Get High Quality Stock Photos for free from FreerangeStock.com

Sorry I moved this post to my new blog. You can find it here.

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

I'm not a big fan of composing blogger posts in the HTML editor. The editor works fine , but I just don't particularly care for it.

Previously, Blogger had a plug-in for Word that worked pretty well, although the HTML looked horrible. When the current version of Blogger went into Beta the plug-in stopped working, and there were no plans to update it.

I heard that Microsoft was going to include Blog support in the new word, which I was really happy about, but at the time, it didn't work either. I can't blame MS on that one, because Docs and Spreadsheets stopped working too. There was a workaround that worked for about 3 days. I wrote about it in "When Getting New Features Means that Old Features don't work anymore".

Enter Windows Live Writer Beta, a pretty handy blog post editor. To be perfectly honest, I don't remember why I stopped using it, as I remember the HTML that it creates is pretty clean. My dirty little secret is that I have been using OneNote 2007's "Blog This" feature. Which although handy, doesn't play perfectly well with Blogger.

A couple of features that have been added to the new version is the ability to save drafts to your blog, as well as blogger tag support. There are also a number of plug-ins available.

When I published this post, the HTML was really clean, and the formatting was correct. With OneNote 2007 or Word 2007 there would always be strange line spacing, as well as extra lines breaks in the post.

Links and References:

- Writer Zone (Windows Liver Writer Blog) - Microsoft

- Windows Live Writer (Official Site) - Microsoft

- whateverblog - Joe Cheng, part of the Microsoft Live Writer Team.

- Live Writer Plug-ins - Microsoft

Technorati likes me again!

In the post I did last night, "633 days of Technorati Ignoring me", I mentioned that I had posted to the Technorati forum about my problem. Well, when I checked this morning, they had started to crawl my blog again.

I had an email from a Technorati Support person, Jose, apologizing for the problems, and someone even commented on my blog to let me know it was fixed.

The final count was 634 days, and to be fair to Technorati, I had only put in a trouble ticket about a week ago. I'm glad that they are indexing me again.

Also, my blog's rank in their index went from 2,831,421 to 1,282,695, whatever that means. I'm curious to see if I start getting traffic from Technorati.

Related Posts:
- 633 days of Technorati Ignoring Me
- Tecnorati is Officially off my Christmas Card List

633 days of Technorati Ignoring me

In February I posted about how Technorati was off my Christmas list, and as of today they say that I have not updated my blog in 633 days.

I'm kind of curious how long it will continue.

I have deleted my claim, then re-claimed my blog, and a week ago today entered a support ticket, but all to no avail.

Now, what I was going to do is compile a list of all the people in the forum who have that they are having the same problem, but everyone I looked at is now being updated. Hmmm....

Let me post there, and see what happens. Here is the Forum Post.

How to use Google Analytics Video Series

If you have a web site or blog, Google Analytics is a pretty powerful tool for web site statistics. It provides you with a good deal of information for the low low price of free. You just place a little piece of code on your pages, and then sit back and watch the statistics come in.

The eMoms at home site pointed me to a set of really great videos posted by Ian Laurie on how to use Google Analytics.

Part 1 - Signing up for an account and placing the code on your site.
Part 2 - Essential Stats
Part 3 - Digging Deeper
Part 4 - Goals

Definitely something you want to check out if you use, or are thinking of using Google Analytics

- Ian Lurie Posts Google Analytics Video Tutorials - eMoms at home

How to find your Google PageRank

In a comment on my Technorati Post, the helpful rip referred to some of her sites as being a PR4, PR6, or PR7. I didn't think to ask, but after I replied I was wondering what that meant.

In short, PR is PageRank, and the number following it is the actual PageRank. If you would like to find out the page rank of your site, then you are reading the right post. I ran across this PageRank Lookup tool on the site SEO Tools which allows you to find out.

In case you weren't sure, the higher your page rank is, the better off you are. Also, in case you were wondering, SEO is "Search Engine Optimization"(I had to look that one up a couple of weeks ago).

Unfortunately for me, it isn't like Golf, if it were I would have people asking me what I did to get such a great page rank.

Just to see if my PageRank from this tool was a verifiable result, not some random number pulled out of the air, I went ahead and checked it with PageRank Checker at Top25Web and the results were the same. Not entirely scientific, but good enough for me. Thanks to an anonymous commenter on this post, I also tried the "Verify Google Page Rank" site, and it confirmed the number.

Now SEO Tools has a great deal of stuff packed onto their page, lots of links topics and some ads, but Top25Web looks like they fell out of the AdSense tree and hit every branch on the way down. The tool still works though.

I'm not terribly worried about my PageRank, at least not yet. I'm still working on just getting some content on the site, and maybe even start posting on a regular basis. Once I have that straightened out, then I'll start to put some time into PageRank, Keywords, and all that jazz.

Now, if you found this post because of the SEO and PageRank keywords, I don't want to leave you disappointed.

My Opinion
I think that the most read blogs in the blog-o-verse, or intra-blog-o-sphere-orama-2.0 are the ones about how to make money with your blogs. Of course, like any blogger with dreams of making a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash through blogging, I have read my fair share of "blogging for money" blogs, and "make your blog popular blogs". To sum it up, there are a lot of "blogging about blogging" blogs out there. So let me point you to a couple of blogs that I think are very worth reading, and that I bet you will find helpful in this area:

Some Recomendations
- The eMoms at Home Blog - Don't let the "Mom" in the title throw you off (if you happen to be a guy), this is an outstanding blog, with tons of great tips. She even has a free blog traffic e-course. When I first found this blog, I just went crazy following links, and I think that I gave her a ton of pageloads those days. The e-course also has some really great tips. Nothing underhanded about her tactics. Thanks Wendy!

- Pro Blogger - Everyone links to this site. Go visit it and you will see why. This is another blog that becomes a click fest once you get there. On top of all the great tips and content, the guy is bald too. Fellow follicle challenged bloggers unite!

References:
- PageRank Lookup - SEO Tools
- 10 Related page Rank Tools & 136 SEO tools - SEOCompany
- PageRank Checker - Top25Web
- Verify Google Page Rank
- eMoms at Home
- 10 Days to a Better Blog - eCourse from eMoms at home.
- ProBlogger

Technorati is officially off my Christmas Card List

Did you ever have a cousin that you met once at a family reunion? Maybe you talked it up some, and really enjoyed the conversation. Then after the reunion, well life gets in the way, and the next thing you know, you haven’t talked to that cousin in a very long time. Maybe you feel like a big heel for not calling.

OK, if you are still with me, imagine that the cousin has made attempts to contact you, letters, phone calls, yet when you see the name on the caller ID, you let the answering machine answer the call.

You also make sure that you are really quiet, since you never tested to see if the microphone on the machine is actually off when it is taking a message, and you would hate for him to hear you and start yelling “I know your home; I can hear you breathing in the background!!!”

In this case, Technorati is the one being quiet, and this blog is that ignored cousin.

What I am referring to is the inability of Technorati to find my blog, and the stubborn refusal of my pings. As you can see from the image above, Technorati doesn’t think my blog has been updated in 620 days. If you scroll down a little bit, you will notice, that I have in fact posted in 2006, and shockingly, in 2007 as well. Granted, I haven’t posted with any consistency, but come on, there have been posts!





I don’t quite understand why, I use their handy dandy ping button, and when I use Performancing, I set it to ping Technorati, but for some reason, Technorati continues to ignore me.

So I say to you Technorati, in front of all my loyal readers reader, no soup for you! You shall remain without soup until you update your stats on my blog. At such a point, there will be soup aplenty, but not until then.

Some blogs that Technorati and I both love:
- The How to Geek
- Tech-Recipes
- Windows Connected
- LifeHacker
- 43 Folders

Update: Johnny Cash over at "Making Money on the Web" posted a comment that he has the same problem with Technorati. A quick look in their blog directory says that his site hasn't been updated in 52 Days, and I am up to 626 days without an update. He also has a post about his problems titled "My Technorati Woe"

Writely Post

Well, I am checking out Writely, and let me tell you, it is really cool! First off, it looks very similar to a Word like interface, but all inside of a browser of course. I also noticed the really neat tabs across the top, Collaborate, Publish, Blog, and Revisions, but you have to check out this file menu! Not only can you save it in 5 different formats, but I can even get an RSS Feed!

I wanted to check out the blog posting features, so I thought I would just put a picture in here, and try to post it. Blogger has a nice add on for Microsoft Word that I am a big fan of, but it doesn't support the posting of pictures. So lets see....

Holy Cow! That is just the coolest. Not only does it support it, but it allows you to set the column size of the preview so you can see exactly how it will look. Pretty sharp.

So anyway, go check out Writely. Now if I could just figure out how this whole tag thing works...

Update: For some strange reason, after it was posted, the title did not show up, so I had to edit it again in blogger in order to have a title, although the URL contained the title correctly. Hmmm...

Blogger is just too cool!

I have been playing around with the settings, and just want to say that blogger is just too cool.

The thing that prompted this is when I noticed that I can create an email address for my blog, and then send emails to that address, and the email gets posted. I then poked around a little more and realized that Picasa, which is also free, allows you to download helo, and publish pictures to the blog.

Awesome!

It takes something really neat for me to be impressed, and I am impressed.