I was faced with this problem a short while ago. Initially with my amazon aStore and later with my Job Board.I attempted to do it but I kept failing and getting frustrated. I searched the internet for answers and eventually I came across this code on wordpress.org. The article was written by the owner of ORMSblog and it worked fine for me with the Job Board.

There are several steps.

1. Copy and past this php code into a text editor like notepad or wordpad

<?php

/*

Template Name: (whatever you want to call the file so that you will know what it is like amazonstore or jobamatic)

*/

?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<iframe src=”(here put link to the webpage that is your store or job-board)” width=”100%” height=”600″

frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”0″></iframe>

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/show_categories.php’); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

2. Save the file as (Template name).php, edit the parameters width and height so that it fits into the dimentions of your blog and then upload the file into the folder holding your blog theme. In my case,

/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/(Theme name)./(Template name).php.

3. Go to your wordpress Dashboard and write new page and name it what you want your store or job board to be called. At the bottom, select a template. there you will see a drop-down list and one of them will be the name of this php file you just uploaded (Template name).php, but without the .php.

4. Publish your new page and view it live on your blog as its own page.

As a quick note, I do not know how easy this would be for Blogger and wordpress dot com blogs. It needs access to one’s root directory and that is easily applicable in self-hosted wordpress blogs. All the text within ( ) need to be replaced with one’s own text/url or filename depending on which one. I hope this helps. Ask your questions in the comments section and I will be happy to answer. Meanwhile do check out my job board or advertise on my job site by following the link at the lower right hand corner.

These bloggers visited and enroled in June Blog competition. Due to movement to a new self-hosted server and some other issues and glitches, the competition was not as smooth as it should have been. I apologize. Some entries were spam while some fell quite short of the basic requirements of the competition. These two blogs below are the blogs of focus for June and July. Visit them and see what they have for you.

It’s a woman’s world

Spiritual Journey

Blogging takes a part of you and marshes it all up. the adventure in you, the determination in you, the greed in you, the ambition in you, the creativity in you, the friendliness in you, the generosity in you, the business sense in you, your feminine side, your masculine other half….the list is long. Any bloger will recognize some of these characteristics.

The curious questions then are :

Does Blogging change you? Does it bring in new things, or does it just bring out other aspects of you?

Honestly, there should be no single correct answer. In my blogging I have run into monsters, as I have angels. Hackers and code-breakers are on the rampage in the blogosphere, so are calm beings fit for paradise! Some are kind, others are kinder. Some are mercenary, others are peculiar characters. Some reach out for friendship, while others present scorn. Some are like what the cat dragged out, while others are like 007.

Were these bloggers like this or were they changed? I have changed a bit since I started blogging. I have learned some geeky stuff. I have read a lot. I have been to many continents and countries. I have wooed strangers. I have tried to entertain and teach complete strangers. I have visited strange and familiar places. Yes I never used to do all those before. Not really, I used to, but not to that extent. I belong to a couple of social groups, but not humongous ones like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog! I never used to visit my ‘friends’ for rewards, neither was I ever an advertiser. I never used to sell (advertisements or anything else for that matter), now I do.

Is it not too risky to blog? Is it not scary to have personality changes and in some cases career changes? Blogging means a new social circle. New goals and targets. new skills. New learning. Blogging could even mean strained relationships in the home when your newest romance is your computer and the blogosphere? Tell me, how risky is your blogging? How has blogging changed your life?

1. Are you ready to blog?

Blogging is interesting and exciting depending on how well you are able to execute it. It is rewarding and gratifying to see complete strangers respond to your writing with comments and exchange of personal experience. Blogging is really a trip for those ready to blog. Are you ready to blog? Are you ready to keep up with the demands of an ever increasing audience. Are you ready to engage your readers? If you are ready to work tirelessly on a thankless project (at least initially), then move on to the next step. If not, look for something else to do.

2. Can you start afresh?

Often times the first steps on the internet and in the blogosphere are baby steps in the wrong direction…possibly on the wrong terrain. We may have signed up for one useless hype of a “pay-for-this-and-get-rich-NOW” scheme. We paid and paid but did not get rich. We received websites or web pages to make money but nobody came. We even tried to resell one thing or the other but it failed. The realization that you need to start afresh is an essential second step. Do not be afraid to get back to the basics. Remember Abraham Lincoln? he became President one day because he kept on starting afresh. get ready to start afresh.

3. Identify your blogging platform

before you start blogging, you must decide on the blogging platform to use. there are numerous options, but the most popular ones according to a poll by Problogger last year were Wordpress.org (self hosted)[36%], Blogger(free hosted)[25%], and wordpress.com (free hosted)[15%]. There are many other less popular platforms including Typepad, Moveable Type, Typepad, Drupal, Joomla, Nucleus, Livejournal. This list is non-exhaustive. The important thing is really to know which platform works for you. One could test-blog and see how easy it is to work with the various platforms. Just sign up with a not too interesting name and start a blog. Your main purpose would be to test the interface and see whether a particular platform works for you. You can delete the blog after you have tried it for a few minutes to an hour. Sample several of these blog software to decide which one works best for you.

Look for reviews of blog platforms and explore services offered by the free hosting platforms like Blogger and Wordpress.com. What support would you get? Can you monetize the blog? What restrictions exist? Does the platform host any A-listed Blogs? What do other bloggers have to say about the platform? By the time you have gathered that information, you would have identified the platform you like the most.

4. Identify your niche

Identifying your niche is about identifying some area you have a passion for. I will use swimming as an illustration. Do you like swimming? Do you know a lot about swimming? Do you have anything to say about swimming? Like say the history of swimming, trends in swimming today, swimming events calendar. Once you have identified a niche which you have a passion for, you are almost there.

5. Identify your blog host

Often times everyone is apprehensive about web hosts and yes you should be. Your host could be your key to success or your doom. Look for a great web host. There are many but since we are talking about hosting a blog here, I will suggest one of these top hosts: Bluehost, Hostgator,or Hostmonster. These companies are big time which means they have and are continuing to fine-tune their services. Essential components include the ability of these hosts to provide you the blogger a cPanel where you can see your whole hosting platform. There you would be able to install several scripts via the popular Fantastico or Elephante. These are tools that help you make a decision because there are so many software at your disposal. You could do a one-click Wordpress install (actually three clicks) or go for Joomla or Nucleus. Fantastico guides you through the installation of your blog platform and you are almost ready.

6. Network and Traffic

When you have completed the first five thought processes and actions, then it will be time to drive traffic to your blog. You also have to network reasonably well so that Social bookmarking sites like Digg and SU will be sources of traffic for you. Also join traffic networks like Entrecard in the first few weeks and aim at converting one traffic visitor a day. At the end of 365 days, your blog readership would theoretically be 365. Another important community to join is BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. You will generate traffic from there too, a lot.

Conclusion

Once you have all these in the pipeline, believe it or not you are ready to self-host your blog. If you do not try, you will not succeed. Other aspects of self-hosting are beyond the scope of this article, so I will save that for another day.

Pen and Paper Blogging

Some of the best blogs have been written with a pen and a paper. This style works and I would reccommend it as one of your blogging styles for the following reasons

1. Personally, when I do the Pen and Paper Blogging, I write longer posts and there is rarely the distractions that come when you have RSS feeds streaming constantly. Pen and paper away from the computer works for me. I am more disposed to reading my posts over, while still writing and penning a more systematic essay.

2. The Pen and Paper blogging also forces further proof-reading when we eventually want to transcribe it onto our editor in the control panel of our blog. There comes in another spell-check, automated by your browser if you are using Firefox and Wordpress itself too (the first spell-check was when you were writing it manually)

3. I am afforded a second chance at sentence and copy construction/re-construction that makes the copy read better.

4. With Pen and Paper posts, there is ample opportunity to add to the post because there is a time gap between when you write and when you post to blog.

5. Pen and Paper blogs can be typed by your secretary or your child while you are busy with some other things. If you have concerns about links, well our good Zemanta will come in handy as it suggests the latest blog posts related to your topic. Also there is a wordpress plugin called aLinks from drupal. This plugin helps you deep-link your posts so linking is no problem.

There you go. So it is not as we would think. Blogging with Pen and Paper has hidden advantages and every blogger should tap into them to produce great copy.

• Using Blog Editor to Overcome Posting Constraints [via Zemanta]
• The Ultimate Guide to a Wildly Sticky, Successful and Outstanding Blog [via Zemanta]

Image via Wikipedia

#9:IE Tab (Internet Explorer)add-on for Firefox
This add-on may be self explanatory but I will still lend it some brief explanation. IE Tab for Firefox is an add-on that simulates the Internet Explorer engine within a new tab in Firefox. This enables bloggers to see how browsers using internet explorer (which is very popular though not the best browser) will see their pages.
You may be wondering what for and I will tell you. Internet explorer is a bad browser that finds it really difficult to render webpages adequately as the designers of the page want. Therefore, if the page publisher is able to identify what elements IE will not show its users, then the blog owner can adjust or modify the design to overcome that deficiency.

This add-on is also said to be a more convenient alternative to the add-on called open in IE. That is because you really do not have to leave Firefox to see how the page you have just blogged renders in IE. Serious bloggers have a need for this add-on and you can download it from here.

1. No-Blogger!
This is a person that does not blog, knows next to nothing about blogging and is not an active owner or inheritor of a blog. The person may have some rudimentary interest in getting ahead on the internet, but is yet to reconcile the concept of blogging with the inner being.

2. Pre-Blogger:
My idea that when you start blogging, just like many start-ups, you are not really sure you can do this. You may close shop in a few days or weeks. You are testing yourself, but you claim to yourself that you are testing the blogosphere. You hope to be able to get what you want out of blogging, but you are not really fully launched. The blogosphere does not even know you exist. Maybe you have a blog, or something close to it. The design may be pre-historic, or so bizarre that it is abstract art! 50% of these Pre-bloggers go on to blog.

3. Gobloggers(Gloggers):
My favourite group. These people own at least one blog or several blogs. They have blogged and inovated. The Go-blogger’s ranking, performance and ratings is on the upward trend. The Go-blogger is making contacts and meeting new people. The Go-blogger’s blog may be amateurish, but is well thought-out. The Go-blogger is handling inadequacies and deficiencies appropriately.

Go-bloggers are not earning a living from blogging, even though it may be their dream and motivation. The Go-blogger is a go-getter blogger who creates content and is steadily expanding readership. The Go-bloggers soon become B-listed bloggers.

4. Probloggers(Ploggers):
Professional Bloggers. Earn a living plus some extra perks from blogging. This could be either directly or indirectly. Pay-per-post, Adsense, Reviews, etc. This stages usually comes with age at being a go-blogger. You would have paid your dues. Many-a-times more than two to three years blogging well. A few go-bloggers get there, but it takes effort and dedication. Pro-bloggers have made a profession out of blogging. They do not keep jobs except the probloggers of the online newspapers.

5. Team-bloggers (Tloggers):
After turning professional, often times bloggers start blogging in teams. A few go-bloggers try it, but usually this is when they are close to boing professional. They are advanced bloggers. they cross-post and have part ownership of team blogs, online magazines and blog or media networks. They team up for more effective marketing., having already made names for themselves as A-listed Bloggers. They may have owned several blogs in the past which they may have sold off. Some hand over management to a team and post only occassionally in their previous blogs.

In the new team blogs which they belong to, they operate a profit sharing system and grow their pokets fatter. They market various products including consultancy, books and speaking through their team blog. Tloggers are the movers and shakers of the blogosphere. When they sneeze, the blogosphere shudders. Examples in 2008 include Gawker Media with its network of bloggers/blogs, B5media, Huffingtonpost and many others.

6. Cash-Bloggers(Cloggers):
This is an aside, not really a stage but cuts across all the levels. Anyone with a desire to make money from blogs/blogging is a clogger. Unfortunately even sploggers are cloggers too.

Which one do you consider yourself. Vote in the poll or just add a comment. We want to hear your voice. Tell others about these definitions in your various blogs so that we will have a common definition of these terms, afterall we are what we are!

• For the Best Blog Reviews go to Pro-BlogReviews
• Find out why It’s a woman’s world
• Get tips on healthy foods, eating and weight loss
• Find out about Home based business to help you realize your dream

Anyway, with some luck and a few hours, we are getting somewhere. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks, I will relocate and tell you how. I will give a step-by-step guide and I am sure many will eventually make that move. Believe it or not, if I can do it, you can.

Take a sneak-peak at a screenshot of my landing page. What do you think?

Click image to enlarge

• For the Best Blog Reviews go to Pro-BlogReviews.com
• Find out why It’s a woman’s world
• Get tips on healthy foods, eating and weight loss
• Find out about Home based businesses to help you along realize your dream

This month our competition continues. The April session went on very well and we have some winners. Our contests here are based on what one does in a competition not “random selection”. The rules are clear and everyone can be a winner, but you have to play by the competition rules here.

• For the Month of May,link to this post and place one comment below. Below are some of the things you get.
• The top entries for the preceding month will get reviewed as featured blog here as Blogs of Focus for the month free!
• A directory is published for the month with permanent links through the contestants’ keywords of choice submitted in the form below.
• The Blogs of Focus box above gets sent out with RSS feeds on every post and we do publish a lot every month.

The winners for May will be in the Directory for June.

As with many lists, we know that the first entries on the list get the most hits, so be wise. All it takes is a link to the post and you are on!

• MCNERI’S WEBLOG

Entrecard seems to be the new/future of social networking. Keep dropping on me and I will continue to drop on you. I really do not mind bounce rates in a non-self hosted blog yet. Conversions are all important so if you get 100 droppers a day and 5% convert to your blog, at the end of 100 days, theoretically you should have 500 converts! That is the way to look at entrecard. There is a wonderful blog dedicated to entrecard and it has great posts that will help beginners and older users as well.

Many droppers just drop and go, well, you are welcome. I do that too sometimes. However some blogs are welcoming and interesting. They have what I am looking for or what I did not know I needed and that gets me reading and leaving comments. Believe it or not that comment brings me visitors. Dropping brings me visitors. Blogging brings me visitors.

Getting your visitors to come back is all-important. How to do that with entrecard is relatively simple. If you look hard and long enough, you will find blogs/bloggers that interest you. Warm up to them, make useful comments on their blogs, reciprocate their drops, put them in your favorites list. That suddenly becomes social networking. Soon you have a community no matter how small and it will grow into what you dream of some day. Consistency is the word.

Do not lose focus and do not be in a hurry. If you realize that with 5 subscribers to your blog daily in one year you will have up to 1825 regular readers of your blog (from Entrecard alone). then if you use Blogcatalog or Digg or Stumble also, the number further increases. Soon adverts on your blog will be going for double and triple figures.

The good thing about entrecard-grown blogs is that majority of the readers are entrecarders so you will continue to get drops. The hard work is at the begining. I think the first 100 days. If you make 300 per day drops in those early days, certainly you will have loads of converts. However, you must have great fresh and useful content if you want me to be back to your blog. Pro-blog reviews also has a few lovely entrecard and blogging posts.

Drop and go, but please bookmark me, subscribe to my RSS feed and drop a comment. I will reciprocate.

There are several styles of blogging and I will discuss a few today.

1. Blogging on the fly!
This I believe is about the oldest style. It originated from the good old early days when pioneer bloggers simply created web logs of their lives. Most were of their daily activities and programming breakthroughs. The blogger then did not think anyone was indeed really reading the blog. As we expect only us to read our diary, so was the expectation. This has been carried forward and in today’s blogosphere, we see rants and raves. This is more common in the personal blogs. A few bloggers from time to time do this also and I have done it in many of my posts. It helps one put a personal touch to the blog, even though it may be a niche that one is blogging in.

2. Blogging as the Press.
As blogging has developed, so has readership widened and many blogs boast of readerships that eclipse my neighborhood newspaper’s numbers. Major examples include Google’s blogs for its gmail, and google itself and online resources like Lifehacker, Techcrunch (802K RSS subscribers. I hope they have a 401K), The Huffington Post and Mashable. These blogs/websites have editorial teams and the output is really something else. The corporate blogs seem to be a somewhat unofficial source of official information. Press releases serve their role, but also, releasing the information in a sub-formal way via blogs seems to be the way to reach more customers. The challenge faced by the everyday blogger is to measure up to such standards. Well, I wish you luck.

3. Blogging to the top in your niche.
This by far is both the easiest and the most popular. The blogger simply tries to be the best in that little niche that he/she blogs in. Usually the style is a mash-up of the first two styles. Guest bloggers post interesting articles, professionally written and edited a thousand times. Blog owner recruits readers from as many social circles as possible including link exchanges, Digg, Stumbleupon, Blogcatalog and Mcneri’s! The Blogger also occasionally produces timeless articles that would measure up to the big fish and have a chance at front page on Digg. It is easy to be in this category because you simply are just trying to get ahead and non-committal to any particular style. You are a Maverick Blogger. Soon you become A-listed and as your readership grows, you have to choose a conventional style, otherwise you will fall back to oblivion where you came from.

I will advice that bloggers keep an eye on thier style and know when to start conforming to a particular style. Know when you need more professional copywriters, when you need to go on that writing course, and when you need to re-define your niche or start another blog.

What is your blogging style, How do you blog?

In my experience, the two most common scenarios are absent entrecard widgets or splogs posing as blogs. Entrecard advocates reporting the blog/site/user. I have done that a few times. The add-on here however is such that it can and will warn you when you are about to visit a site tagged dangerous/untrustworthy/unsafe for privacy or whatever. It alerts you with a danger sign.

It saves the blogger time because you automatically know that the blog has no widget so you do not go there at all. It also protects others that may otherwise want to do business with the site as to the untrustworthy nature of the site.

On the other hand, this add-on can be used to rate a site that has impressed you and is trustworthy so that others can benefit positively. I would advocate you download the WOT: Web of Trust add-on right away and install it. then give my blog a good rating and continue to surf.

See you soon and do not forget to subscribe to my RSS for the latest entries here straght to your inbox or Reader.

MCNERI’S WEBLOG

If you have an answer, state it in the comments box. This blog is giving something really big away, but many readers do not know. If you tell your readers, they will be grateful and thank you. Imagine the opportunity to reach ALL those recieving my RSS feed.

You may be wondering what I am talking about. It is the unique blog contest. I have scoured the internet and I am yet to see anything like it. I will not repeat the contest components in this post, but I will wager any blogger to show me a better contest, or any contest for that matter that offers value better than this. Many blogs host contests that give things away to their associates, selected by unmeasurable parameters: “randomly selected”. Such a hoax in the name of competition and greed.

In my definition of competition, there is a clear criteria for winning, nothing random. The winners of this competition will benefit every month with the directory listing them and their keywords and the top contestants will have their links and keyword phrases in this cute box above. On every post. That way, the reader even sees them before they see me.

That brings me back to my question: What will you give me when I spread the word about you? If you have any compelling offer, you tell us, we are listening.

Hello splogging spammer, I do not know which planet you come from, but at least you live here. Stop spamming. I think the laws should be tightened and enforced much more. Spammers should be brought to book. They not only scrape the web for other people’s work, they also use it to make money for themselves through online adverting. I understand Google has done alot to curb them but they are still rampant. According to Mashable last month, Wordpress has up to 33% of its blogs, spam blogs. That is an obscene number.

For those new to the blogosphere, or old members learning new skills, make sure you do not spam. hard work pays off on the internet. If you play by the rules, you can not go wrong, or rather you would almost never go wrong.

Akismet, a wordpress anti-spam plugin has done a great deal to stop spam comments before they get published. Also Lorelle VanFossen, recently in a post on BlogHerald discussed how Google, Technorati and herself were responding to the spamming sploggers. Newer anti-spam software will be robots. they will spider the splogs, and destroy the contents down to the root directory. Then they will send the information into a database including the IP addresses, sign-on information, host account on server and location. If possible, the perpertrators should also be identified. Just dreaming? Well if was a programmer that would be my next project. Since I am not, I hope some of you out there will take up the challenge and get this problem out of the way.

Once again, if you want your blog to be a top-rated blog in your lifetime, do not spam and do not splog.

#6: Session Manager add-on for Firefox

This add-on rescues you when you need to be rescued. Of course we have all at one time or the other suffered a browser or worse still a computer freeze. When that happens we are likely to lose those important blogs that we had open on several tabs, or those web images that took you two hours to accumulate. Session Manager saves and later restores your tabs either when you want it, or at start-up following a crash.Session manager also helps you restore a window which you have accidentally closed. It may be three windows ago or just the last window you closed. For any blogger out there that uses several tabs at the same time, one could get mixed up and close the wrong one. Also many times I have had to stop blogging in the middle because it is too late, or something has come up. This tool helps me get back to where I was. Download it from here. One important thing which I forgot to mention earlier in this series is that Safari works pretty much with many Firefox add-ons. Thus owning a Mac should not discourage you, besides Firefox works on Macs too. There are many inherent advantages of Firefox which I have outlined elsewhere.

You can

I am compiling a list of Blogs/Websites and their link phrase keywords to be displayed on this site at the beginning of every month. It is important to get links and these links become more useful if they link to you through your link phrase of choice. That way, the search engines see that you are linked to for those words and your journey up begins. In addition to being on the list, the top entries will also get featured as one of our Blogs of Focus for ne full month. In subsequent months, you may submit additional keywords/link phrases which will also be added to the list for that new month and published provided you fulfil all the basic requirements outlined below.

To qualify to be listed, all you have to do is;

Basic Points
1.Comment on two posts on this blog. One of them must be this post.
2.Use the same email address to fill in the form below
3.Subscribe to my RSS feed by confirmed by email
The above gets you 25 points. These you may redeem as Entrecard credits without appearing on the list.

Bonus Points
4. As a bonus, if you mention the competition and link to it in your blog, your trackback link will appear below and you will gain an additional 10 points for every link to it. (SPAM,SPLOGS and obscene or illegal sites are not accepted)
5. If you link to any other post on this blog, you get 10 points apiece.

Goodies
The top entries for the preceding month will get reviewed as featured blog here as Blogs of Focus for the month free!

As with many lists, we know that the first entries on the list get the most hits, so be wise. All it takes is a link to the post and you are on!

The tool is a browser embedded translator. It makes translating web pages very effortless, as the tool is part of your browser. It kicks into action the moment you navigate to apage that is not in your default language.

Concisefreeware, the authors say Foxlingo supports 45 languages and over 1000 different language pairs. It has features like translated search, auto-translation and text translation. It uses 35 free online translators. see list below as obtained from their website:

Worldlingo.com, Google.com, Abacho.co.uk, Altavista.com,Bestiland.thread.ne.jp, Wani.bbsnavi.net, Eigo-navi.com, Elmundo.es, Excite.co.jp, Freetranslation.com, Gencat.cat, Gts-translation.com, Ibm.com, Imtranslator.com, Internostrum.com, Interpret.co.za, Linguamatix.com, Lingro.com/, Lingvo.org, Nazgol.co.il, Nifty.amikai.com Ocn.ne.jp, Oesi.cervantes.es, Online-Translator.com, Opentrad.org, Sli.uvigo.es, Toggletext.com, Tr.voila.fr, Translatica.pwn.pl,Translendium.es, Yahoo.com, Xixona.dlsi.ua.es, 220.194.61.120

This tool is a definite must-have and it removes one of the the well-known barriers to communication, language. Any blogger using this add-on will have access to blogs and web material written in many different languages and that is a good thing. The only limitation to getting these blogs is the search engines that try to predict what you want and end up giving you websites written ONLY in your language! (Google take note).

One way around it is to go to a non-english version of the search engine like google France and search for your terms. Any results will come with the translate this page clip of google and even if you go direct to the site, Foxlingo immediately comes to the rescue.

The first one is MattNutts.com. This is an amazingly creative blog by a guy called Matt. he is unassuming, intelligent and goes for the kill. he has created several widgets that make the life of a blogger simple. The icing on the cake is that he is an author. In this book which he has on his blog, he gives you a complete guideline on how to use and help on BlogCatalog, a social networking microblogging platform. That is where I met Matt. I know he will be in the A-list soon enough because he is being of enormous help to bloggers, new and old.

The second blog that has impressed me recently is : Health Nut Wanna Be’s Blog. This is a married stay-at-home mum-blogger who has been changing the lives of her readers with wonderful resources for healthy eating and living. She writes engagingly and has intrigued me with her blogs even though she claims no medical knowledge. One visit to her blog will get you addicted. She preaches eating healthy and when you look at her portrait on her profile page, you will understand why. that blog and blogger are definitely blogs of progress. Let us watch that space. See her recent post here.

The third Blog I would want to talk about is milliondollablogs.com. The blog master got my attention….somehow. Visit his two sites, Potpolitics dot com and milliondollarblogs and see how. Anyway he is a great guy living in San Antonio at the moment. I think his style is trendy yet aggressive and he will get through the roof very soon. Watch him and his friends, I for one.

1. Start your blog development by reading other blogs
This is a no-brainer. You simply have to look around the blogosphere for ideas to boost what you have passion to blog about. This will help you develop your ideas into wonderful blog posts. As you visit other blogs, you will come across some “dope-headed” blogs that are almost unconcious, while you will see others that are very vibrant, have a lot to say and are on the go. The artful blogger must clone ideas from the best blogs they visit and add to it to produce new original content for their own blog.

The interesting thing about this aspect of blogging is that some of these blogmaster will be willing to help you with ideas to improve your blog. The blogosphere thrives on goodwill and to get it you have to be humble and pro-active.

Image via Wikipedia

Just like the name says, Permatabs keeps some tabs of your choice permanent. That way, you can have web pages that you visit often stay permanently in your browser in-between sessions. This comes in very handy for the blogger. The reason is that any and every blogger knows that one sure destination on the web is your blog.

We may read our emails in a desktop-based email application, but we really want to sight that our creation. More importantly, if you have multiple blogs, or some “high-yield” blogs that always give you ideas to blog about, then the permatabs makes it easy for you to always get to that destination.

Permatabs makes it impossible to accidentally close a tab. As Universe Firefox put it, it locks the essential tabs in. The other examples are like your RSS, or calendar. This add-on makes it impossible to accidentally close a tab.

With a little tweaking….which I will talk about elsewhere, you can even use one of your tabs as your windows explorer. Thus all your computer operations will that go on inside your Firefox. Do you want me to tell you the tweak? Ask for it, c’mon. feel free to leave your comments you like here.

When you fire up the add on, it splits the screen into two, thus you can flip from tab to tab in your browser, while the blog piece you are writing still sits in front of you. That comes in handy especially when you need to refine a post, or look for references for your blog post. Some professional bloggers are silent on these wonderful add-ons that we are discussing in the series when they talk about their techniques, but I am sure they use to spin out wonderful posts.

The beauty of Scribefire is that it is adapted to upload your completed blog post to your blog once you input your sign-on details. It also keeps a copy in the tool if you like.It has an FTP transfer tool which comes in handy for pictures and larger files. It also seems to integrate well with Technorati for tags and similar content.

Whizzhack.com recently produced a demo video that further elucidates the uses of this great tool. The authors of Scribefire are not resting and are regularly updating the application. Now the latest version has a button to add videos from Youtube. You can download it here. Be sure to read the notes prior to installation.

When Google launched it’s Streetview module, many of us, Google fans, were excited. Now we can preview that street and that bulding we will be visiting next week from our desktops. This is a wonderful addition, however, there is still much to ask for from Google Maps Project. The down side to this Google tool is that it only shows you the street at a safe distance from the properties. It does not give any pictures of places situated away from the street. That is fair enough since Google is the first to introduce such a tool and they are still busy expanding it with the latest being YouTube videos.

The MSN’s Live Search Maps does not have such a streetview, but they have the downloadable component, called Virtual Earth. It is just like Google Maps. Both applications are very good in terms of showing the user very beautiful maps and areal views. However, I will want you to carry out a simple experiment with the two tools. I did this and I will be silent on my findings until I have heard from you.

What I would like you to do is to search for a specific address including zip code in both Google Maps and Live Search Maps. For Google maps, select satellite view, so that it gives you a view from above. For Livesearch select bird’s eye 2D. View both maps in two seperate tabs and tell us here, which gives a clearer picture. I have not included the screenshots here for copyright reasons.

This type of utility will be very important in situations when you need to know about a factory around a property you are considering purchasing, or proximity of a location to major apartment complexes or large buildings. Thus the clearer the picture, the better for the user.

We will like to hear your findings, reader. Thanks you for dropping by.

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Image via Wikipedia

This is an awesome Firefox add-on that beats me. I only recently started using it and all I can say is that it is great. According to the Zemanta homepage, the tool lets you

“Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. We are making blogging fun again.”

It is an impressive tool, as it eases off the having to flip between tabs to get content to make your blog relevant in the blogosphere. Zemanta goes and fetches the most relevant content from blogs around the web. More importantly, it fetches content that is recent and from higly ranked pages. That way, when you reference these posts, you are more likely to get references from the trackbacks. That is how to become a powerblogger, becoming more relevant in the blogosphere over time, as your blogging gets more references.

Wordpress 2.5 was recently released and that brought up a challenge for the Zemanta team, however within a few short days, the team came up with a fix. At the moment, the tool is compatible and works with all versions of Wordpress including the recently released 2.5 version. It also works with Blogger and Typepad.

In one of the earlier reviews was from Techcrunch’s Mike Butcher entitled ‘A content suggestion engine for blogging ?That could work…’. Other earlier reviews include this more extensive one on wordplayblog.com
This suggestion tool that also fetches images is really a blogger’s dream. It is still an alpha release and the founders are a start-up, however the tool is likely to get popular real soon. The strongest potential I see is that of being referenced by subsequent blogs on the topic since you would be one of the most recent bloggers about that topic using Zemanta!

If you were to use Zemanta to blog this moment about say…..Zemanta, the tool will fetch relevant keywords, tags, blogs and images for you. Most of the images come from Wikipedia. Below your rich text editor, it keeps suggesting links and keywords which you may decide to take some , all or none. Beside the ed