Weblog Tools Collection

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We had talked about introducing something new and exciting and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Weblog Tools Videos to my readers. It is simply an extension of Weblog Tools Collection and a means for us to have the ability to find, upload, view, peruse and aggregate videos related to WordPress, blogging, tutorials, web design etc.

I am really excited about quite a few of the features of Weblog Tools Videos. In addition to the obvious ability to browse through the latest videos and the most popular ones, readers can add videos from various video upload sites, link to videos published elsewhere, upload their own videos and most importantly, record and upload videos from their computers directly from their webcam. There are plans to allow screencast capture and record and post Skype videos and conferences as well. So go ahead and register and start uploading and linking videos.

The power of Weblog Tools Videos is in its users (which is why I ask you to register). When you upload a WordPress or a blogging video to YouTube, your video is lost in YouTube’s content stream, picked up and washed away in the barrage of new content. On Weblog Tools Videos, your multimedia will be exposed to a highly concentrated and well defined audience looking to view and absorb just the kind of media you are looking to produce. Since most of the other features, including the embedding and the social interaction is the same, you could upload your newly produced videos to Weblog Tools Videos and use it/embed it on your blog and/or social content in almost exactly the same way as before (expect an embed plugin soon). In the process, you will receive the attention of the Weblog Tools Collection audience as well as benefit from the exposure on your own site.

Are you videoing yet?

Small Potato of wpdesigner.com fame has come up with a new twist for Premium Themes. Now I try very hard to stay away from promoting premium themes because of their economic nature, especially if there is no direct advantage to my readers. But SP offered a large number of freebies for my readers and I had to pass them on to you.

Small Potato is starting a “WordPress Premium Themes Club” where he plans to offer twelve themes during a period of one year for a price of $5 per year in membership costs. There are four themes in the club and all new members will get the four themes and twelve more over the next 12 months. Now from a users’ perspective, if you like his work, the nominal charge is a good deal for 16 new themes and considering his promotion methods and the quality of his work, I believe he will do well. The themes include support and do not require attribution for use on multiple domains.

Use the code weblogtoolscollection2873ry (good for 500 signups, another 500 will be added as soon as these are used up so that everyone gets a chance) and signup at the following link. You can read more about the club here and preview the current themes here.

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.

If you have tried Lijit, what are your thoughts?

Scriblio was released as a public Beta yesterday. For those that have not heard of Scriblio yet,from their about page, it is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Scriblio, is completely built on top of WordPress, is highly searchable and offers all the versatility and rich content capabilities of WordPress to the management of Library content. An example site built with Scriblio is the Lamson Library of Plymouth State University. Amazing!

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

Your regular favorite Mark is on vacation for about a week. The task of keeping this blog busy has fallen to me. I will try to maintain Mark’s standards and bring you the best of weblog tools over this period. Everything will continue normally, hopefully.

I used to blog actively at WordLog until academic pressures forced me to take a break from blogging. Regaining lost rhythm is difficult, and that blog hasn’t been updated in months. Other more recent pursuits have taken the upper-hand now.

So what is your strategy for maintaining the perfect blogging rhythm?, do you guys have a “Workflow” for maintaining frequent updates to your professional blogs? I’d love to hear from you. Write a post on your weblog and then pingback this post (just link to this post) so everyone else can also learn about your techniques. Optionally I will try to condense the best practices and post them here, with links to the submissions.

For me, it all begins with a good feed reader. I use Gregarius which is written in PHP, open-sourced, and gives me a default “river-of-news” view (as opposed to readers which organize posts by which blog they originate from). There are a host of plugins for Gregarius which make life simpler too. I use Gregarius to keep up to date, and as a source of inspiration for posts on my other blogs. I try to avoid replicating posts from other blogs on my own, since I believe that in the long run, reblogging is counter-productive, and leads to a depreciation in the quality of the blog. On weekends, I write a few draft posts, or if the posts are complete, I schedule the less time-insensitive ones to appear over a few days. This keeps my blogs alive and ticking. The time I invest in blogging is totally amazing on some days. I do it for the love of the things I blog about, and so I guess it is justified.

So write in dudes/dudettes, and teach me how to keep blogs going in difficult times, when “life” calls.

WP plugin: Bad Behavior 2 This new version of Bad Behavior has a bunch of new features including faster code, variable strictness of traffic filtering, lesser usage of the database (which is really important for higher traffic sites) and a new wrapper API. Bad Behavior is now also available for ExpressionEngine, MediaWiki and generic non-database mode for any PHP script, forum, guestbook, Movable Type, etc. Thanks Michael va email.

Related results from Search Engines? Interesting question. I know that I had written a Wordpress hack sometime ago that would post related links from Waypath but it was cumbersome and lacked caching. This might be an interesting plugin if someone wants to attempt to write it and it has not been written already. Caching the queries would be a must.

Technorati Competitor: Gnoos Australian Blog Search Engine Gnoos is providing a similar search engine (as Technorati) but with an Aussie influence. It is still much faster than Technorati and seems to produce sparse but spam free results. Not nearly as many features as in Technorati, but that might be a benefit rather than a disadvantage in maintaining a fast response. Also, in related news, TechCrunch is reporting that Ask/Bloglines is offering a limited blog search and they are conducting their news searches from within 7000 pre-approved blogs and news sites. This blog is not one of those being searched.

Perfect for demonstrating WordPress on someone else’s computer. Also perfect for designing your ideal blog theme while at work.
The guide to installing WordPress on a USB stick and my other guides are also at www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress.

Performancing releases Firefox Extension Full featured blog editor for Firefox that lets you blog from right within Firefox. Works with Wordpress.com, Wordpress hosted and a multitude of other blogging platforms. Many more screenshots here. Not sure if I will get away from my bookmarklets, but this does look promising.

Lussumo Filebrowser - Now with awesome thumbnailing power A highly optimized filebrowser in PHP that allows simple thumbnailing and viewing of photographs. The DEMO is quite refreshing and it validates XHTML 1.1 Transitional! Though I would suggest better use of HTML lists, this product looks to be truly amazing. Also from Lussomo is Vanilla which is a web forum that Matt mentioned in his recent podcast interview.

Filebrowser is SCREAMING to be integerated into Wordpress as a simple, in-post gallery creator that does not break validation. Imagine posts as albums and post categories as album categories. You can even add a random thumbnail from a post as a teaser in the excerpt.