Google Trends: weblogtoolscollection.com provides (slightly) interesting facts on your blog. Though the product is free, signing in is required to see the number estimates. Not all sites seem to have a lot of data in Google Trends but it was fun to browse the various links. Most interesting to me were the “also visited” section and the “also searched” section. Matt Cutts had an interesting writeup on Google Trends for websites a little over a week ago. (6)
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Julien of Webinventif has created a shortcode generator for WordPress. Shortcode is like BBcode in that it provides the ability to use shortcuts to execute a block of code, rather than having to write out the block of code time and time again. Julien has made use of the new API calls within WordPress and with his shortcode generator, makes it easy as 1,2,3 to create your own custom shortcode. Although everything has been written in French, this generator looks promising. If anyone could translate this generator into English, I think there would be many WordPresser’s who would be grateful.
Here is a screencast showcasing the generator in action.
I came across this blog header generator via TechWack.com Big Huge Labs is the company behind this header generator which takes an image from either your local machine, Flickr, Photobucket or a linked image and creates a custom header image for you to use on the Kubrick WordPress theme. The generator provides options to align the visible part of the image in case it needs to be cropped. You can also choose whether to add credit to the image or not.
Linking to an image I found on a quick Google image search, this is what I was able to come up with. Click on the image to see the full size.
Big Huge Labs allows you to edit your result, save the image or share it through links or email. You can also elect to start over if you choose.
Although I hate seeing Kubrick being used all over the place, it’s nice to see such a generator service for those that would like to do things this way. I realize the default Kubrick theme has the option to upload a new header image but it’s no where near as nice as this generator.
Content suggestion engine for WordPress: TechCrunch has an interesting article this morning on the Alpha release of a product called Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine and works with WordPress and Firefox. With nothing to install on the blog, and a simple FF extension, Zemanta creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress with suggestions on what to add to your content. This information is gathered real time from various media publication sites and blogs. I am watching the Zemanta control box as I type this post and it seems to update after regular intervals with new suggestions. It also lets you add links to various keywords on your post to other articles on the web and your blog.
I just tried out some of the features including addition of pictures and related links but the soup generated is not pretty and I personally do not care for it. But it is still Alpha code but it sure is fun to play with and discover related and relevant content to display to your readers. If you are a WordPress (or Blogger) user, give it a try and let us know what you think.
Cinch is a very easy way for a blogger to create interesting Podcasts with no equipment of any kind except for a phone. Follow the instructions below (or as on their website) to test it out quickly for yourself.
Call (646) 200-0000 from any phone (You have to know the number/callerID of this phone, Skype would probably not work)
Thats it! BlogTalkRadio puts out a podcast feed with an MP3 at a pre-defined URI. Just visit http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/number_you_called_from (replace number_you_called_from with your phone number)
The only major drawback I see is the phone number at the end of the RSS URI. Since this would probably be exposed over the web, if I were concerned about my phone number, this method would not work for me. However if you import the RSS feed (and import the MP3 generated), you should be fine.
Thanks to a post from Dave Winer.
Utterz: is a Web-based service that posts to all of the above, from anywhere, even by phone, whether it’s text, photos, video, voice, or a mash-up of all the above. Same with PCs. You can just e-mail or SMS the posts to Utterz, or make a phone call to leave a voice record. After the content is received, it’s forwarded to the blog or blogs you specify in about 10 minutes. This online tools brings us one step closer to having a personal Twitter. If you setup your own WordPress blog (hosted or on WordPress.com) and use the Prologue theme (new zipped release by popular request, thanks Joseph Scott), you can have many of the flexible posting features of Twitter on your own platform. Since Utterz is a remotely hosted service, I am not sure the benefit of a “personal” Twitter are realized quite as well, but it is definitely a start and provides much broader flexibility and control than Twitter. I am quite hooked on Prologue and have started to use it on wltc.net. I have left registration open for authors on wltc.net for those that are interested (probably a bad idea, time will tell).
Instapaper: I came across this service via Techeme and was impressed with the ease of use. Although I barely ever have to “read something later”, one could use Instapaper to quickly and easily bookmark sites, blogs or news items for later reading which could then be cleaned up. Signup is incredibly easy and they provide you with a bookmarket to use. Would you use something like Instapaper? I wonder how they would monetize it? (13)
Filter My RSS is a very useful, simplistic service that allows you to create filtered feeds (from existing feeds) using keywords. I have used something of the same nature on various other services but this is a once stop shop and it is very easy to use. Also, considering the fact that the filtered feed URI can be hand crafted and the simplicity of the service, I am assuming that it can scale very well. This is a classic example of an itch scratch software that can be useful to others as well. Here is the WeblogToolsCollection.com default feed, filtered for the keyword WordPress.
Giving each WordPress post a thumbnail, and display the thumbnail on the home page: Interesting tutorial on creating thumbnails for each post on your blog and using Custom Fields to add and display them on your front page. A word of warning: the process is hand crafted and labor intensive. Think of them as SnapShots for your WordPress posts, hosted on your own blog. I think this could be a very cool plugin that automagically builds thumbnails for your posts and stores them on your blog. Then a custom function that behaves like “recent posts” could display thumbnails of your posts on the front page. I see this feature being really useful for those who post a lot of multimedia such as videos and pictures. Thanks HackWordPress
[EDIT] Also, check out another Custom Fields thumbnail tutorial. (19)
Lijit is a search tool/widget that you easily install on your blog. It lets you provide a comprehensive search of almost everything that you want, including integration with popular social networking tools such as Facebook. Lijit creates custom Google searches with your search items and then, I assume, puts up their own Google Ads in the searches. I happen to think search statistics are very important for a blogger to understand user trends, likes and dislikes. I noticed Lijit for the first time while reading about Kindling on A VC and the name Lijit reminded me of Lijjat (which is a snack from India). I did setup an account to test out the services and you can see it at work on the sidebar of this blog. The popular search cloud and pretty cool set of stats are the killer set of features I was looking for. Give it a whirl on the sidebar.
WordPress Comment Moderation Notifier for OS X: After Matt made the post about the Windows system tray based comment moderation notifier for WordPress, Edward Dale wrote up a Python script to the same effect and used Growl to notify the user. There are instructions in the download.
ExtJS WordPress Theme: This WordPress theme was put together to show off the capabilities of the ExtJS library and according to the author, is more of an experiment and still in alpha. This theme is chock full of features and looks more like an AJAX email application than a WordPress theme. Features include AJAXy stuff like and accordian sidebar, full AJAX load of posts and comments, AJAX calendar, quick search and comment preview. The theme is widget and tag aware but the author warns that some plugins and widgets might not work as expected. Now the theme does seem a little slow to load and to navigate but that might be due to the server it is running on and not the application. It is definitely fun to play with and navigate around! The theme is released under the LGPL.
Digg saturation: Patrick from Blogstorm came up with a way to rank websites using a Digg saturation value that he come up with by searching Google with a specific URI. Apparently Google really likes sites that are Dugg.
BlogBackupOnline: I found out about this service while reading through Leo Laporte’s latest post in which he talks about how he used BlogBackupOnline to import all old VOX posts from his old blog and restore them onto Wordpress. From their help PDF, Techrigy’s BlogBackupOnline allows users to create a full blog backup, schedule automatic daily backups, and restore or export a blog. The service is free for the first 50 MB (while in Beta) and backups can be scheduled and restores can be incremental. This service can be used to import blogs, restore single posts, export blogs from one platform into another among other features. Supported platforms include Blogger, WordPress, Friendster, LiveJournal, TypePad, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Terapad, Vox and Multiply. A worthy tool indeed. Priced right, it could be a silent soldier that everyone depends upon.
AirPress: This post has been sitting in draft for some time, waiting for me to actually produce a video post but time has run away from me. AirPress is an Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) based desktop blogging client that is still in beta but has a few cool features including video blogging right from the desktop with a simple webcam. At first glance I had thought that AirPress lets you post “webcam streaming” to your blog, which would have been tres cool (albeit very hard to manage) but I must have misunderstood the somewhat sparse instructions on the AirPress site. At this time, you can add flash, video, music, pictures etc through AirPress. I would have given them five thumbs up if they would have concentrated on media blogging instead of trying to be another desktop blogging client, but it definitely has potential but it also is buggy. Thanks David
I had come upon this technique sometime ago but with the recent change in the way Technorati looks, I wanted to document the link since it still appears to work. You can use the following URI to generate a PNG with incoming links to your blog for a given period using Technorati. There does seem to be a maximum number of days Technorati keeps track of links and that number is less than 365, closer to 200. Just change the BlogURL value to the URI of your blog, and modify the size of the graph as you see fit for your blog or application.
Wordpress Theme Generator: This latest update comes with 2.3 support and support for Tags as clouds and under each article as article tags. The code generated is now XHTML compliant and there are more colors to choose from. Via Email. (5)
9/13/2007 ↓
Akismet Auntie Spam Ver 2
Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2: engtech has updated his “Akismet Auntie Spam” greasemonkey script. This new version has some nice improvements including collation of spam from the same IPs, grouping by sender, better usability and quite a few other slick new features. If a lot of spam gets caught in your Akismet plugin and you need to run through them quickly to weed out false positives, this script is the ticket. I have been using it since the original beta and I like it. (4)
Weblog Tools Collection web widget: If you ever thought that the material published on this blog might be helpful to your readers as well, you can now post a widget on your blog or webpage with the most recently published articles from WeblogToolsCollection.com The widget looks nice, is configurable and loads quite fast but that is not all. You can also publish your own widgets with content from any other source including your own blog by using the “blidget” (blog + widget) tool from Widgetbox. After you get your own blidget, make sure you check out the other available widgets on Widgetbox. The variety of widgets available is mind boggling and might be fun to tinker with on your blog.
I recently bought myself a Treo 755p with an unlimited data plan and had the itch again to resurrect my moblog. Since I had hacked up scripts in the past to be able to directly moblog to WordPress from SprintPCS phones, I thought about recurrecting them again. However, I also had purchased a Flickr Pro account a couple of months ago and I figured that I would look into Flickr before I went any further. Sure enough, Flickr had something in place already, though the instructions were a little scattered and hard to find.
So here is what I used:
Flickr account
Latest WordPress code on a blog that is setup already
Camera phone with data plan (Sprint in my case)
Steps to setup your moblog:
Visit your Flickr account, log in. Sign up for a free account if you do not have one.
Visit http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne and setup your blog. You will need your admin username and password and the URI of your blog. Choose WordPress as blog type is that is what you are using. Flickr should find the MetaWeblog API for your blog.
Setup a contact on your phone with the last email you get and email all your photos, one at a time, to that email. The subject of your email is the title of your picture and the text of the email is appended to the post.
Post away. Flickr recognizes the email, sender and type of message and parses everything to make life a lot easier.
Caveats:
No caching of pictures. Photos are stored on Flickr and hotlinked on your blog. That might be a good or bad thing depending on your purpose.
Posts are published on your blog and Flickr when you send the email. Donncha (pronounced donn-ah-ka, thanks Andy) has a Flickr Blog this to Draft solution that is pretty cool. Check out InPhotos if you have not already.
No categories support. Tags might work but I have not figured that out yet.
Cannot email multiple pictures. Flickr just sees the first one.
Videos cannot be posted.
I might write a plugin that allows videos to be embedded automagically into WordPress and even come up with a caching mechanism to archive photos directly on the blog. In spite of the fact that there are many existing plugins that use Flickr functionality in WordPress, I find the above method to be much more elegant as a moblogging solution.
This is the link to my moblog. The wonderful thing about a moblog is that it is quite candid and the photos are worthy of being saved. The situations and the memories are absolutely delightful to browse through in the future. If you have a moblog or have come up with a different solution, please leave a link and a comment for others to enjoy.
Jeff Chandler 
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