Blogging Tips

Feed a Fever, Without Starving Your RSS Reader

If you’ve ever come back from a vacation or conference and been reluctant to open up your RSS reader due to the sheer number of unread items that certainly awaited, you are already familiar with “second inbox guilt”. It’s caused by having a second unread count, much like your email inbox, that you have to constantly churn and plow through every day.

The cure for this disease, however, may well be a fever.

Fever is a different kind of RSS reader, rather than burdening you with unread entries and making you rummage through hundreds or thousands of posts to find what you want to read, Fever tries to bring the important articles to the top, making them easy to find and easy to follow. Though it lets you maintain a list of “must follow” feeds, it also works to find and summarize the most important news before you even get there.

Though it is a new and potentially compelling idea for managing RSS feeds, it does have some pretty severe limitations, including a hefty price tag, that will likely keep it from being widely adopted or used. Still, it is worth taking a moment to see if it is right for you.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 and filed under Reviews
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Faulty Subordination, Rambling Sentences, and Faulty Parallelism

If you missed the post on faulty coordination, Sentence Structure and Coordination, be sure to check it out.  We discussed that you don’t always need to begin a sentence with the subject, and the problems we can run into with improper coordination.  This post is a continuation of that topic covering faulty subordination, rambling sentences and faulty parallelism.

There are two types of problems we can encounter when using subordination; we can use the wrong subordinator or we can subordinate the wrong idea.  To avoid using the incorrect subordinator, always make sure that the connecting subordinator shows exactly how two ideas are related.

Faulty coordination:  John ran for months even though he would be ready for the marathon.
Correct coordination:  John ran for months so that he would be ready for the marathon.
Common Subordinators and Their Usage:
To show time: after, before, whenever.
To show …

Written by Patti Stafford from Patti Stafford
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 and filed under Writing
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Aviary Screen Capture

It’s a pretty common task for a blogger to need a screen capture to get a picture of a Web page or grab a logo of a web site that they are writing about.  While Windows, Mac and Linux include some basic tools for screen captures, most bloggers will want a screen capture tool with the ability to capture portions of pages and add text or other annotations to the captured images.  What’s amazing is that the improvements in screen capture software are rolling out at an amazing pace.

Just earlier this year Jonathan Bailey wrote about Skitch: The Mac Blogger’s Best Screenshot Tool and 3 Firefox Screen Capture Tools.  While those tools are great, I’m impressed with the features that the web based Aviary is bringing to the table. Aviary just won a Webware 100 award for their photo editing service, but they are certainly not letting the award encourage them to rest on their laurels.  Indeed, less than a month after winning the award they have rolled out an addition which adds even more features to their screen capturing tool.

Written by David Silversmith from InfoMusing
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 and filed under Software & Programs
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WordPress Adds Commercially Supported GPL Themes

There has been a lot of discussions lately about WordPress and it’s GPL policy for themes. Thord Daniel Hedengren posted about the latest twist in the GPL debate today.

WordPress have added a Commercially Supported GPL Themes directory to the themes area of WordPress. There is currently 9 theme websites displayed in this commercial area : Pro Theme Design, Jestro, iThemes, Press75, StudioPress, Spectacu.la, Themeshift, ThemeHybrid and WooThemes. Though I have no doubt that this will encourage many more commercial theme sites to adopt the General Public License due to the exposure that WordPress can give them.

To be included in the commercial theme area your theme site must :

Distribute 100% GPL themes, including artwork and CSS.
Have professional support options and optional customization.
Your …

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on July 2nd, 2009 and filed under WordPress
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Leveraging Your Twitter Account to Achieve Fame and Fortune?

Leveraging your Twitter stream can be archived in a number of ways, but avoiding the negative connotation of being spammy or being labeled as a gimmick can be the tricky thing. Some tweet for a cause in order to ensure that their online actions aren’t perceived in bad light. The upside? You’re actually tweeting for a good cause. Now isn’t that a win-win?

It’s a lesson driven home by Franny Syufy over at About.com. She notes the current Twitter trend that Sockington started, which was little more than a curious return to the cat-blogging phenomenon that Twitter once was. Drilling down to the origin of Sockington’s fame or the purpose behind Sockington’s website is even more of a curiosity, as we can all scratch our heads and wonder at the necessity and purpose of Sockington at all.

Written by Kristen Nicole from Kristen Nicole
Posted on July 1st, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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6 Things Bloggers Should Bring to Conferences

This past weekend I was at WordCamp Dallas, where I was given the opportunity to both speak to and interact with a group of over 300 fellow WordPress users, bloggers and soon-to-be bloggers. It was a great event that was a unique combination of wonderful sponsors, great planning, spectacular speakers and great attendees.

But if you are a blogger that is new to conferences, whether they are blogger-specific, technical or otherwise, there is a lot to remember. Blogging, for the most part, is a solo activity and if your job doesn’t sent you to a lot of conferences there may well be a lot that you forget or don’t think to bring.

Since conference season is under way and many bloggers may be treking out to their first convention, here are a few things that you should remember before you get in the car.

Written by Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today
Posted on June 30th, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Promote your blog
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How Dare You?

Guess what?  Writers are not perfect.  You see proof of this fact every day if you read enough blogs, books, newspapers or magazines.  The best writers in the world make mistakes, misspell words, use poor grammar at times and punctuate incorrectly.  Why?  Because writers are human and humans make mistakes.  Sometimes humans make mistakes several times before they learn the lesson. Sometimes they never learn.

All writers’ have their pet peeves too, things they notice immediately that may go unnoticed by another writer.  A few of my pet peeves are the use (or misuse) of then and than and obvious misspellings of common words.  Writers will often point out these fallacies in material they find on the web, in the newspaper or in novels.  When this happens, the writer’s own shortcomings are subject to being scrutinized and pointed out by yet another writer who has different pet peeves.  Often the second …

Written by Patti Stafford from Patti Stafford
Posted on June 30th, 2009 and filed under Writing
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