Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks and the counter arguments from Russell (warning, littered with expletives) made me think about blogs, mobile web and the proliferation of blogs on mobile phones and mobile browsers. Since I am closely involved with many of the technologies that are being bolstered or criticized on those posts, I have my own opinions about some of them. Wireless carrier networks are SLOW: I am not so sure. Sprint has decent speeds and I can surf just fine on my phone or by using it as a modem. It is not as good as my 17 Mbps cable modem, but when I was stuck in a hospital and needed to call my parents in India using Skype via Sprint through my 755p, it worked like a charm. My VPN back to work and most surfing done over the phone was painless and got me through […]

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.

Now that WordPress 2.3 Dexter has been released, it is time for everyone to upgrade and check out what the hoopla is all about. Just as in the WordPress 2.3 pre-release coverage, there are a lot of really good resources that discuss preparing your blog for it to be ready for the 2.3 upgrade. Since there is a bigger (relative term, bigger than upgrades in recent memory) chance that many of your plugins and themes might stop working with this new version, checking compatibility and making sure that everything will work as expected is even more important. Here are some resources that might help you make that leap. The WordPress Development Blog has a good article on Preparing for 2.3 I particularly like the list of compatible and incompatible plugins I also like the idea of switching your WordPress install to use Subversion for quick and painless updates Blog Security […]

Facebooked is a 3-column, widget-ready theme based on the social networking site. Loopy Red is a 3-column, red theme. Love is a 2-column, widget-ready theme that pays homage to WordPress. Pigments is a 2-column, blue-and-green theme. Pink for October is a 2-column theme with pink, black and white colors created for breast cancer awareness month in October. Ranting Daily is a 2-column, widget-ready theme. Saur is a 3-column, widget-ready theme that features a random image, big search bar, and comment counter. T1 is a nice-looking Tumblelog theme with styling classes for several different types of entry.

Configurable Tag Cloud is a WordPress 2.3 widget that gives you a very nice set of configurable options for your sidebar tag cloud. Global Post Password enables you to set a global password for all your password-protected posts, and switch password protection on or off from the writing screen with just one click. Headspace 2 manages meta-data and handles a wide range of SEO tasks, including tagging your posts, creating custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, changing the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more. Page Category Plus is a WordPress 2.3 plugin that allows for pages to be assigned categories in the same manner as posts. WordPress 2.3 Related Posts will generate a list of related posts via WordPress 2.3 tags. Tag Suggest Thing is another tagging plugin for WordPress 2.3 that adds a box to the sidebar that will […]

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

One of the very first tasks I always perform on every new WordPress installation I do is to go into my user profile and turn off the visual WYSIWYG editor. I prefer to handle all my formatting markup myself because it gives me more control over the final product. The other day, Mark suggested that most ‘professional’ bloggers also prefer not to use the visual editor. So, the question I throw out to you, the reader, is this – which do you prefer to use, the visual editor or the basic editor, and why? Extra credit: Do you use any formatting plugins for faster, easier, on-the-fly markup? If you use one of these plugins, why do you use that specific markup plugin? For instance, I use TextileWrapper on my own blog because I like how easy it is to add just a single character or two to a line or […]

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