apple widgets

A First Look at the MSI 'Wind 2' U120 [NetBooks]

2008-10-09T17:52:00.019-07:00

A First Look at the MSI 'Wind 2' U120 [NetBooks]
MSI hasn't been shy about their Wind U120, a 10" netbook that should pack a 120GB hard drive, SSD options, 802.11n Wi-Fi and 3G (HSDPA) fun. But from these first official shots of the unofficial...

SpringWidgets Blog is Here!!!!!

2008-10-09T17:52:00.017-07:00

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

How to style an Atom Feed

2008-10-09T17:52:00.015-07:00

How to style an Atom Feed
In order to have browsers render an XML Atom feed into HTML such that it is far easier for users to read, there are two things you must create. The first is an XSL stylesheet which instructs the browser on...

The New Xbox Experience Requires 256MB Storage Card, Minimum [Nxe]

2008-10-09T17:52:00.013-07:00

The New Xbox Experience Requires 256MB Storage Card, Minimum [Nxe]
It's no surprise that The New Xbox Experience will squeeze within a memory card—Microsoft wants to make the software upgrade fit on removable flash storage for Xbox 360 Arcade users who lack...

50 Consumer Technologies Developed by NASA in the Last 50 Years [Nasa]

2008-10-09T17:52:00.011-07:00

Every year NASA publishes a new edition of their Spinoff magazine, a periodical that outlines NASA-based technologies that have disseminated into everyday devices, improving our lives beyond giving... Read More

Hurricane Monitor 3.12

2008-10-09T17:52:00.009-07:00

Hurricane Monitor 3.12
This Yahoo widget will provide you with the forecasts and images This Yahoo widget will provide you with the forecasts and images (read more)

New Features - More Customization of the Button

2008-10-09T17:52:00.007-07:00

New Features - More Customization of the Button
Well, it’s 2008. Hope you all got a chance to try the new features we added last month to your analytics interface. We already received some great feedback. We’ve been busy preparing to move to our new platform. This new platform will enable AddThis to scale more easily and provide additional powerful capabilities to the service. [...]

Well, it’s 2008. Hope you all got a chance to try the new features we added last month to your analytics interface. We already received some great feedback.

We’ve been busy preparing to move to our new platform. This new platform will enable AddThis to scale more easily and provide additional powerful capabilities to the service. We have now reached the milestone of 100 Million buttons served per day, so it was time to move again. The move will happen next week, the transition will be completely transparent.

We have also been busy coding new features for the button (widget). Many of you have asked us for more ways to customize the button, as well as for an email function. We listened…so here are the latest enhancements. Thank for your continuous feedback!

Button customization - You now have full control over the customization of the the button image, text, and style. We essentially moved the button image and link outside of the javascript, so you can now change the image, text, or style of the button as much as you want, and very easily.

Service options customization - You can now customize the list of service options that appear in the dropdown (e.g. Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, etc). You can even remove the “More” choice completely, if you only want to provide access to the most popular services.

Dropdown positioning - We also added the ability to re-position the dropdown vertically or horizontally, if needed.

Email a Friend - We have added a new service option: Email. So when selecting your options for the dropdown, you can now include the keyword ‘email’. When the user clicks on ‘Email’, the dropdown will transform itself into a tiny form to send an email notification to a friend.

>> Here is the documentation for the new features <<

Happy Customizing!

No Smoking 2.0

2008-10-09T17:52:00.005-07:00

No Smoking 2.0
Provides some motivation to help you stop smoking.

About No Smoking
This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign.

Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well.

New Features - New Faces - Happy Holidays

2008-10-09T17:52:00.003-07:00

New Features - New Faces - Happy Holidays
Only a few more days and it’s already 2008. How time flies! We hope you are all enjoying the holiday season. Here is a brief message with the latest news about AddThis. More Analytics. To help you start off the new year, we have upgraded our stats interface to give you more analytics about how your [...]

Only a few more days and it’s already 2008. How time flies! We hope you are all enjoying the holiday season. Here is a brief message with the latest news about AddThis.

More Analytics. To help you start off the new year, we have upgraded our stats interface to give you more analytics about how your content is bookmarked and shared by your visitors. Here are the new features:

- bookmarking/sharing trends over time (day, week, month, year)
- enhanced ‘Top Bookmarks’ report
- audience breakdown by country
- export to various formats (e.g. CSV, Tab, Excel)

To try it, just go to your account ! By the way, we will be adding even more analytics soon. So be sure to add our widget now on all your pages, so that the tracking can already begin. Also, be sure to tell your friends about AddThis.

Our Team. Our team is expanding as well. We are excited to announce that Brian Jones has joined AddThis. Brian is a sys/admin/infrastructure guru; he founded Linuxlaboratory.org, created Python Magazine, helped found php|architect magazine, and is the co-author of Linux Server Hacks 2 for Oâ€™Reilly publishing. Brian is already working hard setting up tomorrow’s infrastructure for AddThis, making sure AddThis can continue to deliver its great service reliably as it continues to grow.

We are hiring. We are currently looking for a front-end guru. If you live and breath AJAX, Javascript, and PHP, and are obsessed with creating the best possible tools for users, then we want to hear from you. We offer very good salaries and great benefits, and even the possibility to work from home.

AddThis Trends. As most of you know by now, each month we publish a report of the top most active bookmarking/sharing and feed reader services. Below is the report for the top bookmarking/sharing services for November. You can find more reports here.

Top Bookmarking / Sharing Services - November

Don’t have our widget yet? If you don’t have an AddThis widget on your website or blog, click here and get it now. It will really help your visitors share and remember your pages, and help you gain visibility in the search engines by the same token.

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2008!

WordCamp Portland: How WordPress Changes Lives

2008-10-09T17:52:00.001-07:00

WordCamp Portland: How WordPress Changes Lives
When I was asked to speak on how WordPress changes lives at WordCamp Portland in September of 2008, I was faced with a dilemma. While WordPress does change lives, blogging changes more lives. How do I connect the dots between WordPress and the life changing experience of blogging? I didn’t realize that the WordPress Community would [...]

When I was asked to speak on how WordPress changes lives at WordCamp Portland in September of 2008, I was faced with a dilemma. While WordPress does change lives, blogging changes more lives. How do I connect the dots between WordPress and the life changing experience of blogging?

I didn’t realize that the WordPress Community would give me the answers I needed to that question. Their inspirational answers led to the following video on how WordPress changes lives, and the creation of the WordPress Fairy Blogmother.

WordPress changes lives because of the community. Over and over again, people told me that WordPress changes their lives because of the people it brings into their lives. While it doesn’t really matter what blogging platform you may use, it’s the community that supports and encourages fellow WordPress users that makes the difference. Without the WordPress Support Forums, the incredible free WordPress Themes created by imaginative and altruistic fans, the powerful WordPress Plugins created and shared by those who saw a challenge and found a solution, and the support and willingness of WordPress users to educate others on how to use the program and make it work better - there would be no community.

WordPress has inspired many to learn about coding, design, web development, marketing, but also how to be a part of a community. WordPress fans are the definition of the social web. With the passion that comes with learning and sharing WordPress tips, tricks, and techniques, they’ve founded a grassroots community, which led to WordPress meetups and social gatherings, and now to WordCamps around the world.

When I attend the many business and professional conferences to speak and present programs, it’s fairly serious. I’m there for business. They are there for business. It’s serious stuff.

When I walk through the door of a WordCamp event, I’ve found family. We’re instantly friends. We all know each other, and if we don’t, we will within a few moments. We’re risk takers and yet communal spirits, sharing the risk together. When one person pushes WordPress, we all benefit from the results.

As I interviewed people and asked the WordPress Community for help in discovering how WordPress changes lives, I knew I had to put faces on the many people who’ve had their lives transformed by their involvement in WordPress. In the first half of the video, I honor those whom I’ve known for several years since early in the development of WordPress, as well as a few new friends. Many of these people have gone from interested enthusiasts to friends of WordPress to employees of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. By using WordPress and being involved in the community, they’ve built their businesses and reputation as WordPress experts, and in turn, powerful forces on the web.

Sure, any blogging platform can do that, but there is something about Matt Mullenweg and his vision for WordPress and blogging in general that brings people together to achieve more than they could alone. This is what changes people’s lives. Together, we’re stronger with WordPress than without.

Enjoy all the inspirational reasons WordPress fans offered for how and why WordPress changed their lives. And don’t forget to check out Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, the video made especially for the finale of my presentation.

Video of How WordPress Changes Lives

There are two versions of the video. The YouTube version is low resolution and a smaller file size. The Viddler version is higher resolution and 138.5 meg file size. The video is ten minutes long. The transcription of the video is below.

YouTube Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Viddler Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Transcription of How WordPress Changes Lives

I haven’t found an easy way to add subtitles or captions to this Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum v9 program. Any help would be appreciated. Until then, this is the transcript of the video.

Fairy Blogmother: Hey, is this thing on. Hey. Is this on?
Is it working? It’s not working.
Bang! Bang! Hello, are you working.
Ah, there we go.

* Instrumental Music “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio *

“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are.
Anything your heart desires will come to you.”

“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
“When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.”

“Fate is kind. She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.”

“Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through.
“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”

Featured WordPress Community Members:

*Music*

*Static*

WordCamp Portland 2008, taking over the streets of downtown Portland, Oregon, with the Fairy Blogmother

Fairy Blogmother: Hello! Is this working?
It’s stop working again, dang it.
What’s going on here? Okay, wait, wait.
Bang! Bang! Ah, there.

Barbara Rozgonyi: Hello, my name is Barbara Rozgonyi with wiredPRworks.com, and Lorelle, thank you for interviewing me in the bathroom. How has WordPress changed my life? I can’t tell you everything in 15 seconds but I can tell you that it’s really made me into the person I’ve always wanted to be. Now, I can be an author, I can be a person who really influences lives. And boy, it’s so interesting to see what readers have to say. To see them take just a little piece of information and take it and make it huge that will help so many people. And I get to hang out with cool people like Lorelle in the ladies’ room.

John Hawkins: Hi, this is John Hawkins from johnhawkinsunrated.com. WordPress. WordPress changed my life how. Let’s see. I’d say I’ve met some amazing people through WordPress. I Twitter and I answer people’s questions, and you would be amazed at the amount of people who are just dying to connect with you through WordPress. Go WordPress!
Hey, come to WordCamp Las Vegas on the January 10-11, 2009. See you there!

Stace Baris:
My name is Stace Baris with aceinternetmarketing.com. And WordPress has changed my life because it is open source, lots of great Plugins for doing SEO getting my content out there, lots of widgets I can use and also made affiliate marketing really easy with great Amazon Plugins and all sorts of things. If you are serious about blogging, WordPress is the way to go and Lorelle is the person to get your info from. She’s great.

Susan Patton: Hi, I’m Susan Patton the Marketing Eggspert from Sparkplugging.com/marketing. How WordPress has changed my life? Besides getting me interviewed in the bathroom at Blog World Expo, the height of experiences, it makes it really easy. I have some tech experience but I love the creative side. So I don’t want to deal with the hard stuff. WordPress makes it easy to do what I want to do. There are Widgets for everything. There are template for everything. It’s easy. And I can worry about everything else and not my blog.

Kim Woodbridge: WordPress has changed my life by giving me confidence in my abilities and helping me earn money. I’ve found that I love
working on it. Plus, I’ve met so many interesting and talented people online.

This sounded so much better in my head but it didn’t come out quite right Well, I hope it gives you the idea. Thanks! Kim Woodbridge kimwoodbridge.com [Via email]

Naked Bones: I would say WordPress has changed my life, and it has made it easier. It gave me the room to empty my mind of the everyday stuff we all go through. [Via blog comment]

Wendy Piersall: Hi, I’m Wendy Piersall. I’m CEO of the SparkPlugging.com. Looking back I was remembering when I first started my brand. I kicked it off with WordPress. WordPress made it absolutely easy for me with little-to-know tech experience whatsoever to create a powerful brand that is now rocking the blogosphere. I tell everybody now to just start with WordPress. It’s brain dead easy and it’s extremely just brilliant and I don’t know how we could function with out it. We owe a lot to you WordPress. We love you.

Owen Cutajar: [from Twitter] WP means I can build a great new website, secure and loaded with functionality, all b4 breakfast. Good Luck at #wordcampdx.

Heather Rasley: Hi, my name is Heather Rasley, the deputy at Automattic. I made the switch to WordPress after discovering that all my favorite awesome bloggers use it. I’m very happy to be working for Automattic and making other people happy, too.

Jane Wells: Hi, I’m Jane Wells and I’m the user experience person with Automattic. WordPress has changed my life by exposing me to a kick ass community of open source developers and allowing me to work with the best guys in the world.

Karen Jackie and Dana Rockel: I’m Karen Jackie partner of Content Robot and Dana Rockel from Content Robot. WordPress has changed our lives because it has actually given us an entrepreneurial spirit and we produce WordPress blogs for clients all over the world. WordPress is a great platform. We started out as a blogging company and moved to WordPress and we don’t do any other platforms right now. WordPress is it.

Nathan Moller: My name is Nate Moeller from MollerMarketing.com. Without WordPress I don’t know where I would be in the blogging community. What else is there. Blogging is WordPress.

Fairy Blogmother: Oh, no. Not again.
They must be redesigning the interface. Sigh.
Can’t they leave anything alone. They keep messing with things.
It was just fine the way it was. Why do they have to keep changing things?
ARGH!

At WordCamp Portland, I surprised the audience from behind, wearing my WordPress Fairy Blogmother outfit. I spoke about the points mentioned at the beginning of this article, and asked the audience to come forward with their “testimonies” on how WordPress changed their lives. I was stunned at the number of people wanting to share their stories, nearly bringing the audience, and myself, to tears.

You can see the video of part of the presentation by Dale Chumbley streamed live from Cubespace in Portland, Oregon.

The end of the program featured Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, a video on how this woman uses WordPress to blog only with her left thumb. Because WordPress continues to be the most accessible and disabled-user friendly blogging platform around, she has opened up her sphere of influence and network of relationships around the world as her blog allows her to “speak out” when her body won’t.

As we design and develop WordPress Themes, Plugins, and code, the WordPress Community needs to remember that Glenda is an important representative of our users.

Thank you again to everyone who helped me put this together, everyone whose lives have been touched my WordPress, and everyone who has helped changed my life with WordPress.

Site Search Tags: wordcamp, wordcampdx, wordcampportland, wordcamp portland, how wordpress changes lives, wordpress, wordpress news, wordpress events, wordpress community, wordpress users, accessibility, glenda watson hyatt, inspirational

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

Posted in WordPress News��

Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily

2008-10-07T17:17:00.013-07:00

Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily
I was so thrilled when Glenda Watson Hyatt of the Do It Myself Blog volunteered her story of how WordPress changed her life for my WordCamp Portland keynote presentation. I’ll be sharing the videos and pictures of the program in the next few days, but I wanted to share with you Glenda’s personal story. As you [...]

I was so thrilled when Glenda Watson Hyatt of the Do It Myself Blog volunteered her story of how WordPress changed her life for my WordCamp Portland keynote presentation. I’ll be sharing the videos and pictures of the program in the next few days, but I wanted to share with you Glenda’s personal story.

As you design and develop WordPress Themes and Plugins, and even WordPress itself, remember that you are serving thousands, maybe even millions of people just like Glenda. Creative, energetic members of society determined to give back to their community, yet unable to communicate in person or easily interact with a computer. They are reliant upon those of us who make the web possible, and social, to communicate with others by maintaining web accessibility standards.

Glenda tells her story in her book, “I’ll Do It Myself.” Imagine being unable to communicate but having a lot to say. With the help of determined friends, family, and an off-and-on-again support community, made her way through high school and then into college, and eventually into her own consulting business without much ability to talk “normally.”

Glenda Watson Hyatt, Darrell Hyatt, and Lorelle VanFossen at Blog World Expo

When she started blogging, she discovered that she could leave behind all the years of “I don’t understand you” and “What are you trying to say?” and people thinking she was retarded or a vegetable. She could express herself. She could communicate with others with no barriers. A whole world opened up to her.

I was extremely lucky to spend time with Glenda and her wonderful husband, Darrell, at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. We had a great time visiting and both were extremely excited about being included in the WordCamp Portland event through video. I’m lucky to have found two wonderful new friends and I look forward to visiting them soon in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area.

If you have a social media or web technology conference in the Pacific Northwest - or anywhere for that matter - and you want an incredible inspirational blogger to speak to you, get Glenda. She will change your life with her smile and attitude.

Thanks, Glenda!

Site Search Tags: glenda, glenda watson hyatt, i can do it myself, i’ll do it myself, accessibility, accessible, web accessibility, web standards, disabled, disabled blogger, inspirational, how wordpress changes lives

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

Posted in Web Design, WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips��

"Plugin Manager Enabled" Badges

2008-10-07T17:17:00.011-07:00

Are you a Movable Type plugin developer? Have you built in support for Plugin Manager yet? If so, consider adding one of the following badges to your plugin's web page to signify the your plugin is "Plugin Manager Enabled." This... Read More

SATellite Images

2008-10-07T17:17:00.009-07:00

SATellite Images
Allows the user to view many different SATellite Weather Images of USA including 10 Day Forecast. Also does World Weather, Sea Surface Temperatures, Earthquakes, Oceans, Solar Activity, and almost the entire world of Geology, including all 50 states and 76 cities.

Month Calendar

2008-10-07T17:17:00.007-07:00

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.

London Underground Tube Status

2008-10-07T17:17:00.005-07:00

Provides real time information about the London Tube Lines. There are two views for this Widget: 1) The detailed view shows the status of all the London Underground Lines. 2) The compact view only shows the Underground Lines that are having problems. You can get detailed information about each of the tube lines (including station closures and details about the report problems) through tool tips (by giving the Widget focus and moving your mouse over the individual tube lines). The Widget also contains a complete map of the tube system and four convenient links to the TFL Journey Planner tool for common trips. Read More

Retro iPod Shuffle Case Proclaims Old School Fandom [IPod]

2008-10-07T17:17:00.003-07:00

What better way to celebrate your new iPod shuffle than sticking it to Apple's marketing/branding department and sliding the sleek device into the original Apple logo? Available from an Etsy seller,... Read More

Comcast Now Restricts Bandwidth Data Transfer Levels

2008-10-07T17:17:00.001-07:00

If you haven’t reviewed the GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps, do it now. As of Wednesday this week, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband and DSL for Internet access in the United States is going to be restricting your data transfer levels to 250 gigabytes a month. According to Om [...]

If you haven’t reviewed the GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps, do it now.

As of Wednesday this week, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband and DSL for Internet access in the United States is going to be restricting your data transfer levels to 250 gigabytes a month. According to Om Malik:

With this move, the cable company will become the symbol of a new Internet era, one that is both monitored and metered. It is an era that threatens to limit innovation and to a large extent, the possibilities for new startups.

Many bloggers are part of online businesses and startups as well as suppliers of video, podcasts, and downloadable and uploaded files across the web. As web designs and WordPress Themes become more graphic and code dependent, increasing our bandwidth access levels, these limits impinge upon that grown and that access.

While WordPress Themes, Plugins, and Widgets account for very small levels of data transfer, what about a new WordPress user who wants to download and experiment with a lot of Themes and Plugins? Downloading more than a gig or two of WordPress stuff is rare, but if you add that to their other file downloads, like software, instant messaging, IRC, email, flickr, YouTube, podcasts, music, news, television, VoIP, and all the information and data that enters our world through our computers - those numbers add up fast.

I just moved from a satellite connection with a 17 gig limit. We hit the limit all the time and we weren’t downloading music or shows. I didn’t even download podcasts until I went on a trip. There were three of us using the web for our work. Download a few software programs, update your computer’s operating system, test out some Plugins, and it all adds up fast.

According to the White Paper, “today’s power users are tomorrow’s average users” with a predication that by 2012 we will be paying about $215 a month for Internet data access. Malik and others are fighting back with words in hopes of changing this “walled garden” limitation. I hope you join us in spreading the word.

The Web Must Be Free

The timing of this announcement comes the same time as the announcement of the new World Wide Web Foundation was announced. In the welcome statement, the founders, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, stated:

The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web’s capability and robustness, and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet. The Web Foundation brings together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale.

One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information.

While I’m totally in favor and support breaking down communication and language barriers, as well as all social, cultural, and technological barriers, the biggest barrier we have to fight is greed.

It’s getting harder and harder to find free access to the web. Someone has to pay. With belts tightening around the world, will Internet access be only for the rich?

The Internet was originally started and built on lines abandoned by the phone companies, the same companies who struggled to find ways of charging for that access after they realized they were missing out on the financial possibilities of connecting via the Internet and web. They have been looking under every rock to find ways of making money off this “web thing” ever since.

Yes, we must pay for the continued growth and access to the web, but restricting bandwidth and data transfer hurts an economy already showing the flashing red danger signal.

Be warned, be aware, and let Comcast and others know that you do not want this. Fight back with your voice. Spread the word.

I remember when Arthur C. Clarke predicted that long distance telephone calls would be free by the end of the century. I thought it odd since he was a very intelligent man and he lived in the same world that I did, one where corporate greed controls everything. I couldn’t see such a thing as being possible, but with the web, it became possible. Will that freedom continue or will corporate greed continue to slip into our pockets?

Site Search Tags: comcast, bandwidth, data transfer, internet access, internet provider, high cost, bandwidth restriction, bandwidth limits, internet connections, wordpress themes, wordpress plugins, wordpress news, download, upload, files, connection, internet

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

Posted in Web Wise, WordPress News��

Lifehack?s Writing Tips

2008-10-07T17:16:00.005-07:00

Lifehack?s Writing Tips
Every once in a while, Lifehack tackles writing tips and tricks. Recently, two great articles caught my eye. Just Keep Writing! motivates you to just keep writing, inspired with quotes from famous writers on what they believed kept them writing. If you feel the writing spirit waning with your blog, these are some great motivational tips. If [...]

Every once in a while, Lifehack tackles writing tips and tricks. Recently, two great articles caught my eye.

Just Keep Writing! motivates you to just keep writing, inspired with quotes from famous writers on what they believed kept them writing. If you feel the writing spirit waning with your blog, these are some great motivational tips.

If you are already feeling blogger’s block, then it might be time for some of the tips in Break Through Writer’s Block. While I rarely suffer blogger’s block or writer’s block - I always find something to write about - I do get bored with my writing. If I’m bored, I’m sure you are. Boredom leads to procrastination, which eventually slows down my production as I can’t find the motivation to keep coming up with witty and intelligent things to say every day.

This article is a great resource with tips to keep you on the blogging path and kick your ass if you start blog-foot dragging.

Site Search Tags: writing, blogging tips, blog writing, writer’s block, blogger’s block, block, writing tips, how to blog

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

Posted in Blogging Tips, Writing��

Awesome Photo Gallery/Google Maps Mashup

2008-10-07T17:16:00.003-07:00

I recently was contacted by James Sanders who created a really cool Photo Gallery and Google Maps Mashup. They installed and customized the Photo Gallery Plugin such that a little thumb tack is displayed on a map of the world... Read More

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!!!!!

2008-10-07T17:16:00.001-07:00

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!!!!!
We love the cool games we played when we were kids, so we found them and put those games in our widget platform (Thank You, Neave!!!!).

http://springwidget.com/widgets/byCategory/12

Check them out - they are in the "Fun and Games" category of the Widget Gallery.

We have the following:
Asteroids
Tic-Tac-Toe
Simon
Hexxagon
Snake
Space Invaders

They are pretty addictive - I spend more time than I'd like to admit tie-ing the computer in Tic-Tac-Toe - but I figured out the one move that always wins - hehe.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

Get this widget!

Homer Simpson Explains the Problem with Electronic Voting [Clips]

2008-10-02T20:17:00.019-07:00

Conspiracy theorist or not, any time I'm typing information into a computer at any time of the day, I know that it can be lost at a moment's notice, by the simple glitch of a program or power supply.... Read More

Redefining the Widget

2008-10-02T20:17:00.017-07:00

Last year at Widgets Live, the announcement of the SpringWidgets platform redefined what a widget could be. At the time of our launch there were three categories of widgets: desktop widgets, web widgets and a special subsection of web widgets that would work on social networking profiles.

We changed all that by inventing a widget platform that allowed for the first time, the ability to use a single, updatable and configurable widget file to reach all of these destinations. We took it further by incorporating in the ability to “pop” any SpringWidget you find on the web onto your desktop with just one click.

Since our release, there have been a few companies that have announced a similar product offering - YourMinis and Netvibes are examples we feel are well done.

I'm going to give you a little sneak peak behind the curtain where we are quietly working on redefining the widget once again, and perhaps in the process spur another round of inspiration.

For the most part, online widgets have been exactly what the limited definition has made them out to be …

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Thanks Wikipedia

Reading this, I’m thinking about the widget landscape and in my head I’m starting to challenge the entire box that we have collectively put widgets into, trying to look past the simple definition and look at the transformative nature of what a portable chunk of code can do.

Is the widget just a visitor on the web page or can it be much more and control and interact with the web page it’s on? If widgets are like parasites, can a parasite define the host?

Can a widget be a portable “experience?”

Envision if you will a Widget that no longer sends the user off to another site to personalize itself. Imagine a widget that is not content to stay within the confines of it’s own little box, but rather can interact with the page it lives on. The “Transformative Widget” would take over the page it’s on; integrating it's content within that page and transforming it based on a click.

If the Widget is not just a chunk of code, but rather a portable experience, imagine the infinite ways we can expand the brand experience within the social network itself. Moving code and embedding Widgets can create a better way to immerse the user in an extreme brand experience. The widget then becomes an ad that is user embedded, user selected and more powerfully engaging and interactive than any traditional advertisement that is available - and just as performance oriented.

If a user allows the widget to brand the entire page, is that a "Widgetview", an "Ad Impression", or a "Pageview"?

So if SpringWidgets is ready to challenge the Widget Landscape it’s safe to say that the launch of THE FANTASTIC FOUR Widget is the next step in redefining the Widget. The transformative nature of TFF Widget is completely apparent once you start using it on your MySpace profile and the brand experience is more immersive than anything possible with a widget prior to the Fantastic Four widget launch.

This is only one of the many transformative widgets that we are engaged in and only represents a small amount of our R&D efforts. Over the weeks and months to come, we'll be rolling out some truly fantastic products that will not only transform the widget, but transform SpringWidgets as well.

We would love to have you on board as we make these transformations, so please feel free to download our API and put your own thoughts to work in redefining what a widget can be. Read More

Multi-Media Screensaver 1.1.551

2008-10-02T20:17:00.015-07:00

Multi-Media Screensaver 1.1.551
Can transfer media player to screensaver Can transfer media player to screensaver (read more)

TextCatch 2.6.4.1

2008-10-02T20:17:00.013-07:00

TextCatch 2.6.4.1
A powerful windows TEXT capture program with many features and options A powerful windows TEXT capture program with many features and options (read more)

AProverbGenius 1.0

2008-10-02T20:17:00.011-07:00

AProverbGenius 1.0
Collection of Proverbs on your Dashboard.

About AProverbGenius
Dynamic loading of Proverbs when you start Dashboard, more than 1000 of Proverbs in your Dashboard. Internet connection required.

London Underground Tube Status

2008-10-02T20:17:00.009-07:00

SimplyHired "job search" widget launched Monday

2008-10-02T20:17:00.007-07:00

SimplyHired "job search" widget launched Monday
SimplyHired released a widget on SpringWidgets this Monday (2/5/07) - a SimplyHired "job search" widget!!!!! More will be announced "officially", but wanted everyone that might drop by the blog to know they should go grab the widget and put it on their page or pop it into the desktop launchpad.

http://springwidgets.com/simplyhired

widgets/Simply Hired.sbw" flashvars="param_keywords0=Developer¶m_location0=Atlanta, GA¶m_distance0=5&memberId=thespringbox" quality="high" wmode="transparent" width="250" height="350" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

Get this widget!

DIY Geiger Counters Help Us Face Our Dismal, Irradiated Futures [DIY]

2008-10-02T20:17:00.005-07:00

DIY Geiger Counters Help Us Face Our Dismal, Irradiated Futures [DIY]
What with the financial crisis and recent nuclear (dis)agreements and the possibility of having an insane (but like-able! Teehee!) person becoming the country's VP, we could be headed for a The Road...

Rollercoaster 0.1

2008-10-02T20:17:00.003-07:00

Enjoy the Ride - Nonstop.

About Rollercoaster
Wanna have a nonstop rollercoaster ride ? Here we go. - Works only on 10.5 Leopard.

Twitter Tweets

2008-10-02T20:17:00.001-07:00

This is an experiment to check out LoudTwitter. For the next week or so, I will be playing around with this and getting feel for how it works and how to customize this to work with your WordPress.com blog. Stay tuned for more news. Apologies to those annoyed by Twitter rambling. It annoys me, too, which [...]

Apologies to those annoyed by Twitter rambling. It annoys me, too, which is why I need to learn more about how to maximize Twitter content and help you learn along the way.

Are you using LoudTwitter or a similar republishing tool for your Twitter account? How is it working for you? Any tips for me?

07:20 Getting a lot of great interest in #sobcon09 in May 2009 Chicago. You going to be there? I will. Can’t wait. #
10:56 #wordcampvancouver is this weekend in BC. Will you be there? Wish I was. I’ll be #wordcampportland. #
11:36 Looking for digital video editing software. Finding crap. Suggestions? #
11:36 @wordcampbham I’m sure #wordcampbham is going to be fantastic. I need some promo material to help, so contact me! #
11:38 @backon_online #wordcampportland is going to rock. I am so excited to meet up with new-old friends and NEW NEIGHBORS! Love being in portland #
11:41 @jeffr0 Thanks and eager to get news on your new WordPress podcast! How’s that going? #
11:41 @secretsushi WordPress 2.7 is due later this fall. A demo will be featured at many of the WordCamps this weekend - so stay tuned for peeks. #
11:42 @duanestorey Some friends of mine are heading to #wordcampvancouver this weekend. Glenda and Darrell. Treat them like honored guests for me! #
11:43 @kwbridge You can email me answers on how WordPress changed your life at lorelleonwordpress at gmail. Thanks! #
11:44 @mollermarketing And you did great answering how WordPress changed your life! You are a video star! #
11:46 Idiot Alert: I recorded video at #bwe08 vertical not horizontal. ARGH! How do I flip or rotate digital video? #
11:59 @vegasgeek yep!!! Lay down video - new style. Everyone lays down. So used to still, didn’t think about horz vs vert. SIGH. #
11:59 @wiredprworks Will be posting how WordPress changed your life video and video of talk after weekend’s #wordcampportland. Going to ROCK! #
12:20 @GlendaWH Hey, my new dear friend! lorelleonwordpress at gmail - Your video is ~3 minutes on how WordPress changed your life! #
12:21 @vegasgeek LOL That’s the solution for sure. But I like the idea of 200 people laying down to watch much better. Fun at #wordcampportland! #
12:53 @bkajino Can’t wait for #wordcampportland You know I’m also talking about Woopra??? Will have some goodies for those attending, I hope! #
12:54 OMG Did you all see that I’m on the cover of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine?! Bunch of my articles in there. Wow! Didn’t know until #bwe08 #
13:11 @GlendaWH Can’t find your card - found Darrell’s so I emailed him with notes. CAn’t wait!!! #
13:18 Ever have one of those days when you wonder why you blog? Back from #bwe08 I shouldn’t but tired out. Need kick. #
14:21 @WatershedStudio Blogger and Podcaster Rock Star? right? I was so stunned to see my name on the cover. I’m just little ol’ me. #
14:22 @gregbd Right, but not separate. Your blog is yr online resume today. Social business model circles around it. Start blog first then social #
14:45 Idiot Alert Off. FOUND IT! How to flip a vertical video back to horizontal. is.gd/31N1 Simple and easy! Whew. #
14:56 Michael Moore giving away next movie tinyurl.com/5dkqm8 Slacker Uprising. Another example of how free giveaways make money? #
16:13 @vegasgeek What dates are you thinking for WordCamp Vegas? WordCamp Denver scheduling for Jan and don’t want to overlap. #
20:28 4 WordCamps this weekend: Portland, Toronto, Utah, Vancouver(BC) WordPress #wordcamp weekend! #
22:06 @MikePerry Thanks. It was a surprise to me at #bwe08. Great timing. Blogger and Podcaster Magazine doing some interesting stuff lately. #
22:07 YEAH! Raw fooder! Check out the raw food porn book "Raw" by Charlie Trotter. Too much trouble to cook but sexy pics. #
22:08 @vegasgeek Denver wanted the same dates for their WordCamp. Will let them know and maybe they can change them. Thanks much! #
22:14 @gregbd BuddyPress WordPress Theme on steroids is doing that as are others. Connecting the dots. We need more dot connectors to stop scatter #
22:15 @bkajino Woopra is very sweet. I wrote that article (wrong byline), too, after first public preview (hours). It’s even better now. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Posted in Blog Babble��

RSS Hugger

2008-10-01T14:45:00.013-07:00

RSS Hugger

Collin LaHay has come up with an idea called RSSHugger, it's a site that allows webmasters to promote their RSS feeds by adding them to the site. You can add your own page but it will cost you 20US dollars (10 is you blog about RSSHugger).

RSS Hugger seems to be a cross between an RSS directory and a wiki. Collin wants the directory to grow to 50,000 blogs which he claims is 0.00045 percent of the blogosphere.

The idea behind the new site is to create buzz and generate new RSS subscribers for RSS feeds that are added to the site. When you buy a page you basically get your feed headlines displayed on your own page within RSSHugger. Whether or not enough buzz is created to generate any new subscribers to members feeds remains to be seen.

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.

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!!!!!

2008-10-01T14:45:00.011-07:00

We love the cool games we played when we were kids, so we found them and put those games in our widget platform (Thank You, Neave!!!!).

http://springwidget.com/widgets/byCategory/12

Check them out - they are in the "Fun and Games" category of the Widget Gallery.

We have the following:
Asteroids
Tic-Tac-Toe
Simon
Hexxagon
Snake
Space Invaders

They are pretty addictive - I spend more time than I'd like to admit tie-ing the computer in Tic-Tac-Toe - but I figured out the one move that always wins - hehe.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

Get this widget!

Adding an Item to Your Queue

2008-10-01T14:45:00.009-07:00

From anywhere within Media Manager you can add another item to your queue. Click on the "Add Item" link in the left hand menu, or the "Add Item to your Queue" found on the main Media Manager screen. From... Read More

New Features - New Faces - Happy Holidays

2008-10-01T14:45:00.007-07:00

Only a few more days and it’s already 2008. How time flies! We hope you are all enjoying the holiday season. Here is a brief message with the latest news about AddThis. More Analytics. To help you start off the new year, we have upgraded our stats interface to give you more analytics about how your [...]

Only a few more days and it’s already 2008. How time flies! We hope you are all enjoying the holiday season. Here is a brief message with the latest news about AddThis.

- bookmarking/sharing trends over time (day, week, month, year)
- enhanced ‘Top Bookmarks’ report
- audience breakdown by country
- export to various formats (e.g. CSV, Tab, Excel)

Top Bookmarking / Sharing Services - November

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2008!

EA Waiting to Release Android Games Until It Can Charge for Them [Android]

2008-10-01T14:45:00.005-07:00

EA Waiting to Release Android Games Until It Can Charge for Them [Android]
While Namco jumped headfirst into the Android Market by giving away Pac-Man, EA Games is going to sit out for the time being, at least until there's a billing system in place for apps in the Android...

Steve Jobs High (In Mexico!) [The Children]

2008-10-01T14:45:00.003-07:00

Steve Jobs High (In Mexico!) [The Children]
How does a fledgling, technology-oriented school just north of Acapulco get a leg up in this competitive world? I honestly have no idea, but at least one person seems to think that naming it after...

Countdown to DEAD SILENCE - the movie!

2008-10-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

Countdown to DEAD SILENCE - the movie!
How creepy is this widget?!!!!

--His eyes move when your cursor is idle,
--his eyes follow your cursor when your cursor is close to his face, and
--CLICK ON HIS HEAD!!!!! IT BOBBLES!!!!!

CREEPY!!!!

See the widget on the Dead Silence movie page inside MySpace at:

www.myspace.com/deadsilencemovie

Get this widget!

Twitter Tweets

2008-10-01T14:44:00.005-07:00

Twitter Tweets
12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #wordcampportland this weekend (Sat.) on how WordPress changes lives. # 21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: This is an experiment to check out LoudTwitt.. tinyurl.com/4pl8fw # 21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: 08:14 Will be also speaking at #wordcamppor.. tinyurl.com/4op2jv # 21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: 09:06 #wordcampportland in two days. Keynot.. [...]

12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #wordcampportland this weekend (Sat.) on how WordPress changes lives. #
21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: This is an experiment to check out LoudTwitt.. tinyurl.com/4pl8fw #
21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets:
08:14 Will be also speaking at #wordcamppor.. tinyurl.com/4op2jv #
21:20 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets:
09:06 #wordcampportland in two days. Keynot.. tinyurl.com/4e4vyj #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Posted in Blogging Tips��

Toshiba 'Super Charge' Laptop Batteries Hit 90% in 10 Minutes, Age Well [Batteries]

2008-10-01T14:44:00.003-07:00

Toshiba's Super Charge Ion Batteries (SCiBs) have been floating around in various industrial applications for a while now, prompting some serious envy in the consumer space with their ridiculously... Read More

Redefining the Widget

2008-10-01T14:44:00.001-07:00

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Month Calendar

2008-09-29T21:12:00.015-07:00

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]

2008-09-29T21:12:00.013-07:00

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!

2008-09-29T21:12:00.011-07:00

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

2008-09-29T21:12:00.009-07:00

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.

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

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]

2008-09-29T21:12:00.007-07:00

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

2008-09-29T21:12:00.005-07:00

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

2008-09-29T21:12:00.003-07:00

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]

2008-09-29T21:12:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-29T21:11:00.003-07:00

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

2008-09-29T21:11:00.001-07:00

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

John Chow vs Shoemoney RSS competition

2008-09-25T19:14:00.013-07:00

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]

2008-09-25T19:14:00.011-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:14:00.009-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:14:00.007-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:14:00.005-07:00

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]

2008-09-25T19:14:00.003-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:14:00.001-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:13:00.005-07:00

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

2008-09-25T19:13:00.003-07:00

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"

2008-09-25T19:13:00.001-07:00

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

Tide Graph Widget 0.7

2008-09-24T02:57:00.019-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.017-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.015-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.013-07:00

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.

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

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!!!!!

2008-09-24T02:57:00.011-07:00

Checking your own RSS feeds

2008-09-24T02:57:00.009-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.007-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.005-07:00

Technorati Claiming set-up
Technorati Profile

Östgötatrafiken 1.0

2008-09-24T02:57:00.003-07:00

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

2008-09-24T02:57:00.001-07:00

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.

Site Search Tags: wordcamp, wordpress event, conference, wordpress news, wordpress conferences, wordpress community

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

New Features - More Customization of the Button

2008-09-19T17:41:00.011-07:00

Well, it’s 2008. Hope you all got a chance to try the new features we added last month to your analytics interface. We already received some great feedback. We’ve been busy preparing to move to our new platform. This new platform will enable AddThis to scale more easily and provide additional powerful capabilities to the service. [...]

Well, it’s 2008. Hope you all got a chance to try the new features we added last month to your analytics interface. We already received some great feedback.

Dropdown positioning - We also added the ability to re-position the dropdown vertically or horizontally, if needed.

>> Here is the documentation for the new features <<

Happy Customizing!

ProgDVB 5.15.11 / 4.91.10

2008-09-19T17:41:00.009-07:00

Will watch SAT-Television and listen to Radio channels directly from satellite by using DVB-PCI cards Will watch SAT-Television and listen to Radio channels directly from satellite by using DVB-PCI cards (read more) Read More

Football widgets are in season!

2008-09-19T17:41:00.007-07:00

Football widgets are in season!
With football season fast approaching, now is the best time to put the spotlight on our Sports Scoreboard widget and the NFL Gametrax widget. These two widgets are quite possibly the best sports focused widgets ever built. At least that's what our moms say ;-)

The Gametrax widget pulls in all the currently playing games for the NFL and displays them complete with play by play action and game leaders! (can you say fantasy?)

That's a live Gametrax widget to the left, clicking on the "game" tab will show you the play by play action if there is a game currently being played.

Our Scoreboard widget pulls in a complete list of all games playing complete with live scores for the NFL (excluding preseason), MLB, NBA, NHL, College Football and College Basketball leagues.

The great thing about the Scoreboard widget is that it can be dynamically sized. It will drop down as small as 160 pixels wide so that it will fit on most blog sidebars. If you have a sports blog, this is really the best way to share scores with your readers.

The scoreboard widget set to 160 pixels wide for blog sidebar placement. You can also set the default league shown to be MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, CBK or CFB

Each league in the scoreboard gets yesterday's, tomorrow's and today's games in a tabbed format and you can set the initial display of the widget to default to any of those tabs for any league when the widget first loads.

In the yesterday tab, the final game scores along with a win/loss indicator on each team shows you quickly who was on top. Tomorrow's tab shows the game time and teams playing so that you can better plan which sports bar to visit to watch the most games at once, and the today tab shows off live in game scores on all games in the list complete with some in game leader information.

Now for the really cool info... For those of you who have our desktop application installed, the scoreboard widget really begins to shine after you download it.

Flip to the preference panel in the desktop sports Scoreboard widget and enable "docking" and you'll be able to drag the widget to the sidebar for all day sports tracking ability even when your work apps are open.

Take a few minutes and play with the widgets and feel free to use them for your desktop, blog or social network profile. If you think our moms are right and these are the best sports widgets that have ever been built, let us know.

If you are interested in more sports related widgets, search the gallery for sports. So far we have 109 sports related widgets that have been created ranging everywhere from Ask Men's Health and Sports News to the Worland Middle School Sports Schedule.

-Don

click the thumbnail to see what the Scoreboard looks like when docked on your desktop.

SimplyHired "job search" widget launched Monday

2008-09-19T17:41:00.005-07:00

SimplyHired released a widget on SpringWidgets this Monday (2/5/07) - a SimplyHired "job search" widget!!!!! More will be announced "officially", but wanted everyone that might drop by the blog to know they should go grab the widget and put it on their page or pop it into the desktop launchpad.

http://springwidgets.com/simplyhired

widgets/Simply Hired.sbw" flashvars="param_keywords0=Developer¶m_location0=Atlanta, GA¶m_distance0=5&memberId=thespringbox" quality="high" wmode="transparent" width="250" height="350" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

Get this widget!

Question of the Day: Can Advertising Really Help Make Microsoft "Hip?" [Question Of The Day]

2008-09-19T17:41:00.003-07:00

Question of the Day: Can Advertising Really Help Make Microsoft "Hip?" [Question Of The Day]
newVideoPlayer("/pcpride.flv", 475, 376,""); There is no doubt about it, Microsoft's "I'm a PC" ads are far better than those miserably bad Gates and Seinfeld spots. The newer ads try to dispel the...

Countdown to DEAD SILENCE - the movie!

2008-09-19T17:41:00.001-07:00

Get this widget!

ProgDVB 5.15.11 / 4.91.10

2008-09-19T17:40:00.007-07:00

Designing WordPress Themes For the Slowing Web

2008-09-19T17:40:00.005-07:00

Jonathan Bailey of the Blog Herald wrote about Surfing the Slow Web, a summary of his recent experience trying to connect to the Internet as an evacuee from Hurricane Gustav. While most web designers are pushing the limits of heavy handed design towards high bandwidth, the world still doesn’t work that fast or wide. According to [...]

According to statistics, if you are reading this, you are probably on a broadband connection. Whether you are surfing at work on a LAN or at home on a DSL or cable modem, you are probably not on dial up at this moment.

However, there was a time not that long ago in which Webmasters were optimizing every element of their page feverishly to squeeze every ounce of speed from it. Broadband simply was not that common and, even over dial up connections, visitors had twitchy fingers on the “back” button at all times.

But in the age of YouTube, Flash ads and embeddable content, those lessons have been all but forgotten. However, not everyone has access to high-speed connection, especially in rural locations, and after spending just a few days limited to dial up, the lessons come flooding back.

Let us not forget that the virtual world is moving off desktops and land line and cable connections to the wired world of mobile computing. For years, our bandwidth speeds have been increasing, but now that we are moving to Internet access via cell phones and handheld computers, bandwidths are slowing down and narrowing again. Wired’s recent iPhone 3G survey reported that the average speed in the USA is 990 kbps - a typical average where only a few high scores can bring up the lowest to a well-meaning number, but a number not really indicative of what most are experiencing.

Living on the road in the early years, we started jumping up and down when we got a dial-up connection past 1200 baud (that’s without the kilobyte) in 1996, it was a thrill to get the first “fast” connection and actually move into the kilobytes. When WIFI was released and we could reach into the megabytes, and speeds have been increasing, but life on the road means taking what you can find, and what you often find is pretty darn slow.

I moved recently and had a frustrating time researching and initiating Internet access. I only have one choice for Internet service, and while they have multiple offerings, from dial-up to 20 Megs per second, I only have one choice, 1.5 Megs, at my location.

Designing for a Slowing Web

As you design your blog, WordPress Themes, Widgets, and even WordPress Plugins, you have a lot of options about how you code the code and include the graphic elements. You can design for the high speed broadband market, of which you might be one, or take into consideration the drop in bandwidth many are taking when they move from dedicated to mobile connections.

In addition to Jonathan’s tips for designing your blogs with slower bandwidth in mind, here are mine:

Use CSS: CSS was created to speed up page loading by putting all the design elements within the stylesheet. Many are putting them back into the architecture, including redundant images. Move all redundant design images and references back into the stylesheet and increase page generation times significantly.
Style for Accessibility: If your blog design meets the Section 508 Accessibility Standards and the WebAIM Section 508 Checklist, the odds are that it will load faster because it’s designed with accessibility features in mind like page readers and text only browsers.
Put Content First: The general order of a web page’s content in loading should be 1) header, 2) content, 3) additional content (comments), 5) sidebar(s), 6) footer, and the last should be ads and other heavy graphic elements. If a visitor has to wait for a heavy graphic element like ads, sidebars, and big images to load before they get to the content, they are very likely to lose patience and leave. Design the underlying architecture to load the content first and the pretty later.
Use a Mobile/Handheld Stylesheet: Include the option for a mobile or handheld stylesheet for your blog design or WordPress Theme. Restrict the visible design elements to the MOST critical information such as content rather than heavy graphics, sidebars, and ads. There are WordPress Plugins to help create a mobile version of your blog such as the new WordPress iPhone Plugin, Mowser WordPress Mobile, WordPress Mobile Edition, Mobilize by Mippin WordPress Plugin, WP-Wap, WordPress PDA & iPhone, WPhone, and iPhone / Mobile Admin.
Reduce, Resize, and Lower the Resolution of Graphics and Images: Do you really need to upload and display an image that can be viewed on IMAX? No! Keep images, even linked images, down to 800 to 1200 pixels wide. Keep file sizes down. Use JPG and PNG files with optimization to further reduce file sizes. Don’t preload images unless absolutely necessary. And don’t hotlink images as that adds more bandwidth to the bandwidth to pull them into the page from multiple cross-server locations.
Avoid Embedding Videos: As Jonathan mentioned in his article, why embed or host video players on your site when a link to download and play the video on whatever player the user has installed on their computer or browser will work just as well. Consider replacing embedding with a thumbnail image wrapped in a link or with a link to download the file in order to play it.
Limit JavaScripts and AJAX: While most of the web today can’t function without JavaScripts and the new AJAX, these scripts are often found in the head of the HTML architecture file, loading before the rest of the page. This can slow down the generation of a page. Consider optimizing all scripts and updating them for fast loading, and add them to the footer when possible to make it the last thing that loads on the page.

There are many other things you can do to speed up the loading of your blog’s design and content. As Jonathan noted, in the early days of web design, we wouldn’t even release a web design or WordPress Theme without running it through a battery of tests for code checks, accessibility standards, and bandwidth optimization. Maybe it’s time to bring that back for all WordPress Themes and blog designs, as well as for design enhancing and impacting WordPress Plugins.

The whole world doesn’t run at top bandwidth speeds. While we’re waiting for everyone to catch up, let’s design nice.

Site Search Tags: blog design, wordpress themes, web design, optimization, speed, bandwidth, dial-up, mobile, css, testing, design tests, accessibility, accessibility standards

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

MVV Dashboard widget 0.964

2008-09-19T17:40:00.003-07:00

MVV Dashboard widget 0.964
Access Munich public transportation timetables.

About MVV Dashboard widget
Provides direct access to timetables of public transport in Munich/Germany.

Atom Feed XSL Stylesheet

2008-09-19T17:40:00.001-07:00

Atom Feed XSL Stylesheet
One of the key features of Feed Manager is the ability to render a virtually illegible XML feed as HTML so that it is more easily understood by a person. The secret behind this feature is a simple XSLT stylesheet...

Technorati Claiming set-up

2008-09-15T07:37:00.001-07:00

Technorati Profile Read More

Social Trends for July

2008-09-15T07:36:00.011-07:00

Social Trends for July
Google stays at the top. Live and Furl are gaining momentum. More trends here. addthis_url = 'http://blog.addthis.com/?p=33'; addthis_title = 'Social Trends for July'; addthis_pub = '';

Google stays at the top. Live and Furl are gaining momentum. More trends here.

Sprint HTC Touch Diamond Now Available Online [Touch Diamond]

2008-09-15T07:36:00.009-07:00

Sprint HTC Touch Diamond Now Available Online [Touch Diamond]
True to their word, the folks at Sprint came through and put the HTC Touch Diamond up for sale today at Sprint.com, just as we said they would. Nothing's changed since we confirmed the September 14...

Carte de Vigilance de Météo France 1.1

2008-09-15T07:36:00.007-07:00

Card of Vigilance of Weather France.

About Carte de Vigilance de Météo France
Be to inform permanently of the situation weather in France.

Spiderman gets on the Express train.

2008-09-15T07:36:00.005-07:00

Get this widget!

Sony Pictures decided to put out an express widget for the upcoming Spiderman 3 movie.

Being a long time comic book collector, I can completely understand the excitement surrounding this film and am looking forward to seeing this one on the big screen at the local Imax probably more than any of you are.

While you are waiting through the last few days prior to the release, be sure to grab this widget and follow the news leading up to the opening weekend.

Remember, "With great power comes great responsibility!"

Of course, this Spiderman widget is so cool, I had to mash one up myself! as did EJRavin, another of our ExpressWidgets users. Good job EJ! Read More

Aya AVI DVD WMV FLV MOV iPod PSP 3GP MP4 SWF Video Converter Pro 1.1.8

2008-09-15T07:36:00.003-07:00

Aya AVI DVD WMV FLV MOV iPod PSP 3GP MP4 SWF Video Converter Pro 1.1.8
A multiple video format encoder utility A multiple video format encoder utility (read more)

The Media Manager Queue

2008-09-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

Media Manager is the easiest way to write about Amazon items in MT. Media Manager provides a simple queue to serve as a central location for you to manage all of media assets for your blog. From here you can... Read More

AccuWeather.com WeatherAlarm

2008-09-15T07:35:00.005-07:00

This amazingly compact weather Widget gives you all the information you need without taking up valuable space on your desktop. Choose from among the 2.7 million locations around the world for which AccuWeather.com provides a forecast, and get: • Current conditions in Fahrenheit or Celsius (with an easy toggle back and forth between the two) • Five-day forecast via a quick-opening, quick-closing fly-out window • Day display in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish AccuWeather.com’s WeatherAlarm Widget stores as many locations as you want, from one to hundreds—and you can instantly view any of the locations you’ve previously viewed. Read More

My Comment Count is Bigger Than Your Comment Count!

2008-09-15T07:35:00.003-07:00

With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more. PlanetOzh has created the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin which honors the popular blog conversation expert, Liz Strauss. If you want to brag about your blog’s comment [...]

With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more.

PlanetOzh has created the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin which honors the popular blog conversation expert, Liz Strauss.

If you want to brag about your blog’s comment count, this is the Plugin to try. The Liz Strauss Comment Counter Plugin adds a chicklet comment counter similar to Feedburner to your blog. You can configure it with a variety of colors and styles. Ozh has included a lot of great features to customize the look to match your blog’s color scheme and styles. This is a great way to show off the number of comments on your blog.

Think about it. Instead of the arbitrary judgment of how many feed subscribers or visitors you have on your blog, you could give valuable feedback to your blog visitors on how social your blog really is. Every time someone leaves a comment, the count increases. Think of the possibilities!

You could have contests that help drive up the comment count. You could ask people to bet on when your comment count will break a significant score like 10,000, 100,000, or maybe even 100. Blogs could compete against each other to raise their comment count. Or it could just sit there and let the world know that you welcome comments. The more the merrier.

The Comment Count Plugin is getting rave reviews and can be seen in action at Hot for Words and Momworx. The Plugin has been translated into Italian, too.

So what would you do with your blog’s comment count score?

Who Are Liz and Ozh?

Thanks to Ozh for honoring the great work Liz Strauss does for the blogging community. If you don’t know Liz, she is the author of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers and founder of the SOB Award which honors unique and original bloggers, author of The Secret to Writing a Successful and Outstanding Blog — The Insider’s Guide to the Conversation That’s Changing How Business Works, and founder of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon), the annual conference which brings together top bloggers with top blogging and business and marketing experts. With more than 70,000 comments on her blog, she’s a leader in the art of the blog conversation.

Ozh of PlanetOzh is one of the top award-winning WordPress Plugin experts in the WordPress Community - probably the world. His Plugins have been top winners in the Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition and are frequently featured in the most popular and top download lists on the various WordPress Plugin directories, listings, and repositories. He has done amazing work with WordPress Themes, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tools and utilities, web design, coding, and more non-WordPress projects. A few of his most popular Plugins include:

What About WordPress.com Bloggers? We Want to Count Our Comments!

If you are interested in requesting the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin be among the Widget sidebar options for WordPress.com blogs, let them know. Ask in the WordPress.com Forums and chime in behind those who asked first.

One of the ways a WordPress Plugin or Widget makes it into WordPress.com is by being among the top downloaded and most popular Plugins on the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have the full version of WordPress, have your say on how you like it, and encourage others to download and install it.

I really think that the blog comment war is going to heat up with this new hot Plugin.

Site Search Tags: liz strauss, liz strauss comment counter wordpress plugin, wordpress plugin, comment count, comment counter, ozh, planetozh, count your comments, blog comments, blog conversation, comment score, comment score card, wordpress tips

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

The Media Manager Queue

2008-09-15T07:35:00.001-07:00

The Media Manager Queue
Media Manager is the easiest way to write about Amazon items in MT. Media Manager provides a simple queue to serve as a central location for you to manage all of media assets for your blog. From here you can...

Actual HTC Opal Spyshots Surface (Touch's Twin) [Leaks]

2008-09-13T16:00:00.019-07:00

Actual HTC Opal Spyshots Surface (Touch's Twin) [Leaks]
The Touch-like HTC Opal we saw renderings of earlier this week looks like it definitely exists, according to these leaked shots. Yeah, if you're having a hard time seeing a difference from the...

Facebook Climbing to 3rd Spot

2008-09-13T16:00:00.017-07:00

The October data are in! Facebook is continuing its amazing climb, taking the 3rd spot away from Del.icio.us. Favorites are back, stealing the first position from Google Bookmarks. Again, Favorites here means “browser bookmarking”, for any browser. On the Feed Reader front things are much more quiet. There was almost no changes between September [...]

The October data are in!

Facebook is continuing its amazing climb, taking the 3rd spot away from Del.icio.us. Favorites are back, stealing the first position from Google Bookmarks. Again, Favorites here means “browser bookmarking”, for any browser. On the Feed Reader front things are much more quiet. There was almost no changes between September and October.

Top Bookmarking/Sharing - October 2007

Top Feed Readers - October 2007

Web Explorer 2.3 Build 2.9

2008-09-13T16:00:00.015-07:00

Web Explorer is an helpful software that will monitor and record all visited websites Web Explorer is an helpful software that will monitor and record all visited websites (read more) Read More

Mars Explorer 1.7

2008-09-13T16:00:00.013-07:00

Mars Explorer 1.7
3D Multiplayer Laser Tag, Dogfighting, Racing, Dune Bashing, and Rock Crawling - All At The Same Time.

About Mars Explorer
Ascend massive volcanoes, race atop elevated plateaus, splash through lava flows, and execute aerobatic stunts using deployable wings while playing laser tag with your friends over the internet!

Modified New Zealand Wool Resists Blowtorches, Dog Bites, Sharp Knives [Flameproof]

2008-09-13T16:00:00.011-07:00

Modified New Zealand Wool Resists Blowtorches, Dog Bites, Sharp Knives [Flameproof]
Call it cliche (or just inevitable), but those sheep-herders down not-quite under have created the ultimate fabric by weaving a synthetic textile fiber called Vectran with ordinary sheep's wool. It's...

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2008-09-13T16:00:00.009-07:00

Technorati Claiming set-up
Technorati Profile

Plasma Tube - Motion Light Widget 2.1

2008-09-13T16:00:00.007-07:00

Plasma Tube - Motion Light Widget 2.1
An amazing motion lamp widget - The PlasmaLamp. Unmatched 3d animation with a little zip for fast dashboard viewing.

About Plasma Tube - Motion Light Widget
Engineered like no other. The Plasma Lamp leaves your grampas old motion light in the 60’s! We’ve filled this sucker with a material patented exclusively to innermindMedia. This plasma is like no liquid you’ve ever seen and it simply defies the laws of gravity and physics. This is the ultimate eye candy for your Mac OS X Dashboard.

Selling RSS subscribers a sad day

2008-09-13T16:00:00.005-07:00

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.

Do You Remember Your First Blog Post? If You Do, You Could Win!

2008-09-13T16:00:00.003-07:00

Do You Remember Your First Blog Post? If You Do, You Could Win!
Liz Strauss is holding the “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” contest and giving you a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook. Whether you win or not, it’s a chance to really push your blogging creativity. The challenge is to take a picture [...]

Liz Strauss is holding the “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” contest and giving you a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook. Whether you win or not, it’s a chance to really push your blogging creativity.

The challenge is to take a picture of something that shows that “brand new feeling” such as you feel when you published that very first blog post. That’s right, your first. Can you remember back that far? (I can’t ) Compose a one sentence caption and head over to the contact form to upload the photo and your contact information.

There are so many emotions tangled up with that very first blog post, how would you display that in a photograph? I’m fascinated by the concept and eager to see what people come up with. Bloggers are such creative folks, and the almost USD $4,000 value of the prizes is definitely an incentive.

I gave it some thought and here is my version of that “brand new blogging feeling event” dredged from the depths of my memory.

When I began “blogging” the name soon became “online journaling” as we ventured forth with the first web pages and websites in the world. We didn’t call them web pages back then. They were “homepages” and these were our “homesites” as the web wasn’t the Web but the beginnings of the Internet in those rough and tumble days. It was a new world, a new universe, and technology that was part of the rush into space. Since we couldn’t seem to push our government to support travel through outer space, we plunged into cyberspace along what would come to be known as the Information Highway. It wasn’t a smooth ride but this was the future and we were on board our virtual space ships, navigating by keyboard, mouse, and browser, ready for our grand adventure to seek out new life and new adventures. To boldly go where no Internet Connection would ever be lost!

I didn’t realize how far this galactic journey would take me, deep into the wilderness of HTML, web design, CSS, SEO, JavaScript, PHP, the rugged beginnings of WordPress, the stumbling steps of social networking and social media, tags, categories, comment spam, blog trolls…in a way, much like the journey in Zork, the original of the popular IF Games (Interactive Fiction) text-based adventure games. A rough journey of exploration and discovery, with a few trolls and grues to fight off.

There will be 50 winners choose to receive a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of the ebook Insider’s Guide to the Conversation eBook by Liz Strauss.

There is also a bonus round. Be the first fifty to follow the directions exactly and submit “clever pictures” and you will be featured on her blog, Successful and Outstanding Bloggers with a link back to your blog.

Don’t forget that Liz Strauss is also the honoree of one of the most popular new WordPress Plugins, the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin, a nice addition to your blog’s sidebar. I wrote about it recently on my blog and on the Blog Herald.

Remember to submit your entry to the competition in order to participate and win.

Site Search Tags: liz strauss, blog contest, contest, challenge, brand new blogging feeling, successful blog

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

Selling RSS subscribers a sad day

2008-09-13T16:00:00.001-07:00

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.

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