Blogging

Less than two months after being acquired by WordPress’s parent company Automattic, blog commenting system Intense Debate is again available to the public. The service had been in private beta for the last two months, not because the company was busy adding a ton of new features, but because it was busy scaling Intense Debate’s infrastructure to handle the additional traffic that is likely to come when WordPress starts to include Intense Debate features by default.

For now, Intense Debate is rolling out a new plugin for WordPress that adds the following features to your web site:

• Threaded comments
• The ability to vote on comments and show comment reputations
• Simultaneously post a comment to a blog and Twitter
• Replly to comments and moderate comments by email
• Commentor profiles can include links to social networking pages
• Ability to add sidebar widgets with information on things like your top commentors

Intense Debate also works with Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr.

If you have a blog that gets a lot of comments, you might be finding that logging into your blog’s administration panel to moderate comments has become a bit of a laborious process. If your blog runs on the WordPress platform and is self-managed, you might like to check out the Moderator plugin and associated Adobe Air desktop application.

The concept here is straightforward: install the plugin on your blog, then follow the instructions to install the Air application on your Windows or Mac machine. From there, you get a nice quick application from which to review comments and either approve, delete, or mark them as spam.

As the site currently warns, you might find a performance problem if your site has hundreds of unmoderated comments when installing Moderator. The easy and obvious work-around is to ensure that you are up-to-date in your moderating before installing the plugin.

While it’s a fantastic start, I’m one of those insane people that runs a number of WordPress blogs, or at least caretake a few for friends. It would be wonderful if Morderator allowed you to monitor mulitple WordPress blogs and moderate comments for all of them from within one interface. You can change the site that you are aiming Moderator at, but support for multiple sites would be a great enhancement.

So you’re trying to build up a following on Twitter, but things like sleep, work, and bathroom breaks are getting in the way of your goal to out-update Scoble? Jay gave you a look at Twuffer today - yet another web service with a goofy-ass name. I do appreciate that they decided to keep the e before the r, as it saved me having to throw up in my trashcan.

FutureTweets is another service that allows you to queue Twitter updates. But wait just a minute…A Twitter app that doesn’t use your Twitter ID for logins? That’s pretty annoying, because it means that you’re going to have to set up your Twitter details manually. Not a huge inconvenience, but seriously, fellas.

OpenID is supported, which is a damn good thing: FutureTweets own signup feature crapped out on me three times. My OpenID worked fine, however, and I was good to go (after entering my Twitter info).

The update interface isn’t as pretty as Twuffer’s, but it does have two stand-out features. One is the option to create recurring updates - useful if you have poor memory and want to not appear like a forgetful jackass on your Mom’s birthday.

The other is the wicked analog clock. Drag the hands around to set the time you want your post to appear. Sweet.


For that added touch of class, click the send some love button to add a dash of MySpace style to your updates.

There are some practical applications for these services, of course - reminders for your followers, Twitter-based scavenger hunts, not being forced to sleep on the couch because you forgot to Tweet your anniversary love to your significant other.

If you schedule updates, let us know what site you’re using!

I can’t always get to my main laptop when I feel like putting together a blog post. If you’ve read some of my other lists, you probably noticed that I’m a big fan of portable applications for just this reason. As long as I’ve got my trusty USB flash drive, I’m always equipped with the programs I need to get things done.

Here are ten of my favorites (plus two alternatives). With these programs in my pocket, I’m always able to write when inspiration strikes - regardless of what computer I’m using.

1. Windows Live Writer is the best offline tool for composing blog posts, hands down. While Microsoft doesn’t offer a portable version, it’s a simple DIY project (Brad first covered it in September 2007). You can download the portable launcher from Scott Kingery’s blog: it’s over a year old, but it works just fine with the latest beta of Live Writer. With a rich feature set and support for Wordpress, TypePad, LiveJournal, Blogger, and more, it’s a necessity.

2. Portable Firefox and SRWare Iron are both great browsers. I keep Firefox handy in case I need access to my favorite extensions, and use Iron when I just need to do some quick surfing. Why Iron instead of Chrome? For the added privacy.

3. GreatNews is a decent, portable RSS reader that’s actually portable (no Java runtime needed, like RSSOwl). The download is under 1mb, and it formats feeds into a tidy newspaper-like layout. If I’m using a machine where I’d rather not log in to my Google account, I’ll fire up GreatNews to read my feeds instead.

4. FastStone Capture is my favorite screenshot program. Apart from capturing windows (including scrolling ones), regions, or the full desktop, FastStone has an excellent built-in editor that handles text overlays, watermarking, highlighting, cropping, resizing, and more. There’s also a screen magnifier and eyedropper tool.

5. AVI Screen does a good job at capturing screencasts for sharing on video sharing sites like YouTube. Its mouse tracking feature is very slick, and is a good way to keep video sizes small. You may need to download it from this page.

6. CamStudio may be a better option for tutorial-style screencasts. In addition to capturing activity, it can also add captions and add picture-in-picture overlays.

7. IrfanView has a number of useful features. It’s a great image viewer and it also handles batch conversions. Basic editing tools are included as well, like resize, crop, rotate, sharpen, and blur.

8. The Gimp is my choice for more complex photo editing tasks. The 2.6 interface is a big improvement over older versions, and now that I’ve taken the time to really learn it I don’t miss Photoshop at all.

9. WinHTTrack creates offline copies of websites, which is very useful if you need to cache some pages for reference so that you can work without internet access. Make sure you grab the .zip and not the .exe.

10. The Sage is an excellent portable resource for writers. It’s a fully searchable dictionary and thesaurus with over 200,000 definitions. Everything is fully cross-referenced: if there’s a word you need to look up in a definition, just click it. The Sage can even handle anagram searches.

11. Sumatra PDF or Foxit Reader are must haves. If you have to follow a style guide, chances are good that it was provided to you as a PDF. Foxit and Sumatra are both small and fast, and support important features like annotations and bookmarking.

If you’re a blogger or writer and I missed one of your favorites, share it with us in the comments!

Automattic plans to release the next major version of its popular blogging client, WordPress, later this month. But if you’re OK with running your web site on beta software, you can download WordPress 2.7 beta 2 today. It’s relatively stable, and features a whole slew of improvements over WordPress 2.6.

Some of the most visible changes for your readers will be support for threaded comments and sticky posts. In other words, they’ll be able to reply to individual comments without resorting to a silly @ symbol, and you’ll be able to make an important post hang out at the top of your page even after you’ve written more recent articles.

But the really big changes are all in the administration area. WordPress 2.7 has a completely new interface that both saves space (by grouping a number of items together in a collapsable sidebar), and allowing you to customize the interface by dragging and dropping widgets.

But the new interface is just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few of my favorite new features in WordPress 2.7:

• You can search for and install plugins directly from your blog’s administration page. No need to find and download a plugin, upload it to your FTP server and then enable it. You can take care of the whole thing in just a few clicks.
• WordPress 2.7 includes an automatic upgrade script that will download the latest version of WordPress and install it for you.

Overall, WordPress 2.7 replaces at least two plugins I had come to rely on, Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, and WordPress Automatic Upgrade. I’ll be curious to see if the automatic upgrade plugin continues to work with future versions of WordPress though, as it does include a few features that the WordPress auto-upgrade utility lacks, like an integrated database backup tool.

Don’t you just hate it when you sign up on a forum or blog comment system and everyone has cool avatars, but you don’t? If you aren’t too picky about it, why not just punch your name into Turn Your Name Into a Face, and let it come up with something for you out of 100,000 possible faces.

Now, granted, the options may leave a bit to be desired; they’re all black pixel art on a random pale background color. But there are enough options to be somewhat entertaining. It’s particularly fun to punch friends’ and family members’ names into it to see what they might look like, or at least what you can tease them with.

What I’d like to see is a WordPress plugin that uses this functionality to assign avatars to blog commenters that have not explicitly given themselves an avatar.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Blog comment company Disqus was built around one pretty simple idea: the comment systems on most blogs stink. Disqus offers advanced comment features for Blogger, TypePad, Moveable Type, WordPress and other platforms. Features like avatar support, threaded comments, and the ability to rank other users comments. The biggest difference between Disqus and the default comment systems on most blogs is that once you register with Disqus you can leave comments on any blog that uses the system without registering over again. And you can track your comment history across all of those blogs, or see comment history for other users.

But Disqus has faced a few challenges. When the service first launched, comments were not indexed by search engines. Or rather they were, but the search engine would find them on the Disqus web site, not yours. So while Disqus was adding value to your readers, you it could actually be taking some value away from your site in terms of search engine traffic. That issue was fixed in August and Disqus comments are now properly indexed by search engines.

Second, Disqus couldn’t handle trackbacks properly at launch. Eventually the the developers did roll out a trackback feature. But in order for trackbacks to show up on your site, anyone linking to a post had to use a special Disqus URL, not the URL of your post. Last night, Disqus rolled out a fix for WordPress, allowing Disqus to display all the trackbacks or pingbacks to your blog.

With this latest update, I can’t think of many down sides to using Disqus at this point. At least for WordPress users. But there’s the rub: WordPress 2.7 will likely have many of these same features built into the platform. No third party plugin necessary. Last month Automattic, the company that develops WordPress purchased Intense Debate, a company that competes with Disqus. And if you can give readers threaded comments, commentor rankings, the ability to register once and post on many blogs without installing a third party plugin like Disqus, why would you? It’ll be interesting to see how Disqus works to differentiate itself from Intense Debate once WordPress 2.7 is released.

OpenX is an open source ad server that you can install on a web server to provide a complete ad management package for your web sites. The software lets you create entries for advertisers, ad zones, and campaigns. You can also apply a whole slew of filters that will do things like show one ad to a visitor in the US and another ad in the same spot to a visitor from Germany.

The down side? Up until recently you could only use OpenX by setting it up on your web host. In other words, even if you have a web site hosted on a free service like Google’s Bloggger, you still need to sign up for a web hosting account, which usually costs money, to use OpenX.

Earlier this year OpenX announced it would launch hosted version of its ad server. The service is still in private beta, but I got a chance to check it out over the weekend, and it’s pretty slick. The hosted version of OpenX provides all the same features you’d get from the self-hosted version. But there’s no setup required. You just request an invitation and wait (im)patiently for one to arrive in your inbox. Once you’re in, you can start creating campaigns in a matter of seconds.

OpenX also recently launched the OpenX Market Alpha, which allows publishers to sell their ad space directly to advertisers. The Market is still pretty new, so there aren’t a lot of advertisers just yet. You probably won’t get rich by signing up during the Alpha. But it probably won’t hurt either. Publishers can set a minimum rate so that your default ads, say Google AdSense, or Amazon Affiliate units will show up unless an advertiser meets that price. But if a member of the OpenX Market has a higher bid than your minimum, their ad will be shown instead.

Google recently rolled out its own hosted ad management service. But while Google Ad Manager is certainly much simpler to use, it doesn’t offer nearly as many customization options as OpenX.

FeedDemon has been the best RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they bought FeedDemon. The best news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth every penny), it’s now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is easy to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator’s web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the ability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you choose to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

On Monday, AOL (Weblogs Inc.’s parent company) announced that they are shutting down the AOL Hometown and AOL Journals services. AOL Journals members will be able to migrate to a new service, but AOL Hometown users have been instructed to back-up their files and prepare to go somewhere else.

There have also been reports (but Wikipedia is the source, so keep that in mind) that Yahoo! GeoCties has removed or shut-down some of its UK web servers. With Google killing its Page Creator tool and migrating everyone to Google Sites, the free static web host is a dying breed.

So what can you do if you are an AOL Hometown user (or you use another older service that might be on its last legs)? Read on for tips on backing up your content and publishing options for the future.

Backing up your files

The AOL Hometown announcement page gives some details for backing up your content using the AOL FTP tool, but here are some free software alternatives might better suit your needs, especially if you have a hard time using or locating the AOL tool:

FileZilla - FileZilla works on Linux, Mac and Windows. It is very easy to use and very powerful.

Cyberduck - If you are a Mac user and you want a more Mac-like feel, Cyberduck is free and also very powerful.

FireFTP - FireFTP is a great plugin for Firefox that lets you use FTP right within your browser. It works with Firefox on all platforms.

After you decide on an FTP tool, follow the instructions to connect and download all of your files and images. Download everything that is on that server. It might be a good idea to burn a copy to a CD or DVD for safe-keeping, if the information is important.

Moving Forward

For users who want to move their content to another service, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that today, you can build even more advanced web pages, blogs or photo albums using any number of free services. Aside from free hosted services like Blogger, Live Spaces and WordPress.com that let you create blogs and photo galleries, there are services like Weebly, Wix and Sauropol that let you easily build more “traditional” static web sties. Keep in mind that WordPress also let you create separate “pages” if you want more than just a blog.

The bad news is that there is no easy or automatic way to import your existing HTML content from a service like AOL Hometown or Geocities onto one of these new sites. For image hosting, you can simply re-upload your photos and tag them accordingly. If you have lots of web pages, however, you might want to look at hosting your own content. Take a look at your content, if it is old or in need of a good update, starting over might not be a bad idea. It will certainly be easier than it was before.

Self Hosting

Even though more and more services are becoming web based (e-mail, storage, document collaboration), there is always the chance that the company hosting that content could either fold or decide to discontinue to the service. That’s what is happening to AOL Hometown users now. If you want to have full control over your own content, the best option is to pay for web hosting and host the content yourself.

There are dozens of inexpensive webhosts that offer full hosting services for only a few dollars a month. These packages often include a domain name, meaning you don’t have to have a URL like http://film-girl.blogspot.com (a blog I have incidentally, never ever used), you can instead have something like christinawarren.com. Hosting yourself also means you can choose to either host the content exactly as it appeared on your old site, or upgrade to the world of dynamic publishing.

Even if you don’t want a blog, building a website is much easier and more efficient using a system like WordPress rather than cobbling together the static HTML files. You can more easily update not only the content, but the look of your site, and you can interact with visitors via comments.

By hosting yourself, you could even choose to host your old content the way it appeared before, while creating new content using newer technology.

The caveat with paying for your own hosting is that you are responsible for the upkeep and the maintenance of your page. Most hosts offer tools to help beginners get up and running quickly, but control means control. You deal with the good and the bad. A hosted service, while it offers less options, also means no technical upkeep on the user’s part.

Final Thoughts

If you are still using one of the older static hosts of yesteryear, consider backing up and migrating your data now. Self-publishing is bigger than ever, but the old model is dying and the faster you start the transition, the better off you will be.