Entries Tagged as 'Blogging tools'

Be Aware. Downloading Screensavers is not always safe.


Image source:www.moonflare.com

News: Controversial Vigilante Screensaver Shut Down; Trojan Warning.
Just days after they released their controversial anti-spam screensaver, Lycos Europe has shut down the campaign. The new program, “Make Love Not Spam”, was designed to actively handcuff spam servers by choking their bandwidth connection. Now, Lycos Europe has shut the campaign down for reasons still unclear.

To further compound this juicy controversy, a new Trojan horse virus has popped up, masquerading as the Make Love Not Spam screensaver. Be warned: this Trojan is NOT the MLNS program!

Understanding RSS

Are feeds and RSS one and the same? It’s easier to think so, but if you want to be a little more technical, the simple way to explain is that a feed could be in the RSS format. In its latest incarnation, RSS 2.0, the acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is what it is. RSS allows aggregation in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) data format for content that gets updated like websites, blogs and podcasts. The RSS document or feed is checked automatically by the feed reader for new content. The orange RSS icon is now standard in many sites.

Feed aggregators

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A term like feed aggregator sounds very intimidating, but in reality, it’s anything but scary. Also called feed reader or news reader, it is a software or web-based application that enables you to read syndicated feeds. In short, you can subscribe to anything with feeds: blogs, websites, podcasts, even video channels. There are many free aggregators out there that take the fuss out of visiting your favorites sites. You’ll find that you’ll save time and become more updated with the use of an aggregator. Start with the NewsGator suite of readers, including FeedDemon for Windows, NewsGator Inbox for MS Outlook, NewsGator Online, and NetNewsWire 3.1 for Mac OS X.

Widget mania

With thousands of widgets you can put on your blog, where do you start? Here are a few recommendations to help you discover widgets that can enrich your blogging experience, as well as that of your readers.

Art Painter.
Lets you draw online and save your drawing. Choose the background color.
gapingvoid. Displays the latest gapingvoid cartoon on your site or blog. Select the size that fits best.
PerezHilton.com. The latest showbiz gossip from the “Queen of All Media”. You want leopard skin with that?
MyBlogLog. Lets you see who visits your site. Now a Yahoo! service.
Twitter. Allows your readers to see your latest Twitter status and find out what your are doing.
Flickr badge. Displays your selection of Flickr photos in HTML or Flash format.

Widgets for your blog

You’ve seen them on blogs and webpages–little boxes that do different kinds of things from animating photos to showing the weather forecast. They’re called widgets, applets that can be easily installed on your site even if you do not know anything about code. Most of the time, you simply copy-paste the script on your blog template or follow the instructions for the platform you are using. The results are instant and do not need to be updated. The tough part is controlling yourself from installing all of them, which is not the best idea because too many widgets will give your readers a major headache. In the next post, we’ll suggest some cool and useful widgets.

Offline Blogging

offline.pngIsn’t it nicer to be able to edit and post your blogs even when you are not connected to the internet? Really, that is possible. There are existing offline blogging tool or software available for download. Some of them are free, there are also proprietary. Either of the two, it is still a comfort to bloggers to do things offline that you usually do online.

An example of an offline blogging tool is w.bloggar. It supports a wide collection of blogging platforms including blogspot, wordpresss, livejournal, drupal, movabletype and others. It is cooler because it is a freeware; no credit cards needed on download.

If you are using the Firefox web browser, you can also try ScribeFire (formerly Performancing for Firefox) as your blog post editor.