The one blog post I have written which got the most attention was on my old blog, called ‘My Ten Thoughts on Successful Blogging’. It received quite a few links and comments, and it was pretty clear that I had got a few things wrong. So, taking some criticisms from the original post, and adding in some of the stuff I have learnt over the last year or so, I thought I would give it another go.

Continue reading “My Ten Thoughts on Successful Blogging: Redux”

Today, I have been doing some work on a side blogging project that I have been thinking about for a while. I’d got the remit of the blog sorted, a name, decided (as usual) on WordPress and on the K2 theme. Everything sorted. So, I went to my webhosts domain registry page, and looked up the URL I wanted.

It has already gone, as had the other couple of TLDs I was interested in. I had a look at the one site that was up and running, using the address I wanted, and was shocked.

The blog was about what my blog was going to be about. It had, as mentioned before, the name I wanted. It used WordPress. It used K2 as the theme. And he had done it all today.

Just how weird is that? Back to the drawing board for me, anyway.

[tags]blogging, wordpress, k2[/tags]

Since Lee (who is rapidly losing my respect) has pooh-poohed my earlier attempt at a logo for B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S., and even Amsterdam-resident Neville thought it a little on the risque-side, I have attempted another one.

I thought this might suitably reflect the feelings of most Bollockers (is that the right collective noun?).

Thoughts, chaps?

AJ’s blog features a nice piece on keeping your desktop free. It’s Windows specific, but the principles could be applied to any OS, I guess.

I am with him on this one. The idea of having icons on the desktop is inefficient and, well, rubbish. I use my desktop purely as a temporary holding station for downloaded files before they are put away or deleted. By the time I switch my PC off at night, there is only the Recycle Bin left on show. Because of this use of the desktop as a place for downloaded files I don’t follow AJ’s advice that you should use the Windows option to turn all icons off – they can be handy sometimes.

I also very, very rarely touch the Start menu – again, I just think that they are rubbish, and it depressed me a bit when I installed Ubuntu and Mandriva and found that they use a similar system. I personally use a quick-launch bar, with all the apps on it I use regularly, which is displayed at the top of the screen and which autohides when not in use.

I still think the most efficient and the most user-friendly way of operating a PC is through the keyboard. When I had Google Desktop Search installed on my old PC, I really liked the little search field on the sidebar that would auto-complete and hunt out whatever I was after, whether a file or an application. This sort of thing would form the basis of my ideal OS.

Instead of having to click on a box, though, you should be able to just start typing. Where there is more than one file with a similar name, such as a word processed document, a spreadsheet, an email and a webpage with the same name, then options appear to let me choose which one I want. Likewise, an option could appear to create a new document of some sort with that name.

So, no matter what you are doing, the method of doing it is the same. This could be taken further with task based search words, so I could type “burn cd” which would locate the CD burning software on my machine. The search “type letter” would bring up a word processor. This way, the need to know exactly what bit of software performs which task would disappear.

IN MY WORLD, THIS IS HOW THINGS WOULD BE.

Lee Hopkins, antipodean blogger extraordinaire and contributor to Shel and Neville‘s For Immediate Release podcast, and I have been bantering on various posts about the lack of an offline blog editor that, well, does what we want it to. This led me to make an utterly idiotic suggestion.

There was a recent flurry among the blogging PR community recently about the International Association of Nobodies – an organisation created to provide a refuge for any blogger who has been bullied by another. My suggestion was that we take the IAN as an example and set up our own group: Blogger’s Off Line League Of Content Kreation Systems (the use of K in kreation, is not, as some have suggested, a pathetic attempt to create a childish acronym, but instead a calculated PR move that will certainly add to our appeal to the kidz).

Sadly, I had no idea that Lee was as juvenile as I am. He is certainly giving this project the serious attention it most definitely does not deserve. For God’s sake, he’s even asking for logo designs! Of course, I couldn’t possibly resist that challenge.

I felt that the real requirement here was to create a logo that represented the serious and professional nature of B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S. and this certainly does that. I mean, it would look great on a t-shirt, don’t you think?

So, how far can B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S. go, exactly? As far as we can stretch them, I say. As Lee wrote:

Whenever I next hear young men using the phrase, I shall instantly know that they are talking about offline blog editors.

My thinking exactly.

[tags]B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S., Blogger’s Off Line League Of Content Kreation Systems[/tags]

ajaxTunes is the latest in the line of web based desktop replacement services from Michael Robertson.

It claims to be:

…a web-based media player that lets you play, pause, forward and rewind high-quality streaming music straight from the Internet on any computer. Try ajaxTunes immediately, it has been preloaded with a demo account containing more than 25 songs encoded at 192kbps from different albums and a great mix of playlists from select artists. Or, create your own music locker and choose from over 40,000 songs to create your personal playlists. ajaxTunes is a fully interactive application that will allow you to connect to hours of music, FREE.

To be honest, I am still not sure how it works. It says later on you can use something called www.sideload.com to add your own music to your portable library. This seems to be a step on from the other ajaxLaunch stuff which didn’t offer the chance of hosting files – they had to be saved on your PC or USB key – albeit via a third party.

It doesn’t seem to offer the ability to play music saved locally, which is a shame.

[tags]ajaxtunes[/tags]

So, having had a look at a few offline blog editors, what stuff is missing from them all that would be nice to have?

How about being able to moderate and manage comments offline too? It seems dumb being able to post from an editor, only to have to log into your blog’s Admin screen to check on comments. It could make the editor a one-stop-shop for the day-to-day management of a blog.

[tags]offline editors[/tags]

New page: WordPress.

[tags]WordPress[/tags]

Have added four more header images to keep things interesting:

The discussion about offline blog editors only covers a certain amount of the different ways one can blog. For example, one could:

• Use a blog’s inbuilt editor
• Use an offline editor
• Use a browser extension
• Sending posts in via email
• Post link lists automatically from del.icio.us
• Post photos and text from Flickr
• Post news and stories from Digg

I use all of the above, except for the emailing option, which I have never got working with WordPress, though I did when I used Blogger for a short while. I can actually see the use of it, for example, it would allow to blog when mobile by sending an email with my mobile phone.

Most of the uses of these blogging methods are pretty obvious. Posting from Flickr is the easiest way to get a photo onto a blog, and it offers the chance to edit the text. From Digg is a nice way of quickly getting an item from there onto your blog. The pain with these things is the need to edit the post afterwards to add a category or tidy up some formatting.

I tend to use Performancing for Firefox for many of my posts – especially those quick thoughts on something I have read or a change I have just made to my blog. It’s a quick and easy way of getting a post written without letting the momentum slide. I use an offline editor to write longer posts, or ones that just take longer to write. Like this one – I started it last night, and have revisited it several times today before finally posting.

But the WordPress editor still comes in handy, especially when I am blogging from away from home – like in the office, as well as for tarting up and correcting previous entries.

Of course, this isn’t to mention all the other software I use to blog, like The GIMP for photo editing, Writely for taking quick notes or recording thoughts to be expanded on later, Meebo to discuss ideas with other people, and talk things through.

[tags]blogging, wordpress, flickr, digg, blogjet, performancing[/tags]

I have installed a couple of extra WordPress plug-ins – one seems to work nicely, the other, well, less so.

First up is Comment Quicktags which adds little buttons above the comment form to help people out with formatting HTML in posts.

The other one is Simple Recent Comments, which you can see in the sidebar on the right. Only, those aren’t the most recent comments for this blog. Oh, no. They are the last comments left on davebriggs.net, my old blog. Useful! Hopefully the chap behind the plug-in, Raoul, will get back to me soon, as it is a nice little addition to the site.

Update: All sorted. The recent comments plug-in makes explicit reference to tables in the database, and assumes that the prefix for the tables is “wp_” which is the default for all WordPress installations. But those of us that run more than one blog from one database, like me, then t just picks up the comments from the blog that uses that prefix – which is my original blog. All I had to do was edit the plug-in file and change the table prefixes to those for this blog. Phew! I was seriously freaked out for a while!
[tags]WordPress[/tags]

Following all the recent discussion about offline blog editors, I thought I would give Zoundry a pop, following a recommendation that appeared in my comments from Dan Masters. It’s another free one, and I’m using version 1.0.18 to write this post.

I may as well get it out of the way now: I don’t like it. I genuinely believe that one’s initial reaction to a piece of software is the most important, and from the off I just didn’t get Zoundry. Part of the problem is the cluttered interface:

And the image handling is a bit of a nightmare too. I selected the option to use my blog’s file upload feature rather than Zoundry’s own FTP system, and to be honest, writing this now, I haven’t a clue what it is going to do. The screenshot file I inserted above was automatically reduced down to a thumbnail, but I don’t think it is linked to the original, so I am guessing I will have to sort that out manually later. Update: to be fair to Zoundry, it inserted thumbnails and added links to the full size originals. Using the WordPress filesystem is also an improvement on what BlogJet does – as it keeps all uploads in the same place. Shame the UI doesn’t make it clear just how good a feature this is!

Another user interface problem is in the link box. I select the word I want to link from, hit the (tiny) link button, type in the URL, and the link title, and hit return. Nothing happens. I sigh, and move the mouse to click on ok.

The joy of BlogJet, my #1 offline editor, is it’s simplicity. It has some pretty good features, but the interface is clear and clean and much more pleasant to use:

But Zoundry does have some nice features: being able to tag posts with a number of services, rather than just the standard Technorati, Qumana-style automatic insertion of links from the clipboard, downloading your blog’s entire history to a local backup (it would be interesting to know if this could be used to run two blogs, say one at your normal location, and a ‘backup’ blog at a hosted service, like WordPress.com, say).

But it is the interface that does it for me. Too cluttered, too ugly and the text formatting buttons are way too small. So for me, BlogJet is still my favourite, with Qumana a useful backup option.

Technorati : Zoundry

Images

Inserting images in a blog post can be a tricky thing. This hit me when I set up a WordPress installation for some friends who wanted to have their photos on the site. There a few ways of doing it, I suppose, in WordPress (and probably others):

• Resizing the image manually with a graphics editing program, making thumbnails, FTPing them to your server, and linking to them as normal
• Using an offline blog editor to upload the files to the host and resize them for you (BlogJet does this – I don’t think Qumana does)
• Using the facility built in to WordPress to upload a photo to your server and produce the thumbnails on the fly
• Using an image hosting facility like Flickr or Photobucket to host, resize and link to your image. Flickr allows you to blog images straight from its own interface. This is the only real option available to a hosted blogger, unless they use Blogger and Google‘s godawful Hello thing.

In the end, I chose the third option, despite the fact that I ended up writing some pretty lengthy instructions on the topic. WordPress’ inbuilt image uploader and handler works really nicely, the pop-up image options are pretty easy to use. The obvious problem for real technophobes is that while WordPress generates a thumbnail for you, you may have to resize the original anyway, especially if it originated from a digital camera.

The next problem in WordPress is arranging the damn things once they are there. The only real way to do it is tables, and it is a real pain. I found the best way to do it was to insert each photo one by one into the editor, then open the HTML dialogue and insert the table tags around them. For my friends, I just said that if you have more than one image, then drop me an email. Writing up that one would just be a pain in the neck for all concerned.

Clearly, WordPress needs to have some sort of built in table manager, or some other way of arranging images in a post.

Qumana

As you can see from the tag at the bottom of this post, I am giving Qumana another try, for the odd longer post now and again. My interest has been piqued again after the various posts from people like Neville Hobson, Lee Hopkins and Allan Jenkins As Tris from Qumana knows, I usually find things to moan about. There are a few of things it is still missing in Beta 3:

• The above mentioned image handling thing
• An autoreplace function. This is present in BlogJet, and allows me to type, say, WordPress, which is automatically replaced with the HTML to link back to the WordPress site. The camel-case means this is unlikely to happen by accident!
• Ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete whole words. Can it, please?

One thing I love: adding hyperlinks. Qumana automatically copies whatever is in the clipboard into the dialogue, meaning I just have to hit return, as invariably I have copied the link from BlogLines or somewhere. And if I haven’t, the text is selected, so I can just type over it.

Tags: images, WordPress, Qumana

Powered by Qumana

Tiger Admin is a nice little plug-in for WordPress which makes the admin panel far more aesthetically pleasing. For a comparison, here are a couple of screenshots, of the standard and the modded view.

I know which I prefer!

[tags]WordPress, plug-ins[/tags]

The AJAX Shoutbox is a great little WordPress plug-in, which works really well. If you would like to have a place for visitors to leave a quick comment, it’s ideal.

[tags]WordPress, plug-ins, AJAX[/tags]