorite add-ons (extensions, toolbars, Greasemonkey scripts) to your Firefox profile.

A subscribe option allows you to add the collections of others to your favorites and track when these are updated. These user created collections are ranked by the amount of subscribers they have attracted.

The Firefox Collections page allows you to view lists of Editor’s Picks (so far only Firefox Created Collections), Popular Collections, your own and your favorite Collections. The lists are searchable by most popular all time, most popular this week or month and newest. A keyword search box is also provided.

Social networking aspects are involved here.

• You are able to keep up to date with new extensions added by those whose knowledge you respect. I first heard of collections via the blog post Best Of Breed Firefox Collection For SEO, Bloggers & Internet Marketers, by Andy Beard, whose collection I subscribed to immediately.
• You can subscribe to the collections of current friends and develop more contacts.
• By publicizing and gaining subscribers for your own collections, the higher your own profile will reach in the collection rankings.
• For bloggers this could lead to more visitors and regular readers.

It has taken me a while to get back into the swing of blogging after being away on holiday but life is now back to it’s normal routine. As usual I have tried out the tools I review so here are my own Firefox Collections: These are based on those I use and those I have found useful but have had to delete from my default Firefox profile to keep the number of add-ins down. The more you have the slower the browser.

• Social Networking Firefox extensions and toolbars that help you interact with your social networks and communicate with your contacts. I keep my most used in my default profile but have a social networking profile for times when I wish to do nothing else but catch up with my network contacts.
• Blogging- blog writers, web design and image tools for blogging.
• Sueblimely Using Add-ons- the add-ins I use with my default Firefox profile.

For an explanation of why and how to use different profiles please checkout my post Speed Up Your Firefox Browsing

Advantages of Using Online Bookmarking

Bookmarking services such as delicious came along very early before the surge of services of the social media revolution. They could now even be considered the start of it, although at the beginning bookmarking was probably considered more of an online service than a sharing activity. The popularity of social bookmarking rating sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and Reddit left ordinary bookmarking in the shadow.

However interesting, popular and up to date the content on the rating sites may be, they are not as useful for reference or research purposes as the bookmarking sites. I see two three main reasons for this.

Because our digging and stumbling is "social" we add sites that our friends favor or those that we want to get noticed, for ourselves or for others. What reaches the top is often more about how many contacts the originator of the bookmark has rather than the quality of the content. I will digg and stumble all sorts of topics which, although they may interest me, I will never look for again. I regularly refer to my diigo bookmarks.

Secondly, despite the availability of tagging, tags are either not totally relevant to the content, or they are tagged inappropriately, on rating sites. Digg’s range of categories reflect its News and Video purpose but not the broad range of topics it is actually used for. Stumbleupon allows more flexibility, but it is unusual to see full advantage being taken of this, meaning a search for a topic of a given tag brings unsatisfactory results. Lately I have noticed an increase in mis-tagged articles either: through mistake or mischief. I have never done a search on these sites, whereas I regularly do so on diigo and delicious. The social features of the latter also allow me to add contacts who bookmark topics I am interested in and whose tags I can refer to.

Finally, although the delicious type bookmarking sites may not be not used to their best advantage, as far as tag applying is concerned, it is still far easier to find relevant information on a given topic and information does not get so easily lost over time. The rating sites are all about what is new. This is fine if you are looking for breaking news or for such things as the latest happenings in the entertainment industry or the latest scientific findings. They are not the place to go for research on factual and non changing information. On the plain old bookmarking sites people add articles that may be years old but still of value. The best of these are bookmarked the most bringing the most valuable information to the fore.

My personal favorite bookmarking site is diigo because it has more advanced features than others and it also automatically posts all my bookmarks to Delicious which, after using for years, I was loath to let go of completely. Today I discovered an excellent reason for using the diigo/delicious combination for duplication. Ma.gnolia, one of the main bookmarking sites, lost all their bookmarks! Their database is unretrievable.

The tagging, relevance and searchability of the bookmarking sites make them a valuable tool for research and for bloggers they can be a useful resource for your readers too. I add bookmarks to sites I believe you will find of use on diigo and therefore also on delicious.

Move over Entrecard, make way for CMF Ads (Changing Marketing Forever) and make money at the same time as promoting your blog. Not only can you earn credits on CMF Ads by advertising on your blog, and use these credits to advertise on other blogs, you can buy and sell credits from CMF too: a credit costs $0.25. Member blogs are manually checked to ensure quality.

How does CMF Ads work?

You can see the CMF Ad slots in my sidebar – there are various combinations to choose from, ranging from one Ad spot to a 4 in one block. The Ad widget runs in iframes so as not to slow your page load time.

You set your own price for the cost of advertising on your own site; so there is no being priced out of the market, as with Entrecard. You can change your price to suit your current situation. Ads, which last for a month, are rotating so you can accept multiple ads at a time. I currently have 5 ads running between the two ad spots, at a cost of 3 credits each. If you have more than one blog then you can manage these all from the one account.

Dropping in on other sites is not necessary as you get to know other members through the CMF forums. These have proved to be very friendly and helpful. although I am not surprised considering the bloggers who have spent a great deal of time to set the service up: coming up with the idea to begin with, coding the site, refining and testing it. I was fortunate to have been accepted as a beta tester, although, to my knowledge, everything was running smoothly even at that stage.

The forums, as well as providing help and support on CMF, allow you to join groups to promote your other social networking profiles (Stumbleupon and Twitter so far). A post of the week competition, decided on by a poll of members, allows you to submit your posts to gain some extra recognition. A blog critique forum will give you feedback on your site. The Marketplace section allows you to offer services in exchange for buying an ad on someone’s site or to offer/request guest posts, site design or paid blogging jobs.

CMF Ads Control Panel:

| CP Home | Find Ads | Manage Ads | Ad Stats | Balance | Buy Credits |

Statistics show you the number of page views and how many clicks have been made on the ads on your own site and how many have been produced by your ad on other sites. Individual profile pages show a rank and the number of unique visitors to a site over time. These tools help you to place your ads to the best effect and a categorization system allow you to target your ads to a selected audience.

Who created CMF Ads?

So who are the people behind CMF Ads? – Three bloggers who were heavily involved with Entrecard..

Firstly, Ben Barden, a banana loving, Dr Evil look alike with diabolical vision, who has been an honorary Aussie for the last year or so. We will be sorry to lose you back to England, Ben. He is the author of Ben Barden (not surprisingly), Top Ten Blog Tips, Zen Working and the developer of Injader. If you are not familiar with Injader, it is a CMS system, which provides blogging features like WordPress with the extra CMS features of a Joomla/Drupal type system (without the steep learning curve}.

Joining Ben is turnip and Stan. Turnip of Turnip of Power is a wonderful source of knowledge with tutorials and balanced reviews on blogging, advertising networks and the best social networking practices (he puts the latter into practice well himself too). I did not know Stan until I joined CMF, where is he very helpful in the forums- nothing to do with his blogging ability rather his blog topic Fantasy Baseball – I am not a baseball fan.

Joining Up

If you join up (by registering with the forums) please let me know here – I have some credits available for advertising and if I advertise on your site then you will gain credits yourself.