How To Blog

Excerpts of posts from the NEW How to Blog Site

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Need someone to create a custom template or plugin for your blog? Need help with SEO? Check out Rent A Coder!

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I just found the coolest resource!  It’s called Rent A Coder, and you can post any project that you need help with, whether it be as simple as installing WordPress / MovableType / etc for you on your server, or as complex as asking someone to write a custom blogging platform for you.  Want a custom template for TypePad or a special WordPress theme and don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself?  Just Rent A Coder to do it for you.  You can even find people to help you with Search Engine Optimization, people to write content for you, etc.

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next 'killer app' or answer questions?  Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

    You can review each bidder's resume and reputation online, and when you're ready to make your decision, you can rent  your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!


     Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to.   Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills?  Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills?  Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world!  By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing. 

I just did.

BlogJet allows Windows users to create and edit posts for any blog through an easier, more feature-rich interface

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Just came across a very interesting application called BlogJet.  Basically, it’s an easy to use Windows program that acts as a front-end  for posting to your blog from the BlogJet client instead of from your blog software’s own interface (usually your browser). 

From their website: Works with all leading weblog services:

 

Blogger b2evolution Blogging.com BlogHarbor Blogware DasBlog DeadJournal DearDiary Drupal LiveJournal Manila

ModBlog Lockergnome.net MovableType pMachine PUSHlogs Squarespace TypePad .Text WordPress Blogger API MetaWeblog API

Right now I’m using it to post to my ‘How to Blog’ blog on TypePad (the post you’re reading right now, actually).  You can download a free trial copy of BlogJet here.

I’m only just starting to tool around with it, but my first impression is a good one!  Make that great, actually.  Because I think it may provide me with the best of all worlds interface-wise.  For example, one of my gripes about TypePad is that you have to pop open a new window when you want to select multiple categories for your post (which, for me, is all the time).  WordPress, on the other hand, has a bunch of checkboxes and you can check as many as you want w/o having to open another page (it’s just faster, and hey, doing things inefficiently is a pet peeve of mine..).  Well, using BlogJet to compose this post, I notice there’s a drop-down box which - surprise – provides checkboxes next to a list of all my categories.  One less TypePad gripe.  Make that three – I can now change fonts mid post (except it’s a little buggy because I actually changed fonts and switched to BOLD, and clearly this text isn’t bolded when viewed from my actual TypePad site)

 

and I can(NOT) modify the alignment of the post (or a part of the post) w/o editing the html, so for example, this paragraph happens to be centered – at least in BlogJet, but as you’ll notice when this gets posted (meaning, as you read it), this sure isn’t centered – it’s aligned left just like the rest of the post.  Darn.  And while I’m bitching, how come there’s no ‘strikethrough’ option for text?

On the flip side, one of my gripes with WordPress is that they don’t have a rich text editor – you can’t just copy something from your browser and paste it into WordPress’ edit post textbox and expect it to preserve it’s formatting (and linking) structure.  But BlogJet does have this funcationality – and so now you could have rich text editing and a WYSIWYG display for your WordPress posts.  Which might sway me towards choosing WordPress as the ultimate blogging tool (when used in conjunction with BlogJet) because the features, plug-ins and customizability of WordPress are the best I’ve seen thus far.

Initially I though BlogJet had a huge drawback - no place to enter URIs for sites you want to send a trackback ping to. And a search through their online help (at the BlogJetWiki) for ‘trackback’ came up blank.  But on a lark I clicked the ‘Properties’ tab at the bottom of the window, and lo and behold, there are all of my advanced post options, including Trackbacks!  It’ll be interesting to see if and for how long I’ll actually be using BlogJet to create my posts.  As always, I’ll keep ya updated (oh yeah – BlogJet’s got tons of built-in smiley’s, if emoticons are your thing…)

It will also be interesting to see how BlogJet compares with it’s competition – w.blogger, which calls itself “The best interface between you and your blog” and is Freeware (vs. the free 30 day trial I’m using of BlogJet).  Oh, so much to do, so little time!

Update 3/22 – I’ve done all of my latest posting using BlogJet, and one of the things I’m really liking about it is that I’m not limited to a small edit box for creating/designing my post.  Hell, I can go full screen if I want to.  On the other hand, I’ve noticed yet another bug in the product — my posts are appearing in the reverse order of when I’ve created them for each particular date.  In other words, I publish Post 1, then later I publish Post 2, and then even later that same day I publish Post 3.  In the blogosphere, posts that are archived by date should be displayed in the following order:  Post 3, Post 2, followed by Post 1.  For all of my posts created on 3/22, they’re showing up in the reverse order of when they are published – Post 1, Post 2, Post 3.  So my newest post isn’t at the top.  That’s no good…  Hopefully w.blogger won’t have this little glitch… (I still haven’t had a chance to try it)

Update 3/31 – Inconsistent behavior when dragging and dropping from IE 6 pages – sometimes is retains formatting from original site (and linking), other time not.  Sometimes crashes (I was trying to retrieve my list of posts and got the following error, “Access violation at address 00435113 in module 'BlogJet.exe'. Read of address 00000000 Class: EAccessViolation” — note that this has only happened once in the entire time I’ve been using the software, and shutting it down and relaunching solved the problem..).  Can’t create new categories from w/in their interface – must log into your blogs control panel to do so.

HaloScan brings TrackBack functionality to Blogger, Blogspot, and other blogging tools w/o their own commenting and trackback features

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Link: News - HaloScan.com.

Trackback and commenting go hand in hand, especially in the weblog community, but unfortunately, there hasn't been an easy way for Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other weblog users to implement trackback capabilities until now.

HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00--FREE. Getting started requires minimal work--sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we'll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog.

Hmmm -- so many things on my plate, but I can't wait to try out Blogger combined with HaloScan's free remote commenting and trackback system.   Could this make Blogger a true competitor to TypePad (or perhaps even superior - given that its FREE)?

I'll post my findings soon!

Update: It's not as simple as it seems.  According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

1. login to HaloScan
2. click 'Manage Trackback"
3. click "Send a trackback ping"
4. Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for 'URLs to Ping'
5. Fill in your blog name
6. Paste YOUR permalink URL
7. Paste a copy of your Post Title
8. Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
9. Click the 'Ping Now' button.

Yikes - that's more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with. 

There's a thread in their forums about adding some code to your Blogger templates which enables auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (something that tools like MovableType and TypePad already do), which, if it works, could save some time - but as you'll see in the thread people have found it difficult to implement.  Your mileage may vary.

Feedburner service allows bloggers to add Amazon associates links to your feeds!

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If you're hoping to make some extra cash from your blog, but all of your monetized links are in your sidebars or headers, etc, then you're losing out when people view your blog from feed readers. Not so if you use Feedburner - now you can beef up your feed to integrate links to relevant products using your amazon associate ID, as well as further enhance your feed by splicing photos and links into it AND get stats on your traffic. VERY COOL!

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn't reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he's spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here's how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD's with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

Creating a Private Blog

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What if you want to create a blog that wasn't available to the general public?

I've been poking around in MovableType and WordPress, but haven't yet discovered how to make your blog private on those platforms -- I'd imagine you could password protect a directory by modifying the .htaccess files, but I'd like to see ability to make a blog private incorporated into the blog tools interface.

This is where TypePad excels. Simply create a new blog, and 1) mark it as private (which only stops them from listing your blog on the 'Recently updated blogs" lists ) and make sure the boxes for notifying third party services when you update your blog are unchecked AND then 2) go into the Control Panel and click the link that says "Password Protect a Site" and then enter the shared username and password that you will provide to only those you want to access your blog -- this allows you to limit access to your blog, or part of your blog, so that only you or those you choose can read your posts.

In Blogger, go to Settings | Basic, and make sure to pick "No" from the dropdown box entitled "Add your Blog to our listings". Note that A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select "No" they will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. As such, if you host your Blogger blog on their free hosting site, BlogSpot, from what I can tell you will not be able to keep your blog private or prevent it from being spidered and indexed by the search engines. If you're very careful not to link to it from any external site, theres a chance it will never be found..but you've no guarantee of preventing unwanted eyes from reading your private blog. If you host your blog on your own ISP or web hosting provider and FTP your blogger pages to them, it's conceivable that you could password protect the directory, again by modifying the .htaccess file.

Again, not having yet installed b2evolution or blosxom, I can't comment on those platforms. However, I checked out blosxom's website and it appears that they have several Blosxom plugins that you can use to password protect your site.

So, at this point, it would appear that TypePad is the only blogging software I have tested that allows you to make all or part of a blog private from within the TypePad control panel.

Comprehensive list of ping services that you can use to let the world know when you've updated your blog

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Update Ping Services
You can copy and paste these URIs into your blog service ping options screen (in WordPress, you do it by choosing Options > Writing > Update Services) with each URI on its own line.  In MovableType you can add these URI's to the list of where to ping by going to your configuration settings for notifications.

While TypePad doesn't officially support customizing pings, there is a workaround, albeit a bit tedious - simply paste the list of URI's into the box entitled "Send a TrackBack to these addresses" in the edit post screen (yes, this means you need to do this for each and every post you create).   If you don't see the field for sending trackbacks, make sure you're using the advanced or custom post editor by clicking the link on the create/edit post page entitled, "Customize the display of this page" (it's below the preview and save buttons).

Not surprisingly, Blogger doesn't support customizing of pings and since they don't support trackbacks either, I haven't figured out a way to get this working on Blogger.  I don't yet have b2evolution or Blosxom blogs installed yet, so I've no idea whether they support pings or allow you to customize them..

Anyhow, here's my comprehensive list of ping services to ping to tell them that you've updated your blog:

 

 

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping/

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1 http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

My experiences with Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress, Blosxom, and b2evolution

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I've decided I should create, at it's most basic level, at least one site with each of the blogging tools. I can then better determine which is easiest to customize, as well as well as which is more feature-rich and easy to use. Then I can provide you folks with a much more informed review of the various blogging tools out there.

Obviously, my TypePad site is my How to Blog weblog that you're reading right now. Notice how the header is truncated b/c the templates that come with TypePad don't appear to be rendering correctly in IE6 (update - I decreased the wording in my header so this doesn't happen because it just looks too unprofessional and I couln't find another workaround yet). I'm not sure if this is a CSS problem, and since I don't know much about cascading style sheets yet I haven't mucked around too much in the TypePad templates to try to fix it. I'll create a post on how things look in other browsers in the future.

My Movable Type blog is located at Online Travelogues, and is also a work in progress and needs serious modifications to the index page so that it only lists all of the categories and to the individual post pages, so that it doesn't list the title of all the other posts in the sidebar (which messes up my adsense relevancy).

I've been testing out Blogger for my weblog about Red Eared Slider Turtles.

My 1st WordPress blog is going on my Tool Reviews site.

Blosxom and b2evolution blogs are soon to come.

Once I've got one of each, I can work more on the tweaking of the templates, etc, to see which will eventually be my blogging tool of choice - and also so I can better understand which features I consider to be most crucial (as mentioned many times already, we already know I can't go with Blogger because it doesn't currently support TrackBacks, nor is there any indication that they intend to do so anytime soon).

Can a Google search help me figure out which blogging software is most popular?

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I've already figured out that I don't want to use TypePad or Blogger (the two easiest tools to use) for my blogs as they're not as robust and customizable as other options such as Movable Type, b2evolution, WordPress, and blosxom for example.

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I'm going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don't waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn't have as much community support or won't necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn't support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it's likely that that will be the most popular of searches - yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it's creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I'm at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it's popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?

b2evolution?

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Just came across this free open source blogging tool called b2evolution

I haven't given it a whirl yet, but it claims to be similar to Movable Type except that it's PHP instead of perl. It also claims to be much more feature packed than Blogger - and while it's clear that they are referring to an older version of Blogger, b2evolution does support categories, subcategories, trackbacks, pings, and even the ability to have templates that display multiple blogs in different panes -- pretty cool.

My biggest concern regarding using it is whether or not it is still actively supported (since the website itself is clearly referring to a very old version of Blogger). It also doesn't appear to have the WYSIWYG editor that Blogger has. And obviously, you need to host it on your own server (not a problem for me), but that also means you need to know how to install it - after I've tried that, I'll let you know how it goes.