Herself’s Webtools

Several sites give details on how they made their blogs stand out, here are my favorites:

15 Powerful ways to differentiate your blog from the crowd;

Be more than a blip in the blogosphere

After 10 years of blogs, the future’s brighter than ever

Build a successful site in 1 year using just Google

Movable Type Blogging Software Blog ( Downloads and other specifics at this site. )

Movable Type Blogging software has been around as long as blogging. It is used by many of the bigger name blogs you know and love.

Movable Type can import your Wordpress or Blogger blog.

Those who have been using Movable Type love it. I haven’t tried it. I have noticed many reports of bloggers leaving Movable Type for Wordpress. While Wordpress needs only PHP and MySQL which you will find installed on just about every webserver, Movable Type also needs some Perl which may or may not already be installed on your webserver. Most Apache webservers will have everything you need for Movable Type and Wordpress.

If you are ready to move from Blogger, consider both Wordpress and Movable Type.

See:
Movable Type vs Wordpress
Movable Type 4.0 from a Worpdress user’s perspective

All the wonderful things that have made it easier to find and process information on the net have also dulled the net.

Wiki is a great group encyclopedia. But like all committee work it lacks personality.  Also there is a re-occurring problem with people writing and editing their own  or their companies Wiki entries to their satisfaction.

Blogs are wonderful but if everyone out there is writing five to ten posts a week we’re all going to be covering a lot of the same information. RSS feeds let you process huge amounts of information. But it’s not the same as visiting. And aggregator sites are the lowest interest sites of all. They are just someone else’s idea of what your RSS feed should look like.

Social sites are peaking as well. As pointed out by Cory Doctrow everyone can find you on a social network. Those people you willingly left behind in your life have a creepy way of crawling back in to your life in web 2.0.

Websites have evolved in ways that make it easier for search engines and therefore people to find them. Search engines are evolving and as they get better it will become easier to be found by the search engines with out worrying about keywords or the format of your site.

Many sites need the ad revenues to cover costs. So like news sites they avoid topics likely to offend.

So until the next thing makes itself known I’m going to do my part. All the blogs have had sections added. Photos on some, scripts on others, but they are all branching out. It’s time. There will be more branching out over the next several months. More photos are going up on my sites than on my Flickr account now.

Blogging’s cool but we’re all ready for something new. I’m betting that will be the mobile web, which will one day be known as Web 3.0.

Writer’s block got your fingers? It gets easier as you blog longer. I’m writing 3 posts weekly for 5 blogs and misc posts for two other blogs. That 15 or more posts each and every week. I started out with a bang, hit a wall about 3 months into blogging, now it’s gotten easy.

All week long I look for interesting topics; online, tv, books, movies, radio, magazines, and in conversations and forums. Anytime I see an interesting topic I make a note. Most of my time is spent digging into books, the net, code and whatnot looking for new things to bring my readers. Come Monday morning I usually have twice as many topics as posts. But some topics turn out to be duds. Either every single blog in your niche has covered them or with some there just isn’t enough information to fill out a post. The more topics you can find offline that haven’t been beaten to death online already the better.  For me that is the hardest part of blogging, finding new topics.

Monday mornings I write. I create a post for each topic and post date it. Then I round up resources of interest, add in links and read up on the subject. Then I write. Bad. I just talk with no attention to grammar, spelling or continuity. I just write.

Tuesdays I get away from the desk and out of the house. Or I write scripts and programs. Sometimes I just study some AI or other subject that catches my eye. If you spend all your time blogging you’ll have nothing to talk about but blogging. That’s a pretty full, heavily competitive niche.

Wednesdays it is back to writing. Now the typos and spelling get fixed. I re-write the paragraphs so the subject flows nicely and I polish it up. This is when I check, write and re-write the headlines.

Thursdays I put in back links where ever I can. If you get scraped ( and you will get scraped, if you aren’t you should be worried ) you’ll have some links home and two if some one is interested in a topic you can send them to more information on your site rather than elsewhere.

Fridays is back up day, back up the blogs, update site maps etc.

Saturdays and Sundays I leave blogging alone. If you don’t have a life you’ll have nothing to write about.