An online notebook
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An online notebook
Contactify is a great little service which gets around the old problem of putting your email address on a web page.
How it works is this: you register and provide your details, and Contactify provides you with a URL which you can link to for people to contact you. It presents a standard form, with fields for name, email, subject and message, saving you the hassle.
Nice.
Second on my list of tips was to make sure you are using the systems that suit how you work. What sort of things am I talking about?
How do you blog?
A blog is of course just a website, and you could write your blog by updating some HTML pages by hand. Some people probably do. But there are a wealth of systems out there that will help make your blogging experience easier, as well as making things more fun for your readers. There are some decisions to be made, though. Do you want to have your blog at a hosted service (like this one is) or have your own webspace, and domain name and install a system there? Do you want to pay for anything? Do you like editing your posts through a web page or would you like to have the peace of mind of an offline editor? I’ll go through these questions in more detail.
Systems, systems, systems
There are many blog engines out there, online services which act as content management systems, theoretically allowing you to concentrate on the content while the engine does all the hard work for you. Some of the more famous and popular ones are Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Drupal, TextPattern and many more. I use WordPress, both at this site and on my personal blog. I genuinely think it is the best platform there is, in terms of features and ease of use. Most services offer a free version, whether only as a trial or forever so it’s worth playing around with them. Many also offer the ability to import the posts you have made in one system into another, so you can carry your experiments around with you.
For a beginner though, it is probably best recommending starting a blog at either Blogger, WordPress.com or Typepad to start with.
To host or not to host?
Well, it’s certainly a question. The difference is basically one of time and effort. For example, if you go down the hosted route, there is no installing of possibly complicated software, no web hosting costs, no domain name renewals and so on. But if you did host your own blog, you would get the chance to customise your blog engine’s installation, using plug-ins and other third party extensions, you could completely redesign your site’s look or use one of thousands of available templates. You could also implement an advertising programme to try and earn some money back on your investment. Using a hosted service also often means you can’t have your own snappy URL, and it might be the case that your chosen address for your blog is no longer available, which can be very annoying!
It is probably fair to say that the best option for the beginner is to try out a hosted service, as mentioned above, like Blogger, WordPress.com or TypePad. Then, when your blogging really takes off you can consider having a domain of your own and can start to experiment with your chosen blog engine.
On or offline?
All the main blog engines come with an editor built in. These are webpages you visit to either enter new posts or to edit existing ones. It means that you can do it wherever you are and you don’t have to bother installing new software.
But sometime that just isn’t enough. There are a whole heap of blog editors out there – effectively stripped-down, blog-enabled word processors, which sit on your machine like any other application and which allow you to type at your leisure – maybe at a laptop without an always-on internet connection. It means you can save posts and mull over them before you send them to your blog. And you can generally do that by just hitting a button. No copying-and-pasting required. They can also do other cool stuff, like uploading images for you, or adding tags to your posts, or presenting you with a preview of what your post will look like online.
I use offline editors for almost all my blogging – the almost being when I am away from my desktop PC at home. To be perfectly honest, I do not know why I prefer doing it this way, I just feel more comfortable with it and I believe that others do too. Maybe it’s the case that, despite flat rate always-on broadband connections, typing into a browser still makes me feel rushed.
The editors I have come across so far are as follows: BlogJet, Qumana, Zoundry, Live Writer and w.Bloggar. All bar BlogJet are currently free. There are others: RocketPost sounds great but doesn’t work; and Ecto has been buggy recently.
Summing up
Don’t rush into a choice of blog engines. Try out a hosted service first before splashing any cash. Do try using an offline blog editor if you find it helps you post more coherently!
Tags: blogger, wordpress, typepad, blogjet, qumana, w.bloggar, live writer, zoundry
Conducted by Rajen Sheth, manager of Google’s enterprise products, this video runs for nearly 18 minutes and covers everything from the personalized start page to the collaboration tools in apps like Google Docs and Spreadsheets. There’s also a heavy focus on using Gmail for more than just mail, like replying to users via instant message and automatically adding meeting requests to the calendar.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY2bpr1TAA4]
…but not at MyHouse, thankfully. The BBC reports:
A 17-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage in connection with a house party which left a family home wrecked.
About 200 youngsters damaged Alan and Elaine Bell’s home after the party was advertised on the website MySpace.
Guests are alleged to have urinated on a wedding dress and stolen jewellery from the house near Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham, on Easter Monday.
Durham Police said the girl had been questioned and released on police bail.
I had no idea that writing blog posts for future release was so easy with WordPress!
All you have to do is edit the “timestamp” for the post when you write it to be the day in the future when you want it published, and it automatically appears for you on that day – so simple!
This is ideal for Free as in Beer, where I write quick posts on no cost software. Sometimes I come across more than one cool app in a day, but using this method I can line them all up for publication.
Mike Arrington writes about WriteWith, a collaborative writing authoring platform which combines wikis, forums and ajax document editing.
Once you have finished writing, the document can be exported to MS Office or Openoffice.org format, or even published to a blog.
This could be an excellent tool for groups collaborating on documents across the web.
The Cabinet Office are launching a review into how social media can improve public engagement and empowerment:
Minister for the Cabinet Office Hilary Armstrong wants Government to harness the phenomenon of internet advice sharing sites and empower people with information that could help improve their lives.
There’s no point me writing much about this, as David Wilcox has already done so superbly:
On reflection, what is just as interesting is that Ministers and Civil Servants are becoming aware that presence on the Net is no longer a matter of creating – and controlling – your own web space. It is a matter of going to the places where people already are, and so ending up in many places at the same time.
I urge you to read David’s post in full.
Oliver Kamm in The Guardian:
In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed – and recorded for posterity – at public figures.
The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.
A remarkable view for a political blogger to hold, unless Mr Kamm considers himself a Proper Journalist these days.
It’s early days yet. Political blogging has only really taken off in the last couple of years in the UK. Sure, much of it is unbearably negative and full of inaccuracies, but the same could be said of pamphleteering.
Just because some political blogs aren’t particularly edifying, it doesn’t make the blog format a Bad Thing. In time, some balance will be restored, and as always, the quality will float to the top.
In the meantime, we will just have to trust ourselves to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction.