Automated Open-Source Life-stream Blogging Software

You have a rich Web 2 life and complicated online presence. Would not it be great if all your Internet activities (you choose) are reflected on your blog automatically? Uploaded a photo to Flickr? Bookmarked a new site? In a few minutes, it will show up on your blog!

There have been a lot of "life-stream" services popping up lately that aim to collect all of your Web 2.0 newly created posts, uploaded materials, or certain performed actions, and assemble all this in one place that is central to your online life. It sounds as a great idea, but the downside is that most of the offered solutions are closed source and externally hosted applications, so you are essentially directing all your data into yet another system that you have no control over.

Sweetcron

Sweetcron application, created by Tokyo-based web developer Yongfook, represents a completely open-source solution, self-hosted take on the life stream idea. Like most of the similar services, it is essentially a blog that also pulls your real-time participation data from sites like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Youtube. Unlike most of other competitive service models, however, you can download the software, skin it, and modify it to suit your needs. You will definitely need a server to run it on, of course; therefore this solution is not for everyone.

Developers website: http://sweetcron.com/

Direct Downloading links: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/downloads/list

Additional Information, Detailed Features and Installation Procedures:

http://www.mytestbox.com/new-web-software-releases/sweetcron-friendfeed-automated-lifestream-blog-software/
http://lifestreamblog.com/interview-with-yongfook-on-sweetcron-automated-lifestream-blog-software/
http://socialwebtools.info/2008/08/29/sweetcron-best-automated-lifestreaming-blogging-software/

Smart Blogger Assistant for Simple Blog Publishing

Developer Description:
Smart Blogger allows centralized management of your all diaries and blogs regardless of its Internet location. The software has a single universal interface for reading and sending messages to all blogs; it makes text formatting possible. With this application, you can monitor your friends' diaries checking their blogs for new postings. You can also look through commentaries to your postings as well as other peoples, place comments in blogs, and leave answers to threads.

The software supports three web-blogs:
- LiveJournal
- Blogger
- WordPress

Disadvantages:
This post has been made in Smart Blogger. I already see several disadvantages of using this free software for blogs publishing:

1. No possibility of the text alignment options.
2. Very basic text formatting: color and bold/itallic/under only.
3. No spell checking option.
4. No advanced features as horizontal lines or tables generation.
5. Small publishing field, not very convenient for big posts.

Advantages:
1. Nice and pleasant interface.
2. Easy to use.
3. Portable software exists, so you do not need to install the software on your PC

Developers WebSite: http://www.smartpctools.com/smart_blogger/index1.html

Assessment: The software is good for the light operations, small notes in your Journal, but is lacking functionality for serious blogging.

Software carries rating 3 of 5 in the RateItAll List of 29 free software titles:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24825-blog-publishing-freeware.aspx

If you have personal experience using this software, you are welcome to leave your feedback in the rating widget below:

Blog Publishing Freeware on RateItAll

WordPress Blog Optimization with All-in-One SEO Pack Plugin

One of the most popular WordPress plugin will assist the blog owner to achieve high levels of Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This plugin is streamlined for the best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options ready for tweaking, blogging specialists recommend for starter using the default settings.

Among the plugin features:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Get more information and download:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

A nice video presentation for the plugin:

WordPress Blog Optimization with All-in-One SEO Pa

14 Blog Desktop Editors - Freeware Reviews

Until recently, I was using Web-Based Editor to make post on my Blogs. But, as my activities became more frequent, and overall amount of the Projects increased, I started to look for the suitable desktop solution. It is easier to compile and format the post in convenience on your Hard Drive, and as it ready, just publish it. Appeared, that there is a descent choice of the free products, available on the market, to complete the task. I am still looking for the one that I will permanently use, but almost every product I tried, is more convenient that the Web-Based editing solution.

For your convenience, I have compiled a list of the 14 Blog Desktop Editors on RateItAll. As usual, only the free programs were considered. Also, I did not include the scripts, that require installation on the server.

Please, access the link:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24825-blog-publishing-freeware.aspx

Lifehacker conducted a poll among bloggers to define the desktop blogging software used, and found out that almost 61% of the respondents still use online editor.

What about you?