BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

At various moments I tried to use different blogging tools. Most of the time I blog using WordPress admin interface. However, sometimes I feel like I need a special piece of software, that would help me work the words.

This post was written with the help of yet another (after Windows Live Writer, Writely and many others) blogging editor – BlogDesk. It successfully imported categories from existing blog (had troubles with encodings on my Russian blog though). It tests login and upload procedures on set up of the blog. It is, however, missing some features I’d like to see implemented. So what this boils down to is the Blogging Editors Wish List:

• Starting WordPress 2.3 tags are built-in feature. I want to see my list of tags in the editor.
• Unicode support.
• Custom fields support (I just created a hack for my blog and it works through custom fields)
• Posts Map. Now this is something coming from software projects or similar. I want to be able to form a map or a tree of posts. For example – I have a main post (About Widget One), then I have several posts that link to the main (How I Used Widget One, How I Didn’t Use Widget One, Why Did I Spend Money On Widget One and so on). Then I create couple of more posts that extent some of the previous posts. I want to see this as a tree or a map. This way I immediately realize if there is a possibility to expand some more on existing topics, maybe even discover some things long forgotten that could be resurfaced for various reasons.
• Ability to download all posts into the editor. With simple posts structure of a blog (especially with self-hosted, like WordPress) it must be a breeze. Having an offline backup is a huge thing, having an offline backup in your favorite blogging editor – humongous! This feature along will attract thousands of users.
• Word counter/analyzer. Something similar to WordStats plugin for WordPress. It counts words, sentences and calculates readability for your post based on Gunning-Fog, Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch indicies.
• It looks nice (perhaps even skinnable), loads FAST and doesn’t clog your resources if it sits in the background.

Sometimes I feel a real urge to write something like this myself. The only problem that I have is that I want this editor to be very inexpensive.

Looks like we’re a little late to the party, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have our chunk of fun. In addition to the blog we set up earlier for Don’t Date That Guy – not just one, but two more blogs emerging on our servers.

One will be in Russian (sorry, folks), and will deal with weight problems that Russian immigrants (especially of older age) are dealing with. Unfortunately, their life in former Soviet Union wasn’t as bright as our lives here and now. Science of dieting was not popular and not many people could afford to eat as healthy as we are now. So, we hope that by creating this web site we will provide valuable and necessary information for our own parents and relatives. Stay tuned, the launch is scheduled for February.

Second upcoming blog (hopefully) will launch approximately at the same time. It is targeted to a more younger crowd, people who are bored with existing places they go out to, but not sure where to go instead. Now, don’t confuse it with Zagat survey, it will look more like Events section from Village Voice then CitySearch listings. Plans are (so I heard) to include a lot of free or very inexpensive places. As it turns out not – not every 20-year old kid drives a Ferrari and makes a fortune on eBay.

Not sure if disclosing our future plans is a good idea, but it would be a nice experiment to see how things turn out. Zealus Web Design always tries to support our customers’ ideas and provide them with insights and knowledge of things they would otherwise have a hard time figuring out.

(This is a guest post from the DontDateGuy.com – an upcoming blog on dating advice. Zealus Web Design helped DDGuy with hosting and WordPress set up and, if they will not spend all earned money dating,  hopes to help get their web site more useful and pleasant.)

There is hardly anything older then human relationships. From the moment a Neanderthal man killed whatever animal he hunted down and first brought the corpse to the flock of women to impress them instead of just eating out alone – that was the dawn of dating. Little has changed since then, but what did change is the ability of us, men, to find ways of bringing our killed animal in front of as many women as possible. Corpses rot, so we had to go and hunt one more animal. Then one more again. When roaming from one woman to another with dead animal on our hands became too cumbersome – we invented photography and dating web sites. Now we can show off a picture of same animal to numerous women simultaneously, from the comfort of our chairs.

But being as manly as we are, we kept creating as many dating sites as we could possibly do, always thinking about “what if some of the women didn’t like this one”. What it boiled down to is that now we have drag ourselves to almost all the dating sites out there, just like we did in Neanderthal era, but with added comfort of our chairs and photography. So we decided to get up, stretch a little and take the woman who’s picture we like to the dinner out there. Little did we know about the wild wild world of dating that was awaiting outside. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve been sloppy. We’ve been ignorant. In responce women never told us what went wrong, it was always “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.

Our goal at DontDateGuy.com is to shed some light on what is going on behind the scene. What is she thinking about you? What are you doing wrong? How to capture the attention of the lady you are interested in. And, ultimately, how to create and maintain a respectful and romantic relationship. We are no cure for every problem out there, but we hope that we can help you avoid certain mistakes and pitfalls. We want to give you that little extra edge, a competitive advantage, if you will, to get what you want.

Subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed or navigate to web site itself and don’t forget to answer the tag line question: would there be dates if everyone wasn’t dating material?