Archive for February, 2009

Twitter Tools and Twitter Utilities

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Twitter is a really easy to use social site that lets you keep in contact with your Twitter followers quickly and regularly. If you’ve recently started using Twitter, you may find these Twitter tools useful…

TwitterFeed – Every time you write a new blog post, you will automatically tweet about it on Twitter. This is great for generating traffic to your blog posts.

Tweetlater – Twitter tools to send automatic responses and allows you to schedule tweets in advance. You can also automatically follow new followers and send them a quick message.

TwitterButtons – Generate Twitter buttons for your blogs, web sites and web pages. Having these online will increase your followers.

Twellow – Huge directory of Twitter users, categorised into keywords and types. Makes it very easy to find like-minded Twitterers like yourself.

Regards
Roger Mayne
Swiftdeal

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New Wordpress Blog Built To Flip

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

I just purchased a new domain name yesterday, and created a new Wordpress blog on it. The URL is www.avoid-debt.com, and my main aim is to sell it in about a month or two, once I have it indexed in the search engines, and hopefully making some Adsense revenue.

Debt and debt management is a big topic at the moment, especially with the “credit crunch” around the world. People who are in debt, or worried about getting into debt are all looking for solutions and advice.

The Wordpress blog went live yesterday, and has been ping’ed, so we shall see how long it takes to get indexed on Google and the other search engines.

The next stage is to find a nice Wordpress theme for the new blog and get some content onto it. I’ve found one I like, just need to see if there are any others.

Regards
Roger Mayne
Swiftdeal

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All you need to know about RSS

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

What does RSS mean?

RSS may mean three different things. The original RSS (RDF Site Summary RSS 0.9) was developed by Dan Libby for Netscape. After a couple of months, they produced a simpler and easier-to-use version called Rich Site Summary or RSS 0.91. But they later lost interest, leaving it without an owner. As more and more users were using RSS, Winer made an adapted version of RSS 0.91 for Userland, claiming it as his own. Later in 2005, Microsoft developed Really Simple Syndication in relation to its Simple Sharing Extensions.

What is RSS?

RSS is a XML file format for syndicating content and news in the web. It is usually used by websites that constantly need to update their content regularly such as news websites (CNN, BBC and Reuters) and weblogs. Since it essentially gives one’s webpage more traffic, it is now more widely used in marketing, web publications and virus reports. Today, large and small websites alike are usually RSS-enabled.

For example, you’re an avid fan of baseball and you want to share something recent about one of the players. Other than content, you can also attach multimedia files, like videos or pictures. By using RSS feeds, other Internet users subscribed to RSS-enabled sites can read your “headline” for free. They can also track for changes and updates using news aggregators, which will be discussed later on.

How does RSS work?

To be able to use RSS, you first have to download a software (content management system), by which XML format can be read. The title and, excerpt of the article, and a link to the full article are shown. Other than just text, you can also insert multimedia files in RSS feeds like pictures, videos, mp3s and others. Broadcatching, picturecasting, photocasting, and podcasting are some features you can incorporate into your feed, but will not be discussed in this article.

For users to access a RSS feed, they need to use an aggregator or a feed reader. An aggregator searches for updates on RSS-enabled webpages then displays it. It can either be a standalone program or a web browser extension, depending on your operating system. Search engines for web content broadcasted over RSS feed are also available such as Plazoo and Feedster.

How can I make an RSS feed?

It is definitely easier to make an RSS feed if you know HTML. If not, you could sign up for a blog (there are hundreds out there), some of which automatically creates RSS. If you’re using a personal webpage building system, you need to understand more about RSS. Making an RSS feed from scratch is relatively easy.

A RSS feed should always contain an “item”, whichever version of RSS you might use. If you wrote about a recent event in your city or a book review, the contents of this article can form an item. An item is essentially composed of three things: a title, its description, and link (where they can find your webpage). In choosing a title and description, use something that will describe the web content best. Although it will be easier for you, it doesn’t follow that the title tag of your webpage and the item title are the same.

An item will look like HTML tags. First, you need to put an opening channel tag that defines it as an XML file. Then, label the tag as an item by putting <item> after the channel tag. After this, you can now insert the three essentials of your item: <title>, <description>, and <link>. Just like HTML, we need to close the tag by writing </channel> and </rss> at the bottom.

An RSS feed that contains multiple tags looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>

<channel>

<item>
<title>Anne Rice’s Belinda: A Book Review</title>
<description> If you haven’t read any Anne Rice books yet, you will be greeted with shocking romantic relationships forming between unlikely characters… </description>
<link> http://allaboutbookreviews.com/belinda </link>

<item>
<title>Harry Potter IV: Darker with More Deaths</title>
<description> The recently released Harry Potter installation has proved dark for its younger readers…</description>
<link> http://allaboutbookreviews.com/harrypotterandthehalfbloodprince </link>

</channel>

</rss>
Now, if you’re still having a hard time understanding these tags, look for HTML tags tutorial to further grasp the concept. Have fun!

Regards
Roger Mayne
Swiftdeal

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Introduction to Blogs and Blogging

Friday, February 20th, 2009

What is a blog?

A weblog, commonly truncated to blog, is basically a website carrying published items, including articles, photographs, videos and audios.

A typical blog is an information hub comprising of text, images and weblinks related to other web pages and blogs, along with other media related to the topic.

Meanwhile, in layman language, a blog is essentially defined as a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links.

The act of authoring and maintaining a blog, or adding an article to an existing blog is known as blogging. Individual articles on a blog are referred to as ‘blog posts’ or ‘entries’ and the person who posts these entries is called a ‘blogger’.

History

The pre-digital electronic community witnessed many forms of electronic communications including the likes of wire fights of AP wire, usenet, e-mail lists and bulletin board systems (BBS), going on to ‘threads’, the running conversations created by WebEx.

The concept of a blog as we know it today evolved from the system of online diaries where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. The term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger and abridged to ‘blog’ by Peter Merholz.

Functions

A blog has one or more of the following functions to perform:

• To focus on a particular subject, such as food, politics, news etc.
• To function as an online diary for various thought groups.
• To disseminate information.

Making of blogs

Specific server-based systems are used to create and maintain blogs. The users use tools such Ecto, Elicit and w.bloggar to maintain their web-hosted blog without being online while composing or editing posts.

Besides, blog creation tools and blog hosting services are also provided by many of the web hosting companies, internet service providers, online publications and internet portals. Some of these service providers include Tripod, America Online, Salon.com, Yahoo! 360° and Google.

Some of the blogging software are b2evolution, geeklog, blogger, bBlog, LifeType, Nucleus CMS, PostNuke, Serendipity, TypePad, Typo, WordPress and Xanga.

Blog Composition

A blog entry has two types of components .i.e. vital and optional. The vital components essentially include:

• Title: main title or headline of the post.
• Body: main content of the post.
• Permalink: the URL of the full, individual article.
• Post Date: date and time the post was published.

The optional components include:

• Comments: comments added by readers.
• Categories / Tags: subject that the entry discusses.
• TrackBack / Pingback: links to other sites that refer to the entry.

Types of Blogs

A weblog is designed as such that it can be used for a wide range of possible uses. Normally, a blog is identified by the purpose or the main subject it is used for.

The main forms of blogs include business, cultural, science, political, spam, topical, travel blogs, link blog, moblog, photoblog, shockblog and vblog.

Role of Blogs

Blogs have come to play an important role which benefits the community on a whole. Here we’ve discussed a few of them:

• Information dissemination
Many times, bloggers have to their credit leading the way in bringing key information to public light and breaking and shaping news stories. This leaves the mainstream media with the task of reacting to this news, instead of it being vice-versa. One of the major instances is the furor created by the blogs of the left-swing and right-swing bloggers during the Iraq war.

• Mobilising public opinion
Blogs have played a major role in bringing the common man’s opinion to the forefront and raising the magnitude of its effectiveness and influence. The incident in year 2002 when the U.S. Senate’s Majority Leader Tent Lott’s infamous comments carrying a tinge of racial segregation were brought to the limelight by the onslaught of bloggers is a major example. Lott was eventually forced to step down owing to the public pressure built this way.

• Public Contact
Blogs have also come to act as a major link between the politicians and leaders and the general public. Blogs are increasingly used by these leaders to express their opinion on wars and other issues, acting as major contact between them and the common man. This has made blogging an important tool for outreach and opinion forming.

Common Terms

Here we list a few terms out of the blogging jargon, which are the most common in the world of blogging:

• Audioblog: A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings.
• Blaudience: The audience or readership of a blog.
• Blawg: A blog focusing on commentary about law, normally written by a law professor, law student or a lawyer himself.
• Bleg: A blog entry which is a request to the readers
• Blog client: Software to manage blogs from an operating system with no need to launch a web browser.
• Blog feed: An XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog for syndication to allow further distribution to the web.
• Dark Blog: A non-public blog.
• Flog: A blog that’s ghostwritten, for instance by the marketing department.
• Multi-Blog: Creating, maintaining and running multiple blogs.
• Ping: The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post.
• Splog: Spam blog.
• Troll: A commentator who has the job of attacking views expressed in a blog and incites a flamewar.
• Vorage: Act of foraging for video on the internet and sharing it with others.

Regards
Roger Mayne
Swiftdeal

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