Posts with tag wordpress
Posted Oct 8th 2007 9:30AM by Ted Wallingford
Filed under: Developer, Text, Blogging
If you blog, or use web-based discussion forums, or use any sort of web mail app, then you know just how frustrating it can be to compose rich content with the limited tools provided for word processing on the web . To go from writing in a feature-rich word processor like Word to composing in a stripped-down text box with very little formatting functionality. Forget about embedding pictures, and definitely forget about embedding YouTube videos.
But
Wysiwyg Pro from ViziMetrics, now at version 3, makes life a little easier for those of us who spend plenty of time composing content for the web. This tool is a rich, web-based graphical editor that's compatible with Joomla, Wordpress, and Mambo, among other web content management systems. The editor provides full formatting capability, even allowing you to pre-program HTML code blocks as dockable toolbar buttons. This way, if you need to perform a repetitive task (say, put a blank floating table with room for a picture and caption in your posting), you needn't waste time typing code over and over. Wysiwyg Pro includes an editable, color-coded HTML source view as well as a draft preview.
Posted Aug 21st 2007 11:00PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Design, Developer, Blogging, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Love WordPress? Know how to set up, hack or write plug-ins for it? Then perhaps you might be interested in finding a
WordPress Job. Hosted at
jobs.wordpress.net (but apparently run by Automattic, developers of the now default
WordPress widgets plug-in), WordPress Jobs is a pretty straightforward site hosting job offers for those who need WordPress ninjas of every order. Heck, there are even a few blogging jobs up there, and one (as of this writing) is paying $5/post for a web 2.0 blogger. The two most populated categories right now are General Positions and Programmer Positions, but each of the categories offer RSS feeds to help you stay on top of that next killer WordPress gig.
Posted Aug 19th 2007 4:00PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software, web 2.0
Most blogging tools and web-based dashboards don't offer much in the way of graphically viewing your post schedule. You typically get a list of your posts that you can search and order by date, but that's about it. If you're blogging on WordPress and would like a more graphical view of your posts that should play well with just about any calendar app you're using, this
iCal-Posts plug-in by Gary King might be just the thing you're looking for. Offering a zero-config setup, you simply upload King's plug-in to your WordPress plug-in directory and activate, then add '?ical' to the end of your URL (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical). In our tests, this causes most browsers to download a .ICS file which was immediately opened by iCal on Mac OS X. Adding the URL to web calendars like Google Calendar also worked perfectly. If you would prefer to follow only a specific category in your calendar, you can tweak the URL by adding '&category=' (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical&category=blogging).
Gary King provides his iCal-Posts plug-in for free from his site.
Posted Aug 17th 2007 3:00PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Blogging, Social Software
For bloggers both old and new, a choice of blogging tool (or a switch) is a crucial step to make while building the empire. There are of course a boatload of choices, from
Drupal, to
Blogger and even the lightweight
Textpattern, but for the serious blogger that needs every ounce of power and customizability from their platform of choice,
WordPress and
Movable Type are the reigning kings across the web. They're both very mature products, and while WordPress has been open source from the start, Movable Type recently joined that party as well with a vastly updated UI and a strong set of features straight out the gate. But how can you decide which one to chose without having to muck around with their respective PHP and MySQL configurations just to get started?
Fortunately, Mashable has published a general
comparison of both platforms, ranking them in categories like ease of installation, usability and the all-important user community. We won't spoil the outcome though, because there are some great thoughts and tidbits about both platforms that can make or break the decision for some folks. You'll just have to head over and check out Mashable's comparison for yourself.
Posted Aug 10th 2007 3:10PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Design, Internet, Blogging, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Productivity, Yahoo!, Social Software, BlackBerry, iPhone, web 2.0
We've noticed various bloggers kicking around options for moblogging pictures. Some use Blogger, which has its own built-in moblogging options, while most others use something like WordPress, which doesn't have the most straightforward process for setting up a blog-by-email conduit. The one common thread among everyone one of these bloggers, however, seems to be that nearly every one of them has a Flickr account. If you're in this same bucket - wishing to moblog and using a service that doesn't have a moblogging flip to switch but you also have a Flickr account - you're in luck, because Flickr can serve as your one-stop hub for posting photos via email from a mobile device, while simultaneously auto-blogging each one at a wide variety of compatible services.
Fortunately, setting this all up isn't very difficult. All you need to do is log into your Flickr account, go to your account management page (click on your name/user name in the upper right) and then click on the Email tab. On that screen are two options: "Your Flickr upload email" and "Your blog upload email." As you mght guess, we're going to focus on the latter for now, and this
Upload by email link might take you straight there. If you haven't set up any blogs to use with Flickr, you'll be prompted with a setup wizard that walks you through allowing Flickr to post to your blog (and a surprising amount of blog systems are supported, including Manila, Vox, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress and more). Once you have that all set up, you should see a dialog much like the one in this post, allowing you to chose basic image layouts for your Flickr-powered moblog posts, as well as whether Flickr should post any text in the body of your email as text in the blog entry. Flickr even allows you to
add tags to your images when uploading via email, and it looks like those tags are stripped out when this is all converted into a blog post.
And there you have it - easy-breezy Flickr uploading + moblogging that doesn't require a fancy plug-in or PHP ninja skills.
Posted Jul 19th 2007 11:30AM by Grant Robertson
Got a Wordpress blog and a Facebook page? Why not hook the two up for some ultimate Facebook blogging bliss? The
official WordPress Facebook plugin has recently been released. Currently it appears to only work with Wordpress blogs hosted at Wordpress.com, but that still covers quite a large number of users.
Feedback on the application seems mixed so far, but if you're adventurous and willing to give it a shot, take a peek and see what you can do.
Posted Jul 10th 2007 12:00PM by Chris Gilmer
Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Blogging, Web services, Social Software
It's almost time for another installment of WordCamp, WordPress' very own conference. This is the
second year Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of the open source blogging platform is putting the event together.
WordCamp is a two day conference (an added day from last year), being held in the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA on July 21st, and 22nd. The cost is only $25 (and scholarships are available). Its going to be packed with both users and developers focusing on how to blog better, and what the future of WordPress will be. Everyone from Om Malik, Matt Cutts, Dave Winer, and Jeremy Wright will be there, ensuring that is the best $25 you have ever spent.
Matt has just informed us that tickets are going fast, but there are still a few left if you're going to be in the San Fran area. Check out some
pictures from last year's event.
Posted Jun 5th 2007 6:00PM by Dolores Parker
Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Open Source
Six Apart, the company behind
Movable Type, released Movable Type 4 (MT4) in beta today and announced it will create an open source version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform sometime this summer. Moving to open source will put MT4 in sync with its main competition, Wordpress, which is also open source.
Some new features include:
- Updated user interface with a dashboard overview of all your blogs
- Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT
- Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system
- Increased speed
MT4 is available for download and is looking for user feedback prior to its official open source release. With over 50 new features from its previous MT 3.0 incarnation, Six Apart hopes to gain some of its former users who switched to other platforms in response to MT 3.0's licensing requirements and fees.
MT4 has the following requirements:
- A standard web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x or higher, Apple Safari, Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox), and an FTP utility may be required.
- Operating Systems: Linux, Solaris/Unix, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows Server
- Web Servers: Apache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape
- Databases: MySQL 4.0 or greater, PostgreSQL, SQLite
MT4 is free for personal use and ranges from $200 - $750 for commercial use depending on the number of users.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Thanks FF!
Posted May 30th 2007 9:00AM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Blogging, Freeware
Post2Blog is a really handy WSIWYG blog editor for publishing posts to blogs on a number of platforms including WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and a few dozen others.
While the program used to cost $39, Bytescout Software has released version 3.0 as freeware. In other words, you have absolutely no excuse for not checking it out.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Live spellechecking
- Depending on what blog platform you're using, images can be uploaded automatically to your blog, to Imageshack, Flickr, or other locations
- Plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox let you copy and paste text from the web to your blog with just a few clicks
- Microsoft Word toolbar lets you compose entries in Word and upload them to your blog with just a click
- Quickly add images or documents to your entry by clicking "send to" and "Post2Blog" in Windows Explorer
[via
CyberNotes]
Posted May 29th 2007 1:15PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Design, Features, Blogging, Productivity, Social Software
WordPress is a powerful and very extensible blogging engine that is gaining more CMS (Content Management System) features with each release. As anyone who has downloaded a copy can probably tell, the directory structure is pretty friendly to hacks and plug-ins, but unless you are your own WordPress coding ninja, you might be asking yourself: where exactly can all these themes, plug-ins and hacks be found? Thus the idea for a short roundup of WordPress download sites and communities was born. Following is a starter list of sites for themes, plug-ins, tips and tricks of all kinds, ripe for helping you take your WordPress-powered site as far as you need to go. Since we're sure we haven't found every site for WordPress goodness, feel free to add your favorites in the comments and we'll update this post with the good ones.
Continue reading A primer for WordPress themes, plug-ins and tips
Posted May 17th 2007 1:30PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Open Source, Social Software
The latest public release of WordPress has landed; version 2.2, and it is good. At the top of the
new features list (trac list
here) is the native incorporation of the insanely popular WordPress widgets plug-in from
Automattic; they're built right in now, which should help spread the word for theme authors everywhere to start adding the tiny snippet of code - if they haven't already - to enable the wonders of widgets in their themes.
But handy widgets aren't the only big news here. WordPress 2.2 also brings features like full atom support (of the 1.0 spec), a new Blogger importer that supports the latest version that recently came out of beta, an 'infinite comment stream' that uses AJAX to reload a new set of comments anytime you delete or set some as spam, new protection from enabling a plugin or file (using the built-in editor) that could break the blog, as well as core plugin and filter optimizations that "should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server." Also on the list for Safari users in the crowd is support for an upcoming Safari release that will enable WYSIWYG editing (which Mac users might be able to take advantage of now if they download a
WebKit nightly edition, the open source build of the core of Safari).
Digging into this new release already, Aaron Brazell - a WordPress evangelist - has published
10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.2, an elaboration of the new features that should be of interest to most WordPress users. Austin Matzko, on the other hand, published
WordPress 2.2: Three Things Developers Will Like - you get three guesses as to who that one's for.
This looks like a great update to what is possibly the most popular self-installable blogging/CMS platform available. However, unless you know what you're doing with code or built your own theme, we recommend checking in on news from your vital plugin and theme authors to be sure this new version won't break anything on your site.
Posted May 3rd 2007 5:30PM by David Chartier
Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Social Software
While Six Apart offers an impressive service with
Vox, their blogging community with a focus on 'neighborhoods', it could be argued that the service's doors are a little too closed. While Vox does unique things offering a
streamlined registration system to help curb anonymous comments, one thing they don't have is any kind of API to allow access for things like external blogging clients. Sure, it's possible to email and moblog posts in, but it's hard to beat the power and flexibility that a full-on blogging client provides. A lack of an API also makes it difficult to cross-post from any other blogging system besides Six Apart's commercial
TypePad blogging service.
That said, Pete Wood offers a bit of a compromise for WordPress users in the form of his
Vox Crossposter plugin. Working with the constraints of having to send posts from WordPress via Vox's email system, this plugin will simply send your post - title, image and content - to your Vox account, though not without a few catches. First, none of your categories or tags come along for the ride. Also, your Vox post will more or less live independently from its sibling on WordPress; if you edit your WordPress post, your Vox one won't be updated (and if you aren't careful, it will be posted
again unless you remember to tell the plugin to
not crosspost the edit), and vice versa.
Still, Pete has done a good job with what Vox unfortunately gives him to work with. Our only request for now (until Vox gets in gear and cranks out an API) is that the plugin defaults to 'do not crosspost', since most posts probably aren't quite syndication material, and it would avoid those unfortunate double-posts.
Pete offers his Vox Crossposter plugin for WordPress free at
his site.
Posted May 2nd 2007 2:30PM by Grant Robertson
Filed under: Blogging
Traffic is a double edged sword which exemplifies the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for." Getting something you wrote on the front page of Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us is pretty gratifying, but it also comes with one giant headache attached; How do you handle the resulting, and temporary, increase in traffic?
Turbocharged -- a for-pay solution to the problem -- offers
a solid tutorial on how to weather a traffic storm. It's filled with good advice about Apache settings and MySql but, ultimately it's a sales pitch for their software. Unless you're blogging professionally, you're probably not interested in paying a license fee to decrease page generation times and increase the number of clients you can handle through caching. Fear not, there are cheaper (as in free) solutions.
If you follow the tips in Turbocharged's tutorial to tune up your blog's server settings, and
replace Turbocharged with WP-Cache -- a free solution to Wordpress' CPU intensive page generation -- your wallet will be no lighter but you'll have increased the number of simultaneous hits your blog can take by ten to twenty fold.
Posted Apr 30th 2007 4:00PM by Ryan Carter
Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Utilities, News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Web services, Freeware
Y
voschaap.com is a simple, easy-as-a-web-form way to generate your own color-coded wordpress theme, complete with standard options for sidebar placement and width, site name, logo URL, body width, color scheme, text scheme, the ability to add a third column to your theme and even insert-able Creative Commons and generic copyright text in the footer.
What used to take a fair bit of time -- tweaking and prodding a Wordpress theme to get everything just right -- now requires much less brain-power. Generated themes are handed to you on a sexy zip-file platter and are WordPress 2.1, WP widget and Yahoo UI compatible, not to mention it should work on any "A-grade" browser, sweet!
Posted Apr 17th 2007 2:00PM by Brad Linder
Filed under: Blogging, Web services
BlogBackupOnline is a new startup designed to take the pain out of backing up your WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Drupal, or Moveable Type blog (just to name a few).
The service scans your URL for data and automatically creates a backup of your blog. The initial backup process can take some time if you have a large blog. Backup of a blog with 1500 posts, for example, could take up to 2 hours. But from then on, BlogBackupOnline will perform a daily backup on any new posts.
Since the service works with multiple blogging clients, you can also use it to backup a blog on one platform and restore it to another. In other words, this could be an excellent tool for migrating from Blogger to WordPress.
BlogBackupOnline is in beta, and right now and missing a few important features, like the ability to backup photos and videos. But it looks like those features are both on their way.
Beta accounts are free, and come with 50MB of storage space, but according to the service's help page, if you run out of space, all you have to do is send an email and your space will be increased.
As for whether the service will remain free, we're gonna guess the answer is no. Most sites don't make a point of writing "While in beta, BlogBackupOnline is totally free" unless that could change one day.
[via
StartupSquad]
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