Web and Technology

Trying to make the sidebar more appealing

August 12, 2008 by Tricia

I spent some time today rearranging the sidebars on a few of my blogs. It’s amazing how much time tinkering with the look of your site can take! I think I’m good at finding ways to waste time.

Anyway … I didn’t make too many changes to this sites sidebar, but I was wondering what you think of the sidebars in general.

Does it looks organized? Do the sidebars add to the look of the site or distract? Can you find whatever you might be looking for on my site easily by using the sidebar?

We’ve all been to websites that totally turn us off from the first look or first blast of autoplay music. I’m fairly certain my site isn’t one of those, but I’d like to know if I could make it more appealing in any way.

If you have an opinion or suggestion I’d love to hear from you.

Comment Relish- the WP plugin that greets new commentors

August 10, 2008 by Tricia

What would you think if I added a plugin to my site that would keep track of new commenter and send them a personal greeting?

The plugin is Comment Relish and it identifies new commentors and allows the blog owner to automatically send out a pre-defined message to that new visitor.

With so many new blogs being created daily sometimes you need an edge to grab that first time visitor or well in this case commentors attention. They’ve already like what you posted enough to leave a comment. Why not send them a greeting welcoming them to your site and thanking them for their visit? While you’re at it you could also list your RSS feed and email newsletter subscription link or possibly introduce your new visitor/commentor to another similar blog that you write.

I need your opinion

If you were a first time visitor to this site and you received a warm welcome visa email that also promoted the sites RSS feed and newsletter would you appreciate the message or be ticked off that you got yet another unwanted email? Mind you, this would be a one time email.

My other concern with this plugin, or well for that matter any new WP plugin that I add to my site is whether it will be a CPU hog on my hosting account. A plugin that makes too many calls to the MySQL database or behaves poorly in other ways can get your hosting account shut down as fast as a blink of the eye! I’ve had hosting problems in the past (not with current web host – Hostgator – thankfully!) and I don’t want those issues revisited just because I tried to enhance my visitors experience with a new WP plugin.

If you’ve used or if you currently use this plugin I’d love to hear from you.
Have you had any problems with this plugin?
How do your visitors like it?
Is your site fairly busy or do you have a number of other sites on your hosting account (this is where hosting issues come in on shared hosting accounts)?

Please help me decide whether I should use this plugin or if you know of another one that does something similar (but definitely doesn’t cause problems) please let me know which one you use.

Blaze Media Pro All in one audio and video converter

August 10, 2008 by Tricia

Have you ever wished that you had software that could meet all your audio and video editing needs? Well I’ve just been introduced to Blaze Media Pro software and I think you’ll find that it not only meets all of your needs, and has so many features that you’ll never want to use another piece of software to edit your videos or audio files.

Blaze Media Pro allows you to edit your videos and audio files in all of the popular formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV, iPod, PSP, 3GP and many more. The software includes a full audio and video converter, burner, video capture, audio recorder, data CD/DVD burner, add special effects (there’s a list of 30 special effects that you can use), create and manage playlists and more all in one software application.

I think this software would be great for any bloggers that are thinking of or who already do video or audio podcasts on their sites. Think about it – instead of using two or more programs to edit your video or audio creations you can use just one piece of software. Just imagine how much time you’ll save.

Some of the features that I really like are the ability to extract and save sound files, add audio to video, extract frames to image files in batch mode and the fact that you can create videos from still frame images or by piecing together parts of other videos to create your own awesome movie.

If you want to try out this software you can download a free trial version of Blaze Media Pro. Try it. I’m sure you’ll like it.

Bad migraine knocking me out of commission

August 7, 2008 by Tricia

I’ve had a really bad migraine the last few days. I don’t know what caused it, but it’s stopping me from getting much of anything done! It’s better today than it was yesterday!

Yesterday I spent the day lying on the couch dreading each time the dog would go to the door asking to go outside. Of course, every time I did go out with the dog she wanted to stand in the bright sunlight and if you’ve ever had a migraine or a very bad headache you know that bright light just makes your head pound even more.

I think the headache started sometime on Monday hence the lack of new posts! I just hate being knocked out of commission by my own body! Hopefully the migraine is going to finally go away, it seems like it is, but you can never tell for sure until it’s suddenly gone.

A new way to network and promote your sites

August 1, 2008 by Tricia

Yesterday I read a blog post about keeping your Twitter and Plurk accounts functional and it caused me to revisit a site that I’d been to in the past, but dismissed as not being what I needed at the time.

The site that I visited and subsequently signed up for was Ping.Fm. Perhaps you’ve heard of this site?

Ping.Fm allows you to update your social networks quickly and virtually from anywhere. Best of all, you can update all of your social networks at once!

In my last post I talked about how I think Twitter might be a waste of time for people because some of the bloggers I follow seem to always be sending out Tweets. Now add other social networks like Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Friendfeed and a multitude of other social network sites and you could literally spend your whole day posting messages on these sites just to network and keep in touch with your friends. There are so many social networks popping out of the woodwork these days that it’s becoming overwhelming! So you can see why the idea of being able to post one message to one site and then have that message delivered to all of your social networks at once might be beneficial.

I think I originally dismissed Ping.Fm when I first came across it because I wasn’t yet a member of Twitter or Plurk or some of the other sites that Ping.Fm interacted with at the time. However now that I’m a member of at least half of the sites that work with Ping.Fm I can really see the advantage!

Ping.Fm is very easy to use. Just sign up and activate your social service. You can post your Ping.Fm messages directly to Blogger and WordPress.com blogs, Social sites such as Bebo, Brightkite, Facebook, FriendFeed, hi5, Identi.ca, Jaiku, kwippy, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, and Xanga. You can also use Ping.Fm to post message to the following services – AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk (GTalk), Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, iGoogle Gadget, Facebook, iPhone Web App, and Mobile App (WAP).

BTW all the links in the paragraph above are to my social network profile pages if you’d like to visit them and add me as a friend.

Imagine how much time you’ll save by being able to post message to your friends and contacts on several of those sites all at once?

Now, if you happen to have a WordPress blog on it’s own domain there’s a WP Plugin called PingPressFm that will allow you to notify your social network sites about a new blog post. The WP plugin only works with WP 2.5 and higher so if you are a Ping.Fm member and want to use the plugin on your blog make sure your installation is at least WP 2.5 or higher.

Unlike some I don’t post a lot of messages to my social networks, but I do like the idea of being able to notify all of these services of new blog posts. Up until now I’d only been using Twitterfox to post blog post updates to Twitter. If the PingPressFm plugin works well I’ll use that instead.

Ping.Fm is in Beta right now and you need an invite before you can become a member. So consider this your invitation. The invite code is currently pingscompany. Oh and speaking of invites if anyone has an invite for Jaiku I’d love to get one so I can explore that site.

If you know of any other handy services that make it easier to network I’d love to hear about them.

Trying to make the sidebar more appealing

Blaze Media Pro All in one audio and video converter

Bad migraine knocking me out of commission

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