apple widgets: September 2008

Monday, September 29, 2008

Month Calendar

Month Calendar is a resizable calendar showing a month at a time. The month is displayed in weeks, each starting on a Monday or on a Sunday. A week-number is displayed at the start of each week. A memo can be attached to any date. The first three lines of the memo are displayed in the date's tooltip. Memos are saved as files. Calendar files (iCal files) can be imported and managed. When enabled and selected, calendar events appear in the dates' tooltips. Files, texts and URLs may be dragged onto a memo window or onto a calendar date. The dragged text is appended to the text already in the memo window. The Widget can speak the selected date when a memo is opened and can speak the contents of memos. Various types of single or repeating alarm events can be associated with calendar dates. Read More

Speakers for Those Who Love the Cries of Cold, Starving Children [Speakers]

Sure, you may be an audiophile, but I'm an Audiophile. What's that mean? My ears are so honed and my listening so advanced that I've outgrown even the most crystal clear of symphonic reproductions.... Read More

ExpressWidgets from SpringWidgets!

ExpressWidgets from SpringWidgets!
It’s a day to “Express” change . . .

Today we’ve launched our ExpressWidgets service…

http://springwidgets.com/express/getFeed/

Up until now you could use our RSS Reader Widget to brand and add a blog to your site or desktop, but you could not add that finished blog widget to our gallery so that other people could find it and share it.

Today we changed all that!!!

As of right now you can use our ExpressWidgets process to create your own uniquely-branded Widget(s) and have those widgets instantly added to our gallery just like any other widget. Build as many as you want and add them to our growing gallery of blogs and desktop Widgets so other users can embed, pass along and bring them to the desktop.

It’s pretty cool. We “expressed” the RSS Reader first. We think it’s the easiest build process for you to quickly syndicate and distribute your blog or audio and video podcast content. Best of all, you can uniquely brand your ExpressWidget to match your website or blog, making it a truly one-of-a-kind Widget out in the WidgetSphere.

To make sure that the end product is as good as it can be, we've added a new way to customize an Express RSS Reader - you can now skin the "chrome" around the content so that it better matches your blog or site. (This is a feature that has been requested for a while and we are happy to be able to push this feature live today).

And for our many Feedburner users, your burned feeds will continue to give you the industry leading analytics and metrics for which Feedburner is known. If you have your Feedburner feed handy, drop on in to the ExpressWidgets process now and add your blog to our gallery to get some free exposure.

Talking about exposure… We’ve also added in a few familiar buttons on the display pages for your widget. Anyone can now Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and otherwise bookmark your widget directly from the widget view in the gallery – guaranteed to lead to at least a couple of hundred eyeballs on your content ;-)

Go get’em tiger!

How to Remove WordPress.com Ads From Your WordPress.com Blog

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog. While you may have never noticed, those who are not logged into WordPress.com will see ads on blogs across the WordPress.com network. two years ago, WordPress.com started experimenting with Google ads to help support the cost of the experimental and state-of-the-art multiple [...]

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog.

While you may have never noticed, those who are not logged into WordPress.com will see ads on blogs across the WordPress.com network. two years ago, WordPress.com started experimenting with Google ads to help support the cost of the experimental and state-of-the-art multiple user free blog service. The intent was not to cover your blogs with ads, like many free blogging services do, but to show an occasional ad discretely within your WordPress Theme.

Since few complained or noticed, the experiment continued, helping to keep WordPress.com free and add a lot of free features that might have been paid upgrades.

These ads were so rare, I never saw them. So I forgot about them. I’ve written a lot about the WordPress.com Terms of Service policy that prohibits adding ads to your WordPress.com blogs, so I was dismayed a few months ago when I got a few emails accusing me of special favors from WordPress.com because I had ads on my blog. They were seeing the WordPress.com experimental ads. Unfortunately, one of the ads was - shall we say - inappropriate, a problem many have with Google’s ad program.

Still, this bothered me. I talked to the WordPress team about this and they agreed that users should have the right to determine whether or not to have WordPress.com ads on their blogs. As Matt explains:

At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.

They’ve been working on this new feature for a while, trying to come up with a secure and affordable way for users to continue to support WordPress.com by permitting ads on their blogs, while allowing those with sensitive or special interests to not host ads. They’ve finally done it, and I applaud their foresight and integrity.

Removing Ads from Your WordPress.com Blog

Before you start jumping to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, remember that those ads, most of which you will rarely ever see, help bring in income to keep WordPress.com going. If they don’t bother you or your readers, leave them alone. Why not?

You are using one of the most powerful, state-of-the-art blogging platforms, a service that will survive the Digg-effect and high traffic surges without charging you; a service that keeps bringing you options and features without charge; a service that gives you a platform upon which to express yourself proudly - and is incredibly SEO friendly. Why not help them continue to keep this service free for everyone?

If you do feel a compelling need to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, go to Upgrades.

WordPress.com Upgrades Panel

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

Select no-ads to turn off ads on your WordPress.com blog

The cost to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog is 30 credits annually (USD $30 if you haven’t earned any credits) which comes to eight cents a day.

Whether you keep or remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, why not take a little time to give back to WordPress.com and other WordPress.com users by browsing the WordPress blog network and get to know your fellow WordPress.com members. You can use the Random Post feature in the gray dashboard bar at the top of your WordPress.com blog when you are logged in, or visit the WordPress.com Blogs of the Day which lists the most popular blogs by language, or the WordPress.com Tags list.

If you are familiar with how WordPress.com works, then why not help out in the WordPress.com forums and get to know the volunteers and staff there as well as your other fellow WordPress.com members. It’s a simple way to say thank you for this powerful free blog service.

I Want to Put Ads on My WordPress.com Blog

A lot of WordPress.com bloggers want to put ads on their blogs to make money for themselves. While some free blog hosts permit that, don’t forget that WordPress.com is also a testing site for many of the latest features of WordPress development.

While the world has to wait for the release of WordPress 2.7, WordPress.com users are already using the new sticky post feature and will soon be playing with other new features as part of the new WordPress Administration interface redesign, a continuation of user interface improvements from the previous version of WordPress - long before anyone else.

This means that WordPress.com has to stay clean of code that will screw up not just one blog but all the blogs on the WordPress.com network powered by WordPressMU. While most ad code is harmless, opening up WordPress.com to Javascript and other code languages opens the door up to malicious code, too. It’s a security risk WordPress.com isn’t willing to take, and I support that policy.

If you want to monetize your blog, get the free version of WordPress and pay for cheap hosting. Some hosts are offering web hosting for under USD $10 a month. With the full version of WordPress, you can not only add ads, but customize the whole look, add all kinds of cool WordPress Plugins, and really tweak your whole site to maximize its revenue potential.

WordPress.com has always been about blogging, about freedom of expression and creativity. It’s not about the code. It’s about the words. WordPress.com is working overtime to make sure we have a place to share our words with others around the world - no holds barred.

Site Search Tags: wordpress news, wordpressdotcom, wordpress.com, wordpresscom, ads, ads on blogs, blog ads, advertising, blog advertising, monetization, advertising on WordPress.com, WordPress.com ads, make money, make money with blogging

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in WordPress News, Wordpressdotcom��

Office Pranks: Surprise Ambush [Clips]

Tomorrow will mark an important day in the history of office jobs. With the help of our readers, we've assembled an elite guidebook to illustrate the dangerous world of the corporate cubicle... Read More

DropMover

The DropMover Widget displays a keypad, which can be used to move or copy files and folders to specified folders, or to open applications, data files and web pages. Each key of the keypad can have a destination folder, application file, data file or url associated with it. Files or folders dropped onto the key are moved or copied to the destination folder or passed to the associated application. DropMover has seven keypad layouts of increasing complexity. Each has its own settings which are preserved when the Widget is closed and restarted. PLEASE NOTE: The default action of the Widget has changed. It now moves files and folders by default. To copy files and folders, hold down the alt-key (on Macintosh) or control-key (on Windows) while dragging and dropping files and folders onto a key. The Widget moves files and folders by copying them to their new location, then deleting the originals. Please use the Confirm Action feature where loss of files would be important. Read More

Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

A large number of blogs and other sites now use Feedburner as it has a number of great Pro freatures and Feedburner also allows you to transfer feed ownership between users. Whilst you can see your stats in Feedburner the graphs are not that great and you can compare them.

There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.

To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.

The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

New Paris Building Casts No Shadows, Generates Electricity [Architecture]

New Paris Building Casts No Shadows, Generates Electricity [Architecture]
Le Project Triangle is one of those buildings that make us think that we may actually drive flying cars one day. To be completed by 2014 in the Porte de Versailles area in Paris, its most impressive...

Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Power Audio Cutter 2.3

Cut Audio files to WAV, MP3, WMA, M4A, AMR Cut Audio files to WAV, MP3, WMA, M4A, AMR (read more) Read More

Thursday, September 25, 2008

John Chow vs Shoemoney RSS competition

RSS is now one of the most valuable metrics on the net. Increasing your RSS subscriber count is a measurable way to show the popularity of your site. As RSS is an opt in way for readers to view your site contents, they can easily stop being a subscriber at any time.

It shows how far RSS has come when John Chow and Shoemoney start a competition to see who can get the most new subscribers in a month. Notice how it wasn't a competition to get the most traffic or the most subscribers to an email list but who can get the most RSS subscribers.

Why RSS subscribers

John and Shoe are both canny marketers and know the value of RSS. RSS is a transparent metric that shows a loyal readership. If a site starts to slide in it's content then readers will no longer subscribe. They would rather gain an RSS subscriber than an extra visitor.

Whilst the challenge is a bit of fun there is also a serious reason John and Shoe have gotten together to run this little competition. At the end of the competition they will both have a larger loyal subscriber base. This competition has gained them a large number of new subscribers which generally means more revenue for them.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

The Dangers of Holding Your Wii While Wanking [Wii]

As hot as a girl playing the Wii can be (Very NSFW link!), it is imperative that you wait for some real private time before touching yourself in an impure manner. And for the love of God—do not... Read More

Selling RSS subscribers a sad day

There is a new site that is selling RSS subscribers. The idea behind this is that the more subscribers you have the more valuable your site will be. This is based on RSS being the new metric for measuring a site based on Mark's theory that an RSS subscriber is worth 30 dollars.

RSS for sale

I think this is boarding on criminal, it basically promotes the faking of RSS subscribers to fool readers into thinking a blog is popular. It is lying to advertisers by artificially inflating the RSS subscriber count but worst of all the site seems to be selling RSS subscribers so the site or blog owner can sell their site at a premium. This is fraud.

Remember these are fake RSS readers they are selling. All that happens is that your FeedBurner counter reports more subscribers. As FeedBurner is owned by Google I am sure RSSxplosion will not last long.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Selling RSS subscribers a sad day

RSS for sale

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Tide Graph Widget 0.7

Tide Graph Widget 0.7
Graphical tide prediction based on NOAA tide prediction web service.

About Tide Graph Widget
Graphical tide prediction based on NOAA tide prediction web service. You can choose from several different tide stations.

Furutech Thinks You are Stupid Enough to Buy an $1800 Power Cable [I'll Take Two]

You may recognize Furutech as the premier purveyors of all things strange and overpriced. They have a rep to maintain—which is why they are attempting to sell what may be "the Most... Read More

TheSpringBox 1.1.3

Hey Guys. Today we've got an update of our desktop platform for you. Most of the updates are purely cosmetic, but we hope they will improve you SpringWidgets experience:

Visual Updates

Lock your widgets on your screen

Performance updates

Widgets are now stored under My Documents

Happy Holidays Everyone,
- The SpringWidgets Team Read More

FeedBurner feed count drop

You may have noticed on Saturday (3rd November) that you FeedBurner feed counter was reporting a much lower level of subscribers to your blog. Here at Newsniche the counter dropped by nearly a hundred subscribers.

FeedBurner blame Google for the glitch as the Google feedfetcher bot had gone out on Friday night and was up late Saturday. This was probably due to drinking too much GoogleJuice the night before, those bots can't hold their drink. As a result none of the Google Reader subscribers were reported in the stats for Saturday.

Google Feedfetcher drops ball

At the time like me you may have worried even panicked when you saw a massive drop in subscriber numbers. If you have more than one blog then you would have figured out the drop was across the board and due to some glitch.

These sorts of glitches although usually temporary can cause a webmaster a lot of unnecessary stress. These things happen, my advice is don't hit the panic button, do a little investigating then report it if needed. More often than not these things are temporary. I have learned by experience if you do too much tinkering thinking it's something you have done you end up making things worse. All you need to do now is explain to your advertisers why your stats dropped.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

2008 Ole Miss Rebels Football Schedule Widget 4.0

Clicking the Ole Miss logo displays the Rebels Football Schedule with kickoff date, time, TV and scores from previous games.

About 2008 Ole Miss Rebels Football Schedule Widget
Instant automated access to the latest Rebels kick-off and schedule information for the 2008 Ole Miss Rebels football games. All games are listed with the date and time, home or away, TV scheduling plus the scores from the previously played games.

- Team logo hot link to the team’s Official Athletic Web Site for the absolute latest information on scheduling.
- Button to play Ole Miss Fight Song.

National Champions 1960

HOTTY TODDY!

Critical Bug Fixed: "'mt_pluginmanager' doesn't exist"

It took me far too long to track down a simple error a number of people were reporting with Plugin Manager, but I did track it down, and did finally manage to fix it. Long story short, the deployment mechanism... Read More

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Tide Graph Widget 0.7

Graphical tide prediction based on NOAA tide prediction web service.

About Tide Graph Widget
Graphical tide prediction based on NOAA tide prediction web service. You can choose from several different tide stations.

Värmlandstrafik 1.0

Värmlandstrafik 1.0
Quick route searches for public transportation in Värmland, Sweden.

About Värmlandstrafik
Quick route searches for public transportation in Värmland, Sweden.

SpacePig Preview 2.3.0

Fun, entertaining and relaxing cartoon-style 3D game.

About SpacePig Preview
Fun, entertaining and relaxing cartoon-style game. Control the animated pig character around the moon, picking as many coins and diamonds as you can, but beware of the falling meteorites and spikes.

Post your score in our Top Players list and check how you are playing against others around the globe.

How to Remove WordPress.com Ads From Your WordPress.com Blog

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog.

Since few complained or noticed, the experiment continued, helping to keep WordPress.com free and add a lot of free features that might have been paid upgrades.

At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.

Removing Ads from Your WordPress.com Blog

If you do feel a compelling need to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, go to Upgrades.

WordPress.com Upgrades Panel

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

Select no-ads to turn off ads on your WordPress.com blog

The cost to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog is 30 credits annually (USD $30 if you haven’t earned any credits) which comes to eight cents a day.

I Want to Put Ads on My WordPress.com Blog

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in WordPress News, Wordpressdotcom��

SpringWidgets Blog is Here!!!!!

We're using the tools available to speed up our communication process. We'll be using this as our What's Up?, New and Cool, Future "stuff" blog so you don't have to crawl through the Forums if you don't want to (of course, feel free, if you like . . . either's cool).

The "wizards" (as I like to call them), aka our development team will add info here as well . . . so keep checking back. Read More

Checking your own RSS feeds

Are you checking your own RSS feeds, are you subscribed to your own feeds. If not then how do you know your feed is working properly. This is something I have come across, I have noticed on both my own and other bloggers feeds that sometimes your feed breaks.

The simplest thing you can do is subscribe to your feed in your feed reader. Create a separate folder to accommodate just your own feeds so you know exactly where they are. Now every time you make a post your new post will appear in your feed reader.

When you do your usual daily RSS trawl you will be reminded to check your feed. If there is anything amiss you will know about it sooner rather than later. I have emailed many a webmaster to tell them that their feed is broken. I mean who reads their own feeds, right.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Lighthouse Cams 2.5

Lighthouse Cams 2.5
View lighthouse webcams from the East Coast, Great Lakes and West Coast. Select an area or cycle through all webcams. Choose from 5 seconds to 30 minutes.

About Lighthouse Cams
View lighthouse webcams from the East Coast, Great Lakes and West Coast. Select an area or cycle through all webcams. Choose from 5 seconds to 30 minutes. Also check hotels near those lighthouses from back of widget. Links to the Travel Widgets Lighthouse store also on back. Report webcams that are down.

Brought you you by TravelWidgets.com, the most tech savvy travel site on the internet featuring dozens of widgets and iphone web apps to help book travel and track the latest travel deals. Book hotels, air, car rentals, cruises and show tickets and activities. Save on air and hotel packages. Have you visited Travel Widgets yet?

Technorati Claiming set-up

Technorati Claiming set-up
Technorati Profile

Östgötatrafiken 1.0

Östgötatrafiken 1.0
Quick route searches and real-time information for public transportation in Östergötland, Sweden

About Östgötatrafiken
Quick route searches and real-time information for public transportation in Östergötland, Sweden

Attend a WordCamp and Meet Your WordPress Family

Attend a WordCamp and Meet Your WordPress Family
Last year at WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco, I got a chance to meet up with my long time online buddy and WordPress guru, Andy Skelton. Living on the road myself, I was thrilled when Andy announced he was riding his motorcycle to WordCamp - but not from Texas to San Francisco. He road from [...]

Last year at WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco, I got a chance to meet up with my long time online buddy and WordPress guru, Andy Skelton. Living on the road myself, I was thrilled when Andy announced he was riding his motorcycle to WordCamp - but not from Texas to San Francisco. He road from Texas to the East Coast of the United States and then across it to San Francisco then back to Texas.

I traced much of his travels in the WordPress Wednesday news reports on the Blog Herald as he made his way through all kinds of terrain and weather that very hot summer.

I drove from Oregon to San Francisco in my father’s old Class C motor home to get to WordCamp 2007. So both of us crossed a few miles to get to our first in-person meeting, sleeping when and wherever we could along the way.

When he arrived in San Francisco, we had a joyous meeting and he even escorted me back to where I was staying in San Francisco. Donncha O’Caoimh caught the momentous occasion on Andy’s new bright red Gold Wing motorcycle and uploaded the image to flickr - and I couldn’t find it. Andy finally found it for me and here it is.

Just as Andy and I traveled across the country, one of us the long way, it’s your turn. I challenge you all to attend a WordCamp event and meet an old, or new, friend.

Attend a WordCamp Event and Meet Family

I bring it to your attention because I want to share with you the special magic that is a WordCamp adventure. I will be speaking and attending some WordCamps over the next few months, including WordCamp Portland, Oregon, on September 27, 2008, Podcamp and WordCamp Hawaii on Oct 24, 2008, WordCamp Israel (hopefully), and WordCamp Las Vegas 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 10-11, 2009.

I urge you all to be a part of a WordCamp experience. It doesn’t matter if you just attend or you are part of the team that brings a WordCamp to your area.

WordCamp is a chance to meet other WordPress and blog enthusiasts, but also a chance to learn more about WordPress and how others are using WordPress for their blogs and CMS sites. It’s a chance to meet WordPress developers, experts, and Plugin and Theme authors. It’s a chance to learn how to push WordPress to the limit and find out what’s hot on the WordPress horizon.

Most importantly, it is great fun. It’s a chance to leave the virtual world behind and get real, honest hugs and face-to-face meetings with creative and innovative folks who understand the power behind a blog is not just WordPress but the blogger and their hard work.

I’ve been to many WordCamps over the past year and a half. I attend and speak at a lot of conferences on blogging, social media, web technology, and education every year, and I look forward most to WordCamp events. No one is selling me anything, there is no pressure, no force, no stress. It’s like a reunion without the old politics and back biting history. It’s relaxing, education, but most of all friendly. The WordPress Community is the best.

I’ve started contributing to the The WordCamp Report on WordCamp news and events, and we’re looking for WordCamp attendees to live blog or report on the WordCamp events they are attending. If you are interested, email me or use the WordCamp Report Contact Page.

You can learn more about WordCamps near you at WordCamp Central, The WordCamp Report, and my weekly WordPress Wednesday News on the Blog Herald.

Here are a listing of upcoming WordCamps and blog events:

Upcoming WordCamps not scheduled or confirmed:

Wordcamp Ed(ucation) Twitter for Educators using WordPress
WordCamp Israel
WordCamp Washington D.C. 2008
WordCamp Denver 2008

Attend, volunteer, sponsor, speak, or allow someone to sleep over who is attending - be a part of a WordCamp near you or fly to one anywhere in the world. You will be welcome. As a WordPress fan, you are part of something bigger than WordPress. You are part of the WordPress Community family.