BloggingNotes Now Supports OpenID

May 21, 2008

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If you’ve never heard of OpenID you could be forgiven.  However, the concept of what OpenID is used for is hardly new.  It’s a universal login - similar to what the Microsoft Passport system was supposed to be like.

Now, assuming that you haven’t already clicked on the Back button, let me explain that OpenID is *not* Passport.  First of all, it’s not a Microsoft product, it’s an open source project, with a large number of sites available to register your own OpenID. 

One of the best things that you can do with OpenID, though, is to add a snippet of code to your website which will then allow you to use your URL as your OpenID.  For example, my ‘official’ OpenID is rodtempleton.myopenid.com, but I’ve put the code into the header file here on BloggingNotes that will allow me to use the URL bloggingnotes.net as my login on any site that supports OpenID.

And BloggingNotes itself also supports OpenID, so if you’re going to leave a comment on a post, you can login with your own OpenID and if your OpenID provider provides a name and email, those values will be filled in automatically.

There are even directories of sites which already support OpenID which you should definitely check out. 

The one problem that OpenID has, at this point at least, is a lack of widespread use.  Until sites such as del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. get on-board, it’ll be a very useful, but still niche application.  However, it doesn’t cost you anything to run it, and if it makes things a little easier for your readers, isn’t that worth taking the five minutes to set up the plug-in? 

If you already use OpenID, you’re more than welcome to use it for commenting here.  Hopefully you’ve found that the concept of a universal login is just what you’ve been looking for.

Posted in Blogging 2 Comments »

What Blogging Tools Do You Use?

May 19, 2008

I think that everyone has specific tools that they feel allow them to blog more effectively, and I’m interested in hearing what BloggingNotes readers use when they do their blogging.

While some of the tools that I use aren’t specifically related to blogging, they still allow me to be more productive whenever I’m writing. This will become more clear later in the post.

• Windows Live Writer - I’m sorry, Wordpress. I’ve tried for the longest time to get into using the admin interface for writing posts, but I just can’t do it. If you’ve never tried using WLW, please do yourself a favour and download it. It’s worth it, and while there a lot more plugins than *useful* plugins, there are some real jewels available, which I’ll cover in my next post. Don’t let the fact that this is a Microsoft product dissuade you, either. This is something that Microsoft has done right. Very right.
• del.icio.us - *the* bookmarking utility. I don’t even use the bookmarks feature in Firefox anymore. I can save any bookmarks that I need, and call them up from anywhere. Stuff that I think BloggingNotes readers would find interesting or helpful get tagged accordingly and appear under the <a href=”http://del.icio.us/rtdn/blogging”>Blogging Bookmarks on del.icio.us</a> heading in the sidebar. In fact, if there’s a link you think should be included, save it to your del.icio.us feed and tag it for:rtdn and then I’ll see it.
• Flickr - I don’t post a whole lot of images here on BloggingNotes, but I certainly do on my other blogs, and the Add from Flickr plugin in WLW makes it easy to select photos for inclusion and resizing in my posts. I’ll be covering this one in a bit.
• A blogging notebook - while this one isn’t always specifically a notebook, all bloggers should have a place to record ideas for current or future posts. I’ve used Moleskine notebooks, Google Docs, and my current choice is my Palm Zire. Whenever I get an idea for a post it gets written down and reviewed at least a couple of times per week. I might not have the details of a post worked out when I write it down, but getting rough ideas down will at least allow you to come back to them at some point when they might be more relevant.

And that’s about it for what I use. Nothing earth shattering for sure, but I’ve found that these tools allow me to be most effective in getting my blogging done.

But I’d really like to hear what BloggingNotes users are using to get their writing done. I’m almost certain that there’ll be something in there that I wind up trying and maybe even using for the long run.

Posted in Blogging 5 Comments »

How Quickly Could You Recreate Your Blog?

May 16, 2008

You’ve spent a long time getting your blog to look just the way you want. But one day you decide that you want to change the theme. Or your wp-content folder gets corrupted. Or something else goes wrong, and for whatever reason, your blog is borked. Badly.

Well, Mark Krynsky has a suggestion in this post - keep a text file of all the customization that you make to your theme, in case you need to recreate it at some point. To quote from Mark’s post:

I’m pretty good about keeping a text file that identifies every customization I make to my theme along with details and the actual code. These items include content from third party services like Google Analytics, code necessary for plugins, scripts for widgets etc. I highly recommend you do this as it can be a nightmare trying to remember where all these pieces are without them being documented.

I don’t know why I haven’t thought of doing this before, but rest assured that I’m going to be working on it and will have documentation done for all of my blogs done in the next few days. It’s something that I should have done sooner, simply due to the fact that I have a tendency to change themes on a whim, and putting some of the stuff into the new theme sometimes gets overlooked in the rush to get the blog back up and running. Things like Google Analytics come to mind.

So if this isn’t something you’re currently doing, maybe it’s a habit you should look at getting in to. Particularly if you run multiple blogs, all on a single host.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mark.

Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »

Has Twitter Taken You Away From Blogging?

May 14, 2008

It doesn’t necessarily need to be Twitter - it could be Pownce, or Jaiku. Even FriendFeed could fit into the category. While some might claim that Twitter is a waste of time, I’m finding that I’m spending more time following it than I am following my RSS feeds. And I’m not the only one.

A lot of the people that I follow have a plug-in installed in their Wordpress setup that automatically sends a post to Twitter when a post goes live. Right now I have 220 followers on Twitter, and less than 50 RSS subscribers to BloggingNotes.

Finding out about new posts is just one of the benefits I’ve found from Twitter. A lot of times, breaking news stories will show up on Twitter before they’ll show up on blogs, simply because there’s no delay like there is in posting something to a blog and then having Feedburner pick it up and update your feed, sometimes hours later. Too slow for some cases.

Don’t get me wrong, though - I’m not saying that I prefer Twitter to blogging at all - Twitter is a maximum of 140 characters per post - an information burst. And the feedback and comments that I get from blogging are much more valuable in the long run if you ask me.

Use Twitter to complement your blogging - that’s its best feature. And if you follow enough people, rest assured that you’ll eventually get quite a few post ideas from it.

Which is always a good thing.

(If you would like to follow me on Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/rodtempleton)

Posted in Blogging 7 Comments »

How A Workflow Keeps You Blogging

May 12, 2008

It’s no secret that the time that I’ve spent posting here in the last little while has gone down considerably. Way back in November, I wrote a post detailing how a blogging workflow seemed to be keeping me on track and posting regularly. I’d like to revisit that post, and review how I’m following it

I’ve found that I haven’t been very diligent about keeping up with my blogging notebook, where I would write down ideas for new posts whenever they would come into my head, but now that I’m back to using a handheld device, things have been a little easier. If you don’t have a place to keep ideas for posts that might come up in the future, consider creating one. Maybe that post isn’t ready for writing at the moment, but the day will come when it’ll come in handy.

A regular posting schedule is something that you need to at least try to work in to your day. Quite a few bloggers have admitted to being surprised to find out just how much their readers depend on them to keep turning out posts. My initial posting rate on BloggingNotes was at least a post per day, but I can’t keep that pace up at this point in my life, so I think Monday, Wednesday and Friday is going to be it for the next little while.

Posting to your own blog first, especially if you’re trying to make money at it, is most important. Take care of the readers you already have first, and then go out and find blogs and forums to contribute to. This’ll help bring new readers in, but if you can’t keep the ones you currently have, bringing in new ones isn’t going to matter. You’ll be constantly chasing new readers, and not growing your readership at all.

Finally, have a look at sites outside of your niche. You never know where you’ll get the inspiration for a new post (or even a new blog). Just remember to write it down somewhere, or bookmark it. And if all you do is spend your time concentrating on a very narrow niche, yes, you’ll become an expert in that niche much more quickly, but you won’t have a wide range of experience to base anything on.

And that’s definitely not good.

Unrelated to the topic, but very related to the blog, there are some rather exciting plans in the very near future for BloggingNotes, which I can’t disclose at this time, but I’m hoping to have in place by the end of the month. When I’m ready to announce them, you’ll definitely find out about it here. (Or, you could submit guesses in the comments)

Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »

Don’t Force Users to Run Your Ads, Please

May 1, 2008

The other day I was on the hunt for a new theme for my personal site, due to the fact that I was going to use its installed theme (which I had paid for) on another blog.

I found one that I really liked and was able to tweak it enough to satisfy me. Then I got ready to modify the footer file in order to include the ads that run on the bottom of that blog, and I came across this:

“This file is protected by copyright, and any attempt to reverse engineer or decrypt the contents of this file is strictly prohibited.”

Following that was one heck of a long PHP string variable that just looked like gibberish. I went back to the site and found that there were already ads running on the bottom of the theme. So, I put my ad code underneath it all and checked again. They didn’t look like the ads that usually show up on that site, so I put the code above the original stuff and tried again. Same result.

The warning mentioned that I couldn’t reverse engineer or decrypt the file, but didn’t say anything about replacing it, so I stripped out all of the author’s stuff and inserted my ad code. Save, refresh, and have a look. There was something in that original code that affects the CSS, because now the page looks completely borked. Evidently the author is claiming that “you’re going to run my ads or you won’t use my theme”.

That’s fine. I won’t use your theme.

I can understand that some authors would like to be compensated for the work that they do on Wordpress themes, but I really think that a better option would have been to make a paid version of the theme and allowed the user to decide what they want to run on it. Seriously. I WOULD have paid for this theme. But now I don’t want anything to do with it.

I don’t mind if theme authors put a link to their own sites in the footer and then serve ads from that site, but if I’m going to use a theme, I get to configure it the way that I want, not the way the author says I have to.

Posted in Blogging 7 Comments »

Some Plugin Issues With Wordpress 2.5

April 14, 2008

I happened to think that it was just the odd issue that I’d seen with one of my blogs when I went to try and reorganize my sidebars, but I’m now pretty convinced that there’s some plugin issues with WordPress 2.5.

The main problem is, though, that it’s not bad enough to crash the blog, or trigger the function that disables plugins if they’re not performing properly. Okay, so maybe not crashing the blog is a good thing…

But when I go to edit my widgets, there’s a fatal error listed that makes it almost impossible to rearrange the widgets on the sidebar. The whole thing appears to be the FireStats plugin, which is rather disappointing, simply due to the fact that it’s what I use for analyzing stats on all of my sites. Needless to say, if I can’t find a solution to this, I’m going to need to rethink my continued use of the plugin.

Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t appear that there is a new version. I’ll do a little more investigation and post a follow up on this. But if you’re considering the plugin, and you’re using Wordpress 2.5, you might want to reconsider.

Posted in Blogging 6 Comments »

Staying Focused On Your Blog

April 10, 2008

Sometimes when you get out of the groove of posting daily, it can be harder than you imagined to get it back.  That’s definitely what I’m finding out as I’ve been struggling to get topics to post about, not only here on BloggingNotes, but my other sites as well.

And I’m sorry to say, that my niche site has not being doing very well at all, not generating much in the way of traffic, and definitely no income.  In fact, I put out a call yesterday for other local bloggers who might be willing to take on a partnership in writing the thing, with an equal split of all income from the site. 

There have been no takers.

One of my blogs has essentially shut down until next fall, when the hockey season starts up again (at least for the Vancouver Canucks), so there’s not really any pressure to do much posting there. 

I’ve launched another site (http://windowsnotes.com) and am looking forward to contributing to that.  In fact, that was a last minute toss up between being a blog and a ‘traditional’ web site.  The blog won.

If you’re starting to feel that you’re running out of ideas for a blog, rather than abandoning it, write some posts for it that’ll never see the light of day.  Stuff that’ll never get published, but keeps you focused on the site, and looking for new topics that you would be willing to post.  That’s what I wish I’d done for Blogging Notes.

I know that I said I’d be posting more regularly, and for those of you who’ve stayed subscribed to the feed, and commented in the last little while, I appreciate it more than I can tell you.  I am working on posts, and will have them go live in the next day or so. 

I can feel it coming back.

Posted in Blogging 8 Comments »

Thoughts on Wordpress 2.5

April 9, 2008

Now that I’ve gotten all of my blogs up and running on Wordpress 2.5, I wanted to share my thoughts on the whole thing.  First up, I’m really enjoying the new interface.  I’m even writing this post in the admin interface, instead of Windows Live Writer, although, that’s probably not going to become a regular occurrence - I just happen to prefer WLW.

The only complaints that I’ve got so far have to do with the time stamping issue - I created a post to drop at 07:30 and Wordpress took that to mean 7:30pm (if I meant that I’d have put 19:30) and I had to change the post time to 5:30am to make it even go live.  Not very helpful.

The other had to do with the live updating.  I had a few plug-ins that reported that they needed updating, so I chose the Automatic update feature, which requires your login and password.  Yeah, a small security risk, but I wanted to see how it went.  And for three out of four, it worked fine.  On the fourth update (CommentLuv), though, it crashed, and when I went back to have a look at the blog, it had removed CommentLuv from the posts.  Went back to the plug-in interface, and found that CommentLuv wasn’t even in my list of available plug-ins.  Uh, WTF?   I don’t think that’ll happen each time something doesn’t work out, but I’m glad it wasn’t Akismet, or something like that that just got torched.

I’d be interested to hear from others on their thoughts and experiences with Wordpress 2.5 in the comments.

Posted in Blogging 1 Comment »

Wordpress 2.5: What You Need To Know

March 20, 2008

It goes without saying that one of the best blogging tips you’re going to get is to use Wordpress.  Back in January, though, they announced that they were going to blow through their usual 120-day cycle and actually skip the release of Wordpress. 2.4, and put out 2.5 on time in March. 

Well, according to Aaron Brazell of TechoSailor.com, they’ve now got a Release Candidate out, although the official release date hasn’t yet been announced.  But if you use Wordpress.com or have had a look at the demo site, you’ll know what’s upcoming.  I’ll try and summarize what Aaron’s posted and include the stuff I find most relevant to myself. 

New Admin Interface

This is going to be the most obvious change that you’ll see.  The colour scheme has been changed to include lighter blues, greys and and even some orange thrown in there as well.  It’s a very “Web 2.0″ experience, and if you don’t mind that, then you might not mind the new interface.  If, however, even the term “Web 2.0″ makes you look around for something to bludgeon, then maybe you’ll want to create your own custom look, which you can now do.

Menu Layout

When you log in, you’re liable to say, uh, where’d everything *go*?  The main tabs on the dashboard when you log in are now limited to Write, Manage, Design (formerly Presentation) and Comments.  Settings, Plug-ins, and Users have been moved to the right hand side of the layout, almost as secondary menus.

Personally, I’d like the ability to move the main tabs around on the dashboard.  I never use the Write tab, simply because I do all of my posting from Windows Live Writer.  So I’d like to be able to swap Write for Plug-ins, for example.  I’m more likely to activate and de-activate plug-ins.

Widgets

Holy crap.  I like it.  The whole concept of moving the widgets around and laying them out the way you want just got a whole lot better in my opinion.  Aaron wasn’t wild about it, saying it feels like more work, but I have to say I really like the changes.  It doesn’t feel like a module from 1999 that just got woven in.  Much better, guys.

New Visual Editor

Sorry, but like I mentioned above, I don’t deal with the writing process inside Wordpress, so I don’t really have an opinion on this one.  Maybe someone else could give it a try in the demo and let us know, eh?

Automatically Upgraded Plug-ins

A nice feature, but a security risk.  This would require your plug-ins to be updated from anywhere, automatically.  If this doesn’t make you a little nervous, it probably should.  You will have the option of disabling this, however, and updating your plug-ins the old fashioned way, too.

Time stamping

Apparently it’s been given a complete re-write, and it’s long past time.  The options now are much move like Movable Type (ugh) where you specify where a post is published or not, and you can then modify the time stamp if you wish.  It’s something that needs to be seen to really get it.

So that’s what I got from Aaron’s post that meant the most to me.  Have a look at the full post, by all means, and see what might be in there for you. 

If you’re a bleeding-edger, you can test the latest version by getting it from: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk but all of the standard disclaimers apply.  You’re on your own.

When the release date is announced I’ll be posting about it here on BloggingNotes.

Posted in Blogging 11 Comments »