Archive for the ‘ Blogging ’ Category

Alternatives to WordPress’s blog publishing web application

Since I started this blog, I’ve been using the web application provided by WordPress to write and post new content.  It works fine, but I have found the interface…limiting.  I did a quick search for desktop blog publishing clients, and it turns out there are a ton!  Check out this great blog post about this:

20 Desktop Blog Publishing Tools – Bloggers Edition, Softwares, Utilities, Drivers, Tools.

I’m currently trying out ScribeFire, which is a free Firefox addon.  Its far and away a better way to write content for my blog than what WordPress provides.

2009
08/24
CATEGORY
Blogging
TAGS

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Title bar title not matching your blog title anymore?

Quick post:

So I changed the name of this blog to “Tech Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke” from “Techy Tools for the Young, Professional & Broke”.  I feel this has a better ring to it :-)  After this, I spent about 5 hours trying to get my title bar title (the page title you see in your browser tab and at the top of your browser window) to match this new title.  I changed the title in the “General” section in the Settings tab in my WordPress dashboard.

I scoured the web for help with this and I scoured the html in my theme for the reason why the blog no longer referenced the title I placed in my blog settings to create the title bar blog name.

The culprit: I am using the “All in One SEO” plugin, which allows me to add customized/additional information about my blog for search engine crawlers to pick up and add to their search results.  I had the old blog title entered in this plugin, and this plugin overrides certain parts of my blog’s html, including the title bar display information.

There's more - keep reading... (219 words, estimated 53 secs reading time)
2009
08/22
CATEGORY
Blogging
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My excellent adventure from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

When I began this blog, my main intent was to write.  As such, I was concerned with finding a free way to get my blog up and running (detailed in a previous post).  WordPress.com was my answer, and it offers a great way create a blog quickly and easily.  Despite this, small issues quickly came up that bugged me enough to switch to using wordpress.org software hosted on a remote server with my own domain and gain more control over my blog.

First, I realized WordPress.com did not let me change any aspect of the blog template I chose at the site without paying $15 a year to be able to customize the CSS in the template.  Second, I started to notice and desire things to add to my blog – like the addtoany.com button you can see at the bottom of this post.  WordPress.com blogs offer relatively few options for adding small customizations like this to blog postings.  Eventually I figured out that there is a way to do this, but it is definitely a workaround and not too convenient.  There are many beautifully designed blogs which say they are made with WordPress, but I knew I couldn’t recreate these blogs with my WordPress.com account.

There's more - keep reading... (1250 words, estimated 5:00 mins reading time)
2009
08/20
CATEGORY
Blogging
Professional Development
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Why I chose WordPress.com

Honestly, I didn’t put a lot of thought into which hosted blogging service to choose.  I just knew it had to be two things: free (I know what that means) and good (not exactly sure what that means).  In the quick research I did, I found:

Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Yahoo 360, LiveJournal.com, a dumb ‘ol AOL service, and a dumb ‘ol Microsoft service.  The rest I’d never really heard of, and I figured one of these would do the trick.

I’ve played around with Blogger in the past when I helped design the Fox Net Impact Blog for school.  It worked well, but I always felt like it was going to freeze or stop working when I was editing the layout of my page.  It was especially frustrating when trying to add “Gadgets” – the little boxes of information to the right and/or left of the main blog content that holds links, external calendars, etc.  The blog was eventually finished and it turned out fine, but it wasn’t quite as effortless as the service was trying to be.

There's more - keep reading... (313 words, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
2009
08/12
CATEGORY
Blogging
Professional Development
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What’s My Point?

This blog is about my frantic sprint to a life where everything I do, write, read, watch, and (perhaps) say will be translated into 1’s and 0’s, stored on an unfathomable number of computers around the world, and be instantly accessible from my MacBook. All the stuff I discuss in here is really cool, (usually) really cheap, and make me more productive.