BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.
Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:
Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:
Here are some of amazing facts about it:
Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set
Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
Personal blogs are more than a bunch of words put together. A good personal blog reflects your identity, your personality and individualism and a factor of great importace here is the design. It is the first thing that the viewer notices, before making any presumptions about you or your personality. So a good design is necessary to leave a good and long lasting impression on the visitor.
To help you out with the design, we at Crenk have put together 17 new wordpress themes that we believe, will rock your personal blog. Read on.
So that ends the list. I hope you liked it, if that’s so, show me some love and Digg it
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
Zemanta has long been a favorite addition to my blogging processes. This interesting little addition to the browser builds in the ability include photos, links, and tags for all of your media inserts. By installing Zemanta, I have reduced the time it takes to track down information to include, and by setting up some personal settings I’m sure to find what I need when I need it.
The New
Zemanta has always offered what it thinks you will need in terms of photos and links, but today Zemanta is launching their public API which will now allow users to build a “user suggestion engine.”
Funding for the company has come from Union Square Ventures, Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group, along with its win at the fist SeedCamp, this announcement has come out of LeWeb in Paris, France. This announcement is sure to increase not only the number of users, but also the dependency that online writers will have on this dynamic tool.
The Future
Zemanta has now opened itself to a huge reception in the world of online content creators. By opening their API, they can approach content creators to leverage their unorganized with the system, and the users are able to access the content for various needs.
In an article by TechCrunch, they state that “usage of the API is free for up to 10.000 API calls per month, and for a subscription fee above that.” So not only has Zemanta found a way to integrate user input, but they also find a way to monetize their efforts for content creators to get organized.
Zemanta has a bright future ahead of it. I have just recently connected with one of the Founders for Zemanta on Twitter @andraz. He’s easily approachable and seems to be keen on connecting with users around the world.
During these turbulent times there has been a lot of change across the economic landscape. Companies from big to small, brick and mortar to online sites have all experienced the crunch. Many are comparing these times to the dotcom bust years ago, if history is cyclical this was a short rotation.
Recently BlogRush has decided to close it’s “doors” and fade away. In an announcement by John Reese, BlogRush was suffering from lack of clicks, and users who no longer wanted to be advertised to. While that may come as a no brainer to the typical user, BlogRush prided itself on being unobtrusive and focusing on the needs and wants of the users.
Was this truly what BlogRush stood for? The site definitely had its fair share of critics. For example, Seopedia sticks out in my mind after they were so amazingly rejected by the site. You can read their entire ordeal here. Basically it appear that BlogRush depended on random people to be the judges of whether a site fit the criteria or not. The advertisement that was sent out by owner John Reese seems to focus less on quality judges, and more on mass quantity.
Mashable has a more scathing post from late 2007 where they say BlogRush was a throwback to the Web 1.0 era. They explain the process of earning credits by using their widget on your site, and sharing traffic with other sites increasing exposure and ranking within the network. He compares the concept to that of a pyramid scheme.
Despite the critics, John Reese stands by his product and claims that he is a risk taker. He admits that as an entrepreneur he has had some ideas succeed and some fail, but his success stems from not being afraid to try. He goes on to say that BlogRush was offered a “small fortune” but that he reluctantly turned it down to keep the purity of the idea. Not sure if I necessarily agree with the decision, but regardless, the site is down for the count.
It’s advised that users remove the BlogRush widgets from their pages because they are no inactive. So while click rates dropped, and BlogRush has come to an end, John Reese promises that he will continue to strive with new online ideas, and look to continue his innovative streak.
Crenk has been rated as one of the UK’s premier sites for technology and media news. Ranking 23rd of all UK sites, and having a world wide prescence online, it takes people truly connected to the pulse of the industry to keep this site alive.
Currently the site is looking at expanding it’s current writing staff in order to diversify and establish more timely posts in this current boom in the media business. With social networks taking hold at a global level, mobile apps becoming the wave of the future on all major mobile platforms, start-ups making their mark at high level conferences like TechCrunch 50, it’s almost impossible to capture the scope of the industry what what we have.
So this is YOUR chance to come on board and help Crenk out. Not only do you join a team of experienced writers, but you also have the chance to have your articles seen by a large audience. Come share your analysis, your insight, and open up conversation with our readers and let’s take Crenk to another level!
For more information please email info@crenk.com and let us you’re interested.
Yesterday friend and fellow blogger Daniel Scocco posted the 16th part in a series about generating website traffic, Promoting your content on social networking sites. Outside of Twitter, Daniel admits he doesn’t do much in the form of utilizing social networking or media sites to drive traffic to his site, but I have. Leaving a comment in the article about my experience with MySpace specifically spawned a conversation of sorts in the comments of the article.
There is some validity to using MySpace as a way to generate traffic to your site, but as I explained in the comments of Daniel’s site, it’s very short lived, but a nice spike when it happens. The drawback however is time, it simply takes a lot of time to make blog posts on MySpace linking back to your own blog’s article, same goes for bulletins. Being the wonderful thing that is the Internet, I set out to find a way to have WordPress automate this for me, and that is what this review is about.
A very short and quick search on Google led me to the MySpace Crossposter v2.0a plugin for WordPress. It is almost totally what I was looking for. As described on their site,
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter is a WordPress plugin that publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. This allows you to publish as usual on your WordPress blog, but to also capture and retain your MySpace audience without any extra effort.
Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication.
Users of the plugin have the option of publishing a notification or a whole story to MySpace.
Perfect! The download is just like any other plugin, in a zip file. Extract it and FTP it into the \plugins directory of your web server. Login to the admin panel of WordPress, activate the plugin and then go to Settings > MySpace Crossposter to configure it. I will warn that this plugin is not nearly as simple or clean to install as most all other plugins are. Once you land on the configuration page you need to enter the Database settings from when you originally setup WordPress. The settings are located in your root directory on your web server in the config.php file, which I had to download because I honestly didn’t remember them.
Once that is taken care of, enter both the URL to your blog and your blog name, along with your MySpace login email and password. Lastly is the option to post Notification style, which is a link to your blog, the title of the article posted and a direct link to it, or Whole Blog Entry, where the entire blog post will be republished on your MySpace blog. Default setting is to Notification sytle, which is what I’d suggest leaving it as, it will help drive more traffic to your site and you won’t have to worry about formatting issues.
Click Submit and the settings are saved, you don’t have to do anything else besides write new content. I tested this out and it worked flawlessly, posting a new blog post on my MySpace page mearly seconds after it was published on my site.
The benefits of doing this are many, most importantly it exposes your articles to more people right away and it also helps create back links into your site. While I don’t foresee this as being a huge source of traffic, it is none the less a source. For those people who are active on MySpace and have a lot of friends, it couldn’t hurt at all and it takes no time to do, since it’s fully automated.
Hopefully they can automate the need during intial setup to have the database information already inserted as I think a few bloggers might be turned off by the thought of screwing up their MySQL table information. The whole process took only a few minutes to install and configure though, so I can’t complain.
Now if only I could find a WordPress plugin that would do the same with bulletin postings on MySpace, I’d be fully automated and could spend more time writing. This is a plugin I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for an easy way to cross post articles to the largest social networking site on the internet right now.
TechCrunch is a self proclaimed “obsessive” site for everything technology, especially start-ups. Michael Arrington, co-founder of TechCrunch, has a well established career in doing what he loves best and, in my opinion, being damn good at it. But don’t take my word for, they have just recently hit a huge milestone for any site, over 1 million subscribers follow them via RSS Feeds. In less than 39 months they have achieved this goal and by the looks of it, will continue this trend.
Arrington reports that like any other site, their numbers fluctuate. Weekends are slow, but mid-week is their best time period. Still, even with the fluctuations, fans stay for the news and are even offered various ways to stay in touch with what is happening in the world of technology; Twitter, RSS Feed, FriendFeed, are just as few examples of how TechCrunch stays in touch with their readers.
Recentlly TechCrunch held their TechCrunch50 event which has been covered on Crenk here and here. Because of Arrington’s love for start-ups, he offers some of the best in the world a stage for them to highlight their products, network with VC’s and other interested high profile people, and in turn gives a little back with the success he’s achieved.
I highly recommend businesses to take a look at TechCrunch because as investors, you could be a part of the next big thing in the tech world!
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
As we’ve announced earlier 
The 
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