Archive for July, 2006

Forty Media recently posted a great article on things that make a great website. 5 of them actually and I must say I have to agree with the list. If you are thinking about redirecting the focus of you site or looking for a focus drive an idea these 5 tips could be vital to your site’s success.

(Or maybe just a good starting point).

The list is as follows:

1. Challenge assumptions - controversy always brings interest, and Forty Media explains how controversy in design, going against the norm can help bring you visitors and keep them

2. Provide Rich Content - No Brainer but go examples

3. Make it Sticky - Basically offer choices for visitors to get more information

4. Bring in a Pro - Be it a designer or a writer someone who has been there and done that can get your site off to a big head start

5. Love you website - If you love it they will come, if you develop good information and a nice design people will spread the word for you, and it all comes from you enjoying your work (or play, however you look at it.)

Check out the detailed explanations of each method over at Forty Media’s article Five Rules for Great Websites

technorati tags:blog, design, tips, website

I can’t believe I blogged any other way.

I currently use wordpress on all my blogs, all 11 of them. But this blogging tool will work on all major blog software out there, read below to see which ones.
The Old Way:

To post I used go to the particular Blog’s Wordpress Dashboard, click on write, and go about my business. If I post about a news story or some other great tidbit I found on a website I have to open it (usually in a separate tab) and click back and forth, copying and pasting things I can’t memorize how to spell and generally spending a lot of time keeping my readers updated on the most current related information.

Uploading images, formating text, copying web addresses. Time Time Time. I would waste a lot of time doing a lot of things that I knew had to be possible some other way.

I was then pointed to the greatest Browser a Blogger could ever use.

The New Way:

Now I blog from my browser. As I surf the Internet and see articles I think you, my readers may like, I right click to “blog this,” Type or quote a little bit from my new “stuck” window, hit publish, choose which of my eleven blogs and categories I want to publish to, add some tags and presto, I just published some fresh new content for my blog.

It’s that easy. Flock is amazing. It’s a browser based off of Mozilla but with all the add-ins you could possibly want to be a great and efficient blogger. It literally has everything. I’ll outline some of the best here that deal with efficient blogging but there are a lot more you can use.

Built in Feed Reader

Flock has a built in feedreader. That’s right, no need to login to an account, check your feeds, go to your wordpress, blogger, or typepad dashboard and blog about what you read. Just organize your feeds into folders, it’ll tell you whats new, then right click “blog this.”

To add feeds just click on the RSS icon or link on any blog or news source and it’ll bring up that sources feed. Another great thing is that any site with a valid feed shows up with an RSS icon in the address bar that you can also click and add to your feeds.

Don’t worry if you have a bloglines or other feedreader account you can import back and forth your feeds so you can have the feeds on the go as well.

Web Snippets - Better than Google Notebook

Google Notebook is an interesting addition to your web browser but isn’t all that integrated. It’s still cumbersome to navigate through your stuff and hard to add to blog posts where most people would need it.

With Flock’s Web Snippets all you need to do is drag and drop or right click and add and your in business. The web snippets are saved in a nice expandable/collapsible toolbar at the bottom of your screen. You can then drag and drop the pictures you save, the text, or video feeds into any web application or “blog this” post.

It’s that easy.

Blog This - Finally Efficiency

You can finally have truly efficient blogging. Flock’s “Blog This” function allows you to blog about anything you’re reading or looking at. That’s right you can even do pictures. You can shape and resize pictures (I resized the picture above right in the “blog this” window.)

You can highlight text or pictures, right click to blog this, and your text along with a titled link to what you’re viewing is right there in the window for you and ready to go.
The “blog this” window is sticky, meaning it’s anchored to the screen and you can scroll, highlight, navigate whatever you want to the main browser window and it’s tabs. You can copy paste, drag drop, whatever you want.

You don’t have to log in anymore, all you have to do is setup each of your blogs with their passwords and Flock does the rest. It’ll find your blog, it’s settings, and it’s categories. You truly never have to log in again if you don’t want to. Just click publish!

One other cool thing about the “blog this” feature is that it allows you to tag your posts with technorati tags. No plugins, no coding, just add your tags in their tag box and they show up at the bottom of the post. Tags are quickly becoming vital to a bloggers toolbox and this is a no-brainer way of tagging your posts.

Don’t worry about blogging software support, flock currently works with all the major blog softwares out there like Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, Moveable Type, Live Journal, MetaWeblog API, and Atom API based blogs.
Lack of Toolbar - No Problem

I can’t find a Google or MSN toolbar download support for it but that’s no problem. The built in search box lets you customize what base search engine to use and also lets you add other engines to the pop down search as you type option.

I would imagine you’ll see a toolbar soon as flock seems to be catching on. The one thing I miss is to check Google pagerank of the pages I visit but I’m sure I’ll get over it.
Finally

Flock has tons of other great photo features, favorites sharing, extensions, plugins whatever you want to call them, and it’s open source. Meaning the general public makes it better through extensions and updates. It’s also got a nice support forum and more that you’ll have to try out.
Flock is great and you have to give it a try for blogging and browsing. Just try it out and see what it can do for you. I know there are blogging tool additions for Firefox from groups like Performancing and other add ins that make IE and FF like Flock, but Flock has it all.

By the way this was blogged using Flock!

technorati tags:Flock, Blogging, Blog, Efficiency, Tools, Browser