Weblog Tools Collection

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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)
• Use some sort of a plugin for WordPress to import the said feed into your blog and you be podcastin’!

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).

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.

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?

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.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Adigg.com+weblogtoolscollection.com

To check your own Digg saturation, just replace weblogtoolscollection.com above with your own blogs’ URI. What is your Digg saturation?

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.

http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q=BlogURL&days=3600&width=460&height=200&type=url

I come up with the following graph for WeblogToolsCollection.com

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.
• Visit http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/ and verify that your account is setup to accept photos via email
• At the bottom right hand corner of the page, look for the “Upload to Blog?” column and activate that service. This will give you a final email address
• Visit http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/blog/ and setup the actual post preferences for your blog through Flickr
• 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.

OneClick Install Firefox Extension: Anirudh had written the OneClick Plugin for WordPress that allows a user to upload and install themes and Plugins to their WordPress blog with one click. But to make his plugin more useful and extensible, he has realsed a Firefox Extension for it as well. The Firefox Extension adds a contextual menu item to your Firefox that will let you directly install plugins and themes from their zip download locations. Just right click on the download link for a plugin for theme and install it on your blog with One Click. Thanks to Digital Inspiration for pointing out the extension.

aideRSS is a feed filtering and classification system that was recently showcased on Read/WriteWeb. As usual, the RW writeup is in depth and the insights and the research are useful in understanding the purpose and the use of aideRSS. aideRSS uses a proprietary “PostRank” algorithm to categorize and rank the posts on a certain blog and gives a reader the ability to filter the most important and most attention grabbing topics from any feed or blog. PostRank is particular to each blog’s statistics and is not a universal algorithm. The resulting ranked lists can then be subscribed through any regular feedreader. For example, the “best posts” from WeblogToolsCollection’s feed are available through this feed.

You can perform a similar analysis on your blog by using the simple search on the main page. You can also use the service to filter the feeds that you read in order to reduce clutter (you can import your OPML file). The service also provides widgets that you can embed on your own blog that allows your readers to make the same choices. RW touts that the real benefit of the service will be realized when the service is able to track reader behavior and provide insights into what makes readers tick.

I think the service is interesting from a social networking and reader tracking perspective and it can be useful to find counts of most the social bookmarking links on one page. However, I think that as a way of tracking interesting posts, it provides information that I, as an involved blogger, already have had through simpler means. I already know which of my posts struck a chord with my readers and which posts tanked. (among other things, if you are a registered user on weblogtoolscollection.com and are logged in, you should see the number of times each post was visited) I see little benefit in offering a “best posts” widget to readers for the obvious reasons. In addition, if you are like me and you read feeds to get the latest information as quickly as possible, waiting for a post to become popular and show up on aideRSS would take too much time. It might be useful for those that read feeds like newspapers and use them as a consolidated, summarized version of the daily news.

Would you find a use for aideRSS in your blogging life?

SezWho Offers Portable Reputations : Web Worker has a thorough writeup on the SezWho service which allows commenter reputation and rating across the web. Installation is really simple with their Wordpress Plugin (also for MT). Web Worker seemed cautious about professing the success or viability of this service. However Read/WriteWeb, who is already using SezWho, was a lot more upbeat about the prospects. WeblogToolsCollection on the other hand, has been bitten hard by third party services and their scalability issues and I am going to shy away from this one for now. Sadly, it is quite hard to determine the dependability of a remotely hosted service from just their SLA and their promises, especially if their financial model is shaky.