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.

Popularity: 16%

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… so why can’t we do?

While porting Firefox settings and bookmarks over to replacement laptop I realized that I am using a whole bunch of quite useful plug-ins. So here’s short run-down, in case someone missed any of these very useful things.

• FEBE - simply must-have. Transfers all your extensions, themes, bookmarks, settings and God knows what else. Unavoidable if you don’t want to spend couple of hours figuring how to do this on your own.
• AdBlock Plus - blocks everything and their cousins - all known advertising (banners, text ads, even Google ads). Another must-have extension. Personally, I was VERY surprised to see how messy, overstuffed with ads and unreadable some pages appear in IE/Opera/Safari. Ads are being blocked by the list to which you subscribe when you install the plug-in, so you may not even know something was blocked unless you see the page in different browser.
• AI Roboform Toolbar - actually, I don’t have the toolbar running, but I use “Fill Form” feature almost all the time. The software itself quite useful, especially with so many passwords to remember.
• ColorZilla - useful, especially during conversations with clients, when the phrase “I like the color I’ve seen on such-and-such web site” gets tossed around. You can actually go and pick that color (unless it’s a part of Flash movie).
• Download StatuBar - saves you the annoyance of watching that Download Window. Personally, I believe this is the plug-in that deserves to be included in the next release of Firefox. Version 2.0.0.7 would be just perfect for it.
• IE Tab - for lazy people who don’t like to fire up Internet Explorer to see how it looks. As far as I know it uses Internet Explorer’s engine, so the only two real benefits of this extension is that a) you get to see pages rendered in IE when you miss that “Open in New Tab” in right-click menu (I do sometimes) and b) you can get rid of IE icon on your desktop/quick launch panel.
• lori - Life of Request Info. Shows times from click to first received byte (can be treated as a server response time), from click to complete page display, loaded page size and number of requests. Very useful web developer tool, we at Zealus use it quite often to see how responsive client’s web site is.
• MeasureIt - allows you to draw and measure any rectangular area on the screen. Useful when you need to fit content (usually it’s Flash movie) in a already defined environment.
• NoScript - kills all the scripts (JavaScript, Java and so on) on a page if you want to. Very useful when some script-anxious webmaster puts that no-right-click JavaScript on the page you just happen to visit.
• S3 Firefox Organizer - if you are using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service you may find this one quite useful, although it does have a very big drawback - if you have a transfer in progress in inactive tab and are trying to close the Firefox it will not warn you.
• Save As Image - saves the area on the page as image. Very useful when we need to show a client certain area of the web site he may want to pay more attention to.
• SearchStatus - displays Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank and a bunch of very useful SEO data, like keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other.

Obviously there are many more useful plug-in, we had (at some point) had them installed and tested but turns out that these above are the ones that get really used around.

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While preparing a replacement laptop I do install a lot of (somewhat) useful software. Most of it is freeware like Skype, which I am going to talk about.

As always I went to Skype’s web site and downloaded the latest version of program. If you still on that arctic expedition and haven’t noticed - Skype has bundled a Firefox plug-in with it’s software. And it’s mandatory. That’s right - you are notified about the plug-in installation only AFTER the install is complete. Pretty neat, eh?

Next surprise - if you launch Firefox after installing Skype, instead of your regular home screen (in my case - the ever-tempting about:blank page) you will see an uninvited Skype page devoted to Firefox plug-in (located here: http://www.skype.com/help/guides/ff_extension/) that still has (as of August 26, 2007) the following passage:

Calling phones within the US and Canada is free until the end of 2006. You need to buy Skype Credit to make international calls.

Gee, do you think we still got time for free calls? Or another version: Earth to Skype - it’s already 2007 halfway gone, damn it.

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