Blogging for Good in the Modern World: January 2009

30 January 2009

Pixelpipe: Distribute your Media Content through Multiple Networks

Given the constantly growing number of micro-blogging, photo sharing, and video hosting sites, it is getting harder and harder to keep all these accounts updated. One of the outstanding applications, according to the ReadWriteWeb review, developed to post media files to a variety of services is Pixelpipe. Pixelpipe takes care of the distribution of your files, so that you can simultaneously post a picture to flickr and Facebook, and send a message with a link to that picture to Twitter. Thanks to a large number of updates in the last few weeks, Pixelpipe has become even more versatile than ever before and now lets you share almost any kind of file.

Pixelpipe

While other services like Tubemogul or Ping.fm focus on specific media types, Pixelpipe works with audio and video files, photos, text messages, and now even supports most other types of documents.

Post to 60 Different Services

Pixelpipe has already added support for dozens of new services since its launch, and the amount is growing pretty fast. You can post images and videos to all the prominent video and photo sharing sites, including Youtube, Vimeo, kyte, SmugMug, flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Photobucket. Pixelpipe also lets you post photos to most popular blogging platforms.

Pixelpipe

Post PDF Files to Twitter

This month, Pixelpipe launched a new feature that lets you posts links to videos, photos, PDF files, or any other document to text-only micro-blogging service like Twitter, Rejaw, FriendFeed, or identi.ca. Pixelpipe will simply add a link to the document to your text messages and the files will be hosted on Pixelpipe’s Amazon S3 storage.

Even if Pixelpipe’s internal video player and document viewer isn’t compatible with a file, it will still give you a link to download the document. The upload limit is 200 megabytes.

Post from Anywhere

One of our favorite features of Pixelpipe is that the company has developed plugins for almost every conceivable desktop application for Mac, Linux, and Windows PCs. You can post videos from Windows Movie Maker, photos from iPhoto, Live Gallery, or Picasa, and when all else fails, you can also just email your media files to your personal Pixelpipe address. For mobile use, Pixelpipe provides applications for the iPhone, Android, and Nokia N Series phones.

Power users can also create routing tags (think: @friendfeed or @picasa), which allow you to selectively send items to a specific service or a group of services.

Verdict

The latest round of updates has turned Pixelpipe into an even more versatile tool. Now, sharing a PDF file with your Twitter friends is as easy as emailing it to your secret Pixelpipe address. If you often send the same document to a variety of services (or if you just want to send a picture from your phone to Twitter, but also keep a copy on Flickr), Pixelpipe is definitely worth trying.

Pixelpipe

Video Presentation:

Pixelpipe

25 January 2009

Submitting Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Submitting your Blogger.com or Blogspot.com blog site to Google Webmaster will enable Google to find, index, and rank your site. For those who are new to this, you may go to the official Google Webmaster Tools site to create a new Webmaster profile.

Upon logging in using your Gmail account, key in your blog site URL, and click OK. You will then be asked to verify your site. This is to ascertain that you are indeed the owner of the site.

There are two ways to verify your site. You can either add a Meta Tag or Upload an HTML file. If you are using the Meta Tag method, Google will generate a Meta Tag code. Copy the META tag that is generated for you, and paste it in your site’s home page in the first section of the page, before the first section. What you do is to go to your Blogger dashboard. Under Template ->Edit HTML, somewhere near the top of the script, add the Meta Tag as follows:-

<head>
<META TAG>
<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Replace the META TAG with the code generated by Google Webmaster. Once done, Save the Template. When you return to Google Webmaster site, you can click the button that says “Verify”.

Note: The second method of uploading an HTML file is NOT applicable to Bloggers using Blogger.com or Blogspot.com because this requires you to upload a file to the root directory of your Blog, which is not possible. There is therefore only one method for you to verify your site, and that is by inserting the Meta Tag as explained above.

After you have had your site verified, click on the Sitemaps tab as shown below. By adding a Sitemap, you will be providing Google with more details and information about your Blog. With this, Google will crawl your site, report information on any errors in the Sitemaps tab, and index your Blog site at a faster rate.

Submit Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmaster

Click the link that says “Add a Sitemap”. This will take you to another screen where you should choose the type “Add General Web Sitemap”. The Sitemap URL for any normal website is usually the index page that is stored in the highest-level directory of that site. In the case of Blogger.com or Blogspot.com, the only way to add a Sitemap is to use either of the following 2 Sitemaps:-

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/rss.xml

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Remember to replace YOURBLOGNAME with that of your Blog’s. For Blogger blogs, do not add "www." to YOURBLOGNAME. Once you have added your Sitemaps, you will receive a confirmation telling you that reports are being generated but “may take several hours to update”. Congratulations! You have successfully added your Sitemaps. When you login to your Google Webmaster days later, you should be able to see the indexed pages and statistics of Google webcrawl of your Blog.

Leave the meta tag in the template if you want to view the statistics of your site. If Google can’t find the meta tag, it will show an error message in your webmaster toolbox and you may have to verify your site again.

Source: http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/02/submit-blogger-sitemap-to-google.html

22 January 2009

LiveJournal on the Verge of Collapse

At the midst of the terrible recession, on the day, when Microsoft announced 5,000 employees workforce cuts, information on the 12 to 20 employees lay offs by LiveJournal does not look neither surprising, nor unexpected. However, if think about the total number of employees in the LiveJournal San Francisco office as 28 employees only, you understand that this cut might be really fatal for the LJ bloggers platform functioning. Valleywag reports that the social-media pioneer laid off all of its product managers and engineers, “leaving only a handful of finance and operations workers - which speaks to a website to be left on life support.” Matt Berardo, a Yahoo executive hired on last summer, has also left.

Founded in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way to keep his friends from high school updated about his activities, LiveJournal was among the first blogging services and social networks. The company was bought in 2005 by blogging-software company Six Apart and then sold two years later to Russian online-media company SUP.

According to the statement from LiveJournal, the company’s servers, technical operations, administration and customer-service teams will remain in the United States. However, global product development and design now will be coordinated out of the Moscow office.

Andrew Paulson

The company’s Moscow-based management has told employees it blames the "global economic downturn" - the kind of pat excuse every boss is giving for layoffs, even when mismanagement or a bad business plan is really to blame.

The brutal, abrupt cuts suggest something different: That Sup founder Andrew Paulson (above), who paid an estimated $30 million for LiveJournal a little over a year ago, has realized his expensive mistake in buying at the top of the bubble. Someone familiar with the company tells us Paulson lost the CEO job last summer to Annelies van den Belt, a former News Corp. executive, and was given the meaningless title of chairman; he’s essentially out of the company now.

18 January 2009

Free Tool to submit your pages to Social Bookmarking sites

Submitting your pages to Social Bookmarking Sites provides multiple opportunities for your content exposure without violating any rules, creating similar publication, and with minimum time and efforts spent. The offer presentation will show you a way to make the process easier for your visitors to submit your site automatically to major social bookmarking site. That might give you an enormous boost in terms of site exposure and related AdSense income.

1. About BlogSocializer

BlogSocializer is a simple widget for your Blogger based blog. It enables blog readers or visitors to submit your blog to major social bookmarking sites, including Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Yahoo! MyWeb, Google Fusion, Blink, Furl, and Simpy.

2. Copy the code
First just copy the widget code below. (right click, than Copy)


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

</script>
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/blogsocializer.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/technorati.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/delicious.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/google.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/digg.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/yahoo.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/blink.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/furl.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/simpy.gif" border="0"/>
<img src="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/stumble.gif" border="0"/>
 
<a href="http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/">[get this widget]</a>


3. Paste the code
Now paste the code to your Blogger template. Can work either on new or classic template. In New template (.xml mode) you can simply add a new widget in ’edit layout’ area. But for classic template you just need to paste it at ’edit html’ area. Just for tips, you may insert the code below post content area. You can find some templates with this widget ready to use at TheFachia.

4. Save and Test
Now time to test your new widget. Try to submit one page of your blog to Digg or Delicious. And see how simple it works. Or you can test the script now as demo how it works. Submit this page to one of your favorite social bookmarking below.

You can find detailed instructions of adding new widget here: http://www.smartbloggerz.com/2008/04/how-to-add-bookmarker-widgets-in.html

Developers website: http://blogsocializer.googlepages.com/index.htm

14 January 2009

Do not let visitors leave your blog!

The simple but effective method of keeping your readers on your site is - creation hyperlinks open in a new window when they are clicked.

Why Define Hyperlinks to Open a New Window?

"Why would one want to have their links open in a new window?", you might ask. The primary, and probably the only reason a blogger would do that - is to trying to keep the user on their site as long as possible. You provide the reference link in the text of your posts not just because you want you reader to go away. In some cases, reader might come back after reviewing the site where you sent him, in some case, he will stay there, move further, or just close the online session. If you have the hyperlink opening a new window in every case, it will be easier for your visitor to come back to your site, when he is done with exploration of the link, you created. And he will be able to painlessly resume investigation of your own site after coming back.

When you provide internal links, directing to your own content, this issue is not very important, since your visitors does not leave actually your site, but just continues its exploration. Opening every time a new window, when customer clicks a new link, is not recommended, since your reader might get a feeling that you are spamming him. He will get annoyed and leave.

But if you are referring to another blog or web site, have a new window opened to display the web page, while keeping your own page in the background.

Create a Hyperlink That Opens a New Window

The basic structure of a hyperlink looks like this:

<a href="http://internet-traders.blogspot.com">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

If you use this code, the clicking on the link will lead the clicker to the new location. To manually change the hyperlink properties, forcing to open a new window on every click, requires code modification. Just add one more property to the ’a’ tag to make it do what we want.

All we need to add is:

target="_blank"

Just like the href property/value pair (href="some value"), you need simply to include the target="_blank" to the ’a’ tag of your hyperlink. Here is what the finished hyperlink will look like:

<a href="http://internet-traders.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

Some desktop software HTML authoring utilities are able to provide this functionality as an option for you when you create a hyperlink. For example, Post2Blog, I use can do that easily. But if you use online Blog editor, like Blogger, you do not have ready to go option for the hyperlinks properties modification. You need to review the HTML source, find the ’a’ tag you want to modify and then add the target="_blank" value pair to the hyperlink definition.

11 January 2009

How to choose a good Domain Name

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08 January 2009

How to Put a Widget on a Specific Page of your Blogger Blog

Widgets are short and handy small computer programs that can add more functionality to any Blog platform. In Blogger, where standard set of features and embedded plugins is rather limited, adding extended capabilities with third-party widget might help to spice up your blog and increase its attractiveness. It can be added as an extra code behind the new Page Elements through the Page Elements subtab of the Template tab.

In brief, to add widget or page elements to your blog login at Blogger.com and click on Layout link on Dashboard. Then click the Add Page Element link in the sidebar.

After adding a Page Element to your blog it can be seen on all your blog pages by default, unless you wrap the widget in conditional tags. In this publication, we will present you the way on how to put selectively widgets on particular blog pages. You really can decide on which pages or a single pagethe widget should appear.

WIDGET ON POST PAGES ONLY

If you want to put the widget only on the post (item) pages then paste this line :

<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == "item"’>

immediately after the main includable line of code in the widget :

<b:includable id=’main’ var=’top’>

For this login at Blogger.com and click on Layout link on Dashboard. Then click Edit Html subtab of Template tab. Put a check in the Expand Wdgets Template checkbox at the top of the Template code box and scroll down to the widget code. Lastly in the widget code add a </b:if> before the immediate next </b:includable>. This is how the whole widget code will look like after the change :

<b:widget id=’HTML1’ locked=’false’ title=’’ type=’HTML’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == "item"’>

WIDGET CODE

</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

This widget will only appear on the Post Pages.

WIDGET ON MAIN PAGE ONLY

If you want the widget to appear only on the Main Page of the blog use the code below :

<b:widget id=’HTML1’ locked=’false’ title=’’ type=’HTML’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl’>

WIDGET CODE

</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

This widget will appear only on the Main Page.

WIDGET ON SPECIFIC BLOG PAGE

There are some cases in which you may want the widget to appear only on a specific page of your blog. For example, there might be some pages on your blog with heavy traffic where you plan to put some special ads or particular content. Create the widget by pasting the HTML in the new widget. Then modify the code as shown below :

<b:widget id=’HTML1’ locked=’false’ title=’’ type=’HTML’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == "BLOG_PAGE_URL"’>

WIDGET CODE

</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Replace the CAPS : BLOG_PAGE_URL with the permalink of your post.

WIDGET ON SPECIFIC LABEL PAGE

You can specify a widget to appear only on specific label pages. This is useful when you want to represent your labels with icons. For example, you may have posts on books and when the label books are clicked in your blog the sidebar will show a book icon. For such widgets, you can use the following code:

<b:widget id=’HTML1’ locked=’false’ title=’’ type=’HTML’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.url == "http://BLOG_NAME.blogspot.com/search/label/LABEL_NAME"’>

WIDGET CODE

</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Replace BLOG_NAME and LABEL_NAME with actual.
Source: http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2007/12/put-widget-on-specific-page-or-url.html

02 January 2009

Spice up your blog with free cartoon

How to make my site unconditionally attractive? How to add interesting and catchy content to encourage my visitors come back again and again? How to make my readers stay longer on my pages?

I bet, you ask yourself all these and similar questions, when you try to tune and enhance your blog. And answers might be completely different. In this publication, I want to present a single way to spice up your blog and make it more attractive. It might not work for every site and every blog, but I am sure for some of you it will be a good solution.

Free daily cartoon add-on is a good way to add automatically high-demand content and liven up any page on your site. Simply cut and paste the code below into your website or blog HTML. When your readers click on the thumbnail, a larger version of the cartoon appears.

Users rules from the content developer

1. Feel free to change the code's fonts, colors, etc to match your website or blog, but please keep the text and links "as-is".

2. Cartoons archiving on your site is not permitted.

3. If you find cartoons you'd like to use, please contact the author for the aforementioned reasonable quote.

4. Adult websites are not allowed to use the free content.

Business Cartoons:

DAILY CARTOON
click to enlarge

Cartoon by Andertoons

Blogging for Good in the Modern World