Profy is probably the first technology related blog I ever read. Since initially launched in September, 2006 Profy has built a loyal readership among startup owners, engineers, bloggers, investors, and general tech-savvy audience.
In the last few months Profy has been having problems keeping its authors, but since then Svetlana Gladkova has taken over the editorial status and the blog seems to be rising again. About three months ago Profy had a redesign and Im really liking the new look, except for the logo change!
Profy release about 3 or so articles per day and these articles are rich in analysis and also hot off the press when related to technology news. I would like to see them get some more authors on board and also incorporate the old green style back into the site. Additionally, they are not promoting the blogging platform they launched about six months ago. However, that all being said, Profy is one of the leading technology blogs on the internet, and it is a must subscribe!
Like any good addiction, the first step is always admitting you have the addiction. For many of us, Twitter is that addiction. We find ourselves Twittering from work, twittering from parties, from events, from weddings, from bar mitzvahs, from the car, from our mobiles, you name it, we addicts are Twittering from it. On the other hand, there are still a few that remain of the mindset that Twitter is a time waster and provides no value.
Well for the addict like you and me, we are introduced to Tweetrush. A very systematic web app that provides you with your Twitter usage metrics. Now, after typing in your handle in the search bar, you can receive a breakdown of your usage and find out just how addicted you are.
Tweetrush was built on the analytics engine called Rush Hour, which basically looks at actions taken by a user, such as typing and sending a message via Twitter. Tracking can be done via the website and also through the various API’s that exist for the web application.
Information can be tracked for the last 7 days of usage:
The tracking can even break down by the hour of usage:
No matter how you slice, it, Tweetrush is an excellent tool for measuring your addiction, providing useful information on usage, but ultimately also reveal just how much of your life Twitter has taken over. Give it a try and learn to live with the addiction, Twitter is not going anywhere soon!
WebHostingRating.com is a new host rating site where they are trying to build the biggest searchable web hosting directory featuring complete information on all web hosting providers, all their web hosting plans, promotional and discount coupons, and unedited reviews by real customers.
From what I can tell this service is built on a Wordpress platform which incorporates a review feature, allowing users to find the right provider and package to suite their needs.
Webhostingrating.com also have other sections on the site, such as a directory, web hosting awards and web hosting tutorials. The articles section is basically their blog in which they discuss everything web hosting. The site itself is brilliantly design and I can see this type of directory really taking off.
Since the site is relatively new, they have only review 4 key web hosting companies at present, but make sure you keep and eye out for more coming in the future. The hosting companies they have reviewed are all Unix hosting, but they have other categories that I’m sure will develop over time, such as Windows hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, collection hosting and managed hosting.
While offering some good reviews on trusted hosting companies, they are also writing their own corporate blog, which discusses everything from the world of web hosting. Currently, they seem to have approximately 100 articles in a variety of categories. These categories range from domain hosting to ecommerce to scripting. All the articles seem to be of good length and are very helpful. It would also have been nice to see them add a few pictures in the posts to mix up just the plain text. Normally, a site with the quality of articles they have would grow in the blogosphere, but add in the reviews section and you have a great site in the makings.
Anyways, make sure you head over to Webhostingrating.com and I’m sure they can help you find the right hosting package to meet your needs.
Wordpress has to be one of the most popular if not the most popular blogging software in the world today. Due to its popularity there are thousands of developers all over the world who are building plugins to add to the platform. Thus, I thought I would put together a short list of my favourite plugins, so here is my top 20.
Akismet
The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.
All in one SEO pack
(Inactive)This is an great plugin that will help you manage the meta tags for articles enabling them with unique meta and titles.I use an even better plugin now (Headspace2), which is AllinSEO x 10 times. So this one is inactive. You may want to use it if you are looking for a hassle free and easy meta tag management.
Feed copyrighter plugin
This one is reposible for throwing up those copyright statement at the end of the feeds in RSS readers. It is one way of fighting the scrappers, not sure how effective it is, but it is indeed one weapon we hve right now.Bad thing – The credit link will appear on all RSS footers.
Better comments manager
This is one of the best plugins I’ve always cherished using. It enables easy management of comments, lets you reply to them easily, mass edit/approve them. And yes, this is from Keith and team. His plugins have exceptional quality after all.
Comment Luv
This plugin is responsible for placing the link to your latest posts on comments. Nice plugin, it crawls your site (from the info you submit while commenting), and get’s the latest URL, parse it as HTML beneath your name.Bad thing – To tweak the text that appears with it, there are no options menu, and you have to edit the code. Not too many are comfortable doing it.
Duplicate sidebar widgets
This plugin helps you to duplicate the widgets modules to drag and drop on the sidebar. Ex: If you want two instances of the random posts widget, this one replicates it.
Enhanced Contact form
This plugin is responsible for all those contact forms appearing in the pages.
Feed footer
Adds anything in HTML to feeds appearing in RSS reader. 10 spots available, suitable for advertising and throwing up messages.
Google AdWrap You know about Googles section targeting right?This plugin adds the “sections” to be targeted to comments and content area thereby the ads that appear on Google AdSense will be heavily contextual to the information in these sections.Bad thing – You can’t manually add te google_ad_section code to any other place on the blog.
Google XML sitemaps
Must have for all blogs. Generates an XML sitemap making the contents visible for search spiders.Bad thing – If you enable the robots.txt rewriting, everything you set manually on robots.txt is rewritten.
HeadSpace2
The best meta tag management plugin I’ve seen in the recent times. No words to describe – killer plugin!Bad thing – Initially, difficult to understand how it functions and yo use.
Homepage Excerpts
Adds a “more” link cutting posts on the main homepage within certain limit of characters. Good for curbing duplicate content on wordpress.
I love social bookmarking
(Inactive)Great plugin that displays a pull down menu for social bookmarking on all the top social media websites.Bad thing – Serious alignment issues.
KB Linker Great plugin to increase the number of links within your site. It enables you to select a keyword for which you can set a link. Where ever this keyword appears, it would make it a link.Bad thing – It injects the link code even to links and in between html codes ! And you get html errors sometimes.
Random posts widget Throws up a set of random posts on the sidebar. Good options available.
Search Meter
Gives me access from the dashboard to search phrases on DailySEOblog search box. And also shows if the person who searched the phrase got the info he wanted or not. Good plugin to get an idea of topics to blog.
SEO for Wordpress
A little outdated plugin, it says is reduces instances of duplicate content. But it doesn’t show us how and where. Otherwise a good concept.
Shylock AdSense
The killer plugin that allows you to inject adsense codes anywhere on the post, and decide which ads to go where.
Ultimate Google Analytics
Great plugin that will manage Google Analytics code injection and tracking a breeze. You could very well do it manually, but this one is a laymans friend.
WP- Stats
Displays the wordpress blog stats from the dashboard. A better stats if you wat uptodate results. Analytics is a day and some hours late.
Wordpress is now one of the most popular blogging platforms in the market today and it is rising very day that passes. Today, I thought I would just run through some of the worlds best 2 column Wordpress themes. All of these themes are currently free to download and you can click on the preview link to see how they look. These themes can be a great start for any new blogger using Wordpress, instead of using just the basic theme in the Wordpress platform.
There are a lot of blogs out there done by women on a variety of topics. Men, don’t skip over this post, look at this as an opportunity to get a glimpse into the minds of our counterparts. Perhaps you’ll learn something!
I for one highly respect these women, and while I don’t always agree with some ideas shared, I do commend them for taking to the web and building a community to network with.
5. Broadsheet – This witty and well written blog on the Salon.com network covers women interests in lifestyle, politics, news, health, and celebrity gossip. The writing is very intelligent and I’m very impressed with the comments left in some of the posts. Of the more recent posts I highly recommend the hilarious post “1,250,444 ways to please your man.” Sorry guys, threesomes and foursomes are just not the order for the day.
4. Jezebel – I really love this blogs layout, and the articles range from fashion, to self help, to feature articles on people, places, and groups. This is another blog that has an amazing following and most importantly this blog holds no punches. You doubt me? Guys, think girls are all pristine and polite, well guess again, women are human, and the post “How Do You Break The Poop Ice With A New Paramour?” is a great article. Sure you can snicker and laugh at the topic, but she’s talking about a real problem, and not holding back. Definitely give this blog a try!
3. Our Bodies Ourselves – On a more serious note, this blog has information for women regarding motherhood, health, child care, and other body related issues affecting women. This site is a bevy of information and I recommended it to my wife. Men, I definitely recommend you read this site because these are issues that women, in general, feel very strongly about. Educating yourself on these issue would do you some good. I’d recommend an article, but through the the archives, this site just needs to be added to your RSS Feeds, everything is worthwhile.
2. Feministe – I’ve been reading this site for about three weeks now. I have to say hands down that this site makes me think more than some of the other blogs I’ve listed here. The posts are very tightly written, all topics are well formulated, and the comments are a great resource for discussion. This is one of those sites where I truly don’t agree with everything that is written, but I’d be lying if I said I was not intrigued. Great work, great writing, great posts. I highly recommend the post on John Edwards.
1. Feministing – Okay, this may not be the prettiest site out there, but damn if the information isn’t interesting. From the get go you are slapped in the face with the reality of how women are treated and/or thought of in not just our country but the world. This site tackles subjects on the treatment of women the world over. I find it highly encouraging that they are taking the time to also seek out women in specific industries and highlight them, specifically their women of science segment.
So now that you’ve had your fill, I hope to see women responding to these sites in the comments section. Do you have other sites you’d like to see highlighted or reviewed? I look forward to reading all of your comments!
I came across a really great post today over at PingPongPie that helped to explain what you need to achieve with certain social networks, and how much traffic you can expect from them. I have added the exact numbers below.
Name of Network: Digg Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 60 – 300+ on average Consequence of Negative Vote: Requires more Diggs to become popular. NOTE: One Bury does not cause your story to be removed! You can have a significant amount of “buries” and the story could still go popular. Expected Traffic: 10,000 to 100,000 UVs Type of Network: Social News
Name of Network: Stumble Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 – 40 typically, Reviews and Tags are also important Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points Expected Traffic: 2,000 – 50,000 UVs and the cycle can come again weeks to months later. Type of Network: Toolbar – random
Name of Network: Propeller Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 35+ on average Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points Expected Traffic: 1,000 – 20,000 UVs – Can go to 100,000 if the story goes to news.aol.com Type of Network: Social News
Name of Network: del.icio.us Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: More than 120 bookmarks (as fast as you can) Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 Vote Expected Traffic: Up to 20,000 Type of Network: Techy, Internet based info, guides
Name of Network: Mixx Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 – 60 Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 to overall points Expected Traffic: Less than 100 UVs Type of Network: Social News
Name of Network: Reddit Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 3 – 300+ Consequence of Negative Vote: -1 total points Expected Traffic: 3,000 – 30,000 UVs Type of Network: Social News
Name of Network: Yahoo! Buzz Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: N/A. Popular is Yahoo.com and that is manually selected. Consequence of Negative Vote: Unknown Expected Traffic: 1-3 million UVs Type of Network: Social News
Name of Network: Fark Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: Admin manually select for Popular Consequence of Negative Vote: unknown Expected Traffic: 5,000 to 15,000 UVs Type of Network: Humor
Name of Network: Ebaumsworld Number of Votes Needed to go Popular: 30 Expected Traffic: 500-20,000+ Type of Network: Weird, Wacky Stuff, Interesting and Funny Pictures work really well.
A friend with a local business came to me with a somewhat unique request. He wanted to setup a blog that only his employees and certain other people had access to for sharing information, ideas and other business concepts. I suggested Google Apps for this, but he said not everyone that would be using this would be as tech savvy to fully grasp how that works and he needed more than just a text editor and a spreadsheet.
I set off to search for a plugin that would allow me to accomplish the goal of restricting access to the entire blog, forcing a registration. After a few minutes I ended up on Viper007Bond’s site. I’ve used his plugins before, so I knew they’d be top quality. He wrote a custom plugin called Registered Users Only which, will redirect all users who aren’t logged in to the login form where they are shown a user-friendly message.
Perfect! Upload the .php to the /plugin directory on your server, activate it and tick one box in the Options screen, you are done. As admin to the blog, you create user accounts for those people you wish to give access to. Since it uses the standard WordPress login screen and user database, you can simply add them as a Subscriber and once logged in, can see the entire site.
Total installation time is less than two minutes!
While the idea of putting a blog online is usually done so that someone will read it, this certain situation started to make a lot more sense to me. WordPress offers so much more than just a blog, it’s turning into a CMS, and a tool to allow, in this case, his business to expand and grow internally. The more I thought about it the more I realized that a private blog has many other uses to it.
Parents who want to setup a blog for their children, either from day 1 in their life or as they enter the tween stage probably won’t to protect who sees photos of their kids and what activities they do.
This plugin restricts ALL pages of the site, that is the only option. This fits the goals of my friend and I think many other people. Be aware, this does not protect your RSS feeds. I would suggest deleting all RSS feeds from your WordPress install to fully protect your blog, if that is your goal.
9Rules has just opened their submission window. I have already submitted Crenk to 9Rules, so we can see if we actually get into the fold this time. 9Rules is basically a community of some of the worlds best blogs. It helps readers find information from credible sources and not just any smuck writing a blog. Their submission window is only 24hrs and done every quarter normally. If the 9Rules guys read this post, come on how can you not have Crenk in your network!
This is a simple loophole that is now out in the open. Thanks to JohnChow and Techcrunch for letting everyone know about it. Im not even going to try it out now, cause im sure it will be fixed within 24 hours by Feedburner.
There is famous and there is infamous, and StumbleUpon (SU) can make you both. In a recent event, Darren Rowse of Problogger got a first hand look at what SU did to make him infamous.
Darren has been a big supporter of SU, thus using it very heavily to rate sites across the net. In return for his dedicated support of others sites, a great number of his readership returns the support by stumbling his articles, creating a supportive community. Yesterday, he was notified that StumbleUpon had not just blocked, but banned him for abuse.
This misunderstanding hit the media networks in approximately an hour and a half the entire situation was resolved thanks to dedicated fans, but more importantly a customer friendly, transparent company willing to be open on the errors they make.
While many feel that SU was in the wrong, I find that measuring a business by how it admits and handles its errors is more important than assigning blame. SU did a fantastic and prompt job responding to Darren and Problogger was reestablished.
What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon, similar to Digg, allows you to vote for sites, increasing the popularity based on user support. Once a site has been stumbled, a chain reaction through the social network is viral, and many sites see an increase in traffic.
A toolbar installs into the browser header once downloaded. This allows them to “stumble” a site, a basic “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” If you “thumbs up” a site, you are allowed to provide a brief description of the site and your rating. If a site has already been stumbled then you’ve simply boosted the sites rating, which affects the frequency in the rotation of random sites that SU will display. StumbleUpon is heavily monitored for abuse to provide a level playing field for all sites involved.
I for one enjoy and fully support StumbleUpon, and encourage you to explore the application and while ranking sites is always enjoyable, clicking the “stumble” button can take you to sites you may never have found otherwise.
How many times have you been to an event, conference or convention and wanted to be able to cover all sides of the story? Often times these events will break up into different sessions and obviously you alone can’t be there to report on what’s happening. If you could, you’d be spending perhaps hours recording and then writing blog posts about what happened in session 1, then you probably missed a good part of session 2 because you weren’t paying attention while writing up something about the opening session and so on and so forth.
You could allow other people to help you report on what’s going on in these events. And that’s a novel idea, but if you went the conventional way and went through your blog, then you’d have dozens, if not close to hundreds of blog posts where the size of these entries could be summed up in one or two lines – and chances are they could too. That’s where live blogging comes in…and there are a couple of web applications that come to mind, perhaps more prominent is Scribble Live.
Scribble Live is basically a community of live bloggers that can keep track on what’s going on with different events. Take this month’s WWDC event in San Francisco. Scribble Live became Twitter blogging and in short bursts, multiple authors were able to post their observations and thoughts to the same area. While live blogging seems simple enough, Scribble Live has made it even more easier by allowing you to use either your Microsoft Live, OpenSocial, or Facebook ID as your login. So you don’t even have to worry about having yet another login that you’ll probably forget the username and password to in a few months when you’re not using the thing.
Okay, so it can get boring after a while to just continually typing short (or long) bursts of copy into this simple interface. You can actually do much more than that. It’s a mini-version of WordPress, I would say except you don’t have to install it onto your server. Everything is hosted on the Scribble Live servers and you can share images from your camera, computer, etc. and also video.
However, for large conferences that you might go to, whether it’s South by Southwest (SXSW), WWDC, Ad:Tech, LeWeb3, or any big name conference and you want to share with the world, try out Scribble Live and keep the world posted. It’s free use but the pain in the ass, but obviously understood, is that the developers embed Google Ads into your live blog so every few entries or so, you’ll see an ad that looks kind of out of place. You’ll see what I mean. Another issue that I’m worried about is allowing people to post to live blogs seemlessly via text or SMS messaging. I believe right now they only allow you to go through the web interface. I’m sure that it’s fine for those with the Apple iPhones but for folks like me with a Blackberry, I’m not able to access Scribble Live.
So get your “account” on Scribble Live now and start live blogging. Don’t worry, I don’t think you’ll be giving up your Twitter account anytime soon, but it’ll be good to have live blogging at any of your next big events. It’ll help keep people informed on what they’re missing. Be the first to catch up on the good stuff.
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