There are many different kinds of mobile apps you can offer to your users including games, productivity apps (i.e. specialized calculators, to-do lists, etc.), educational apps (i.e. industry dictionaries, reviewers and exercises, trivia, language tutorial, etc.), lifestyle apps (i.e. ticket store, real-time train/plane schedules, recipe book, yoga, etc.), and more. The point is that whatever industry you belong to, whatever topics you usually touch on, you’ll probably be able to think of an app that would be useful to your users.

The problem with this, however, is that it does take significant investment to come up with a good app. If you don’t have the resources to deliver a good app, do rethink your options before going ahead because you might be better off with a much simpler app that delivers in terms of quality (no buggy apps please!) instead of a potentially excellent and innovative app that ends up half-baked. Remember, first impressions last and you want your users to tie your name with a sound usable mobile app so that when you do release a bigger mobile app, you won’t be hard-pressed selling the idea to your existing user base, and hopefully in selling it to other users who most probably be basing their decisions on the feedback from your users now.

Image credit: Mobile App Developments

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Now you have the chance to not only read online books but you can access any PDF file you download. The PDF to EPUB converter saves you a lot of time and effort by converting PDF files available to be formatted into your own electronic books reader. The great thing about this program is that the PDF still retains its original features, so you don’t have to worry about using a different program to read the file. In addition, the interface of the program is very intuitive. The design is so simple you can start converting PDF to EPUB right away.

The program features are very unique and allows you to save up on your EPUB’s memory space. Let’s say you only need to read the first couple of pages of the PDF file, you can set the number of pages that need to be converted into the EPUB just by selecting the specified pages. Also, if you are a multilingual reader, no need to worry about translating errors because the PDF to EPUB converter suits different languages, such as English, French, German, even Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Windows Live Writer – Never mind if you’re not a Microsoft fan. But Live Writer is definitely a very robust, useful and dependable blogging tool. It could be the best among the lot. Live Writer lets you set multiple blogs and directly publish post to them.

Microsoft Research ESL Assistant – A useful tool for non-English-as-a first-language bloggers.  This tool provides correction suggestions for typical ESL (English as a Second Language) errors including choice of determiners and propositions, as well as word choice suggestions.

Google Translate – If you’re like me who covers netbook news, I usually encounter news items in various languages including French, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, and others. And if a foreign-language site is your only source of information about a particular new gadget, you have no other recourse but to use Google’s Translation tool. It may not be the most accurate translation but it’s enough to give you the gist of what the news is all about. More than enough to you to compose  a decent news blog post.

Google’s Currency Converter – Again another useful online tool for tech bloggers. If you’re writing about new products and gadgets which you sourced out from foreign-language blogs, you simply type the price plus the currency’s name in Google’s search box,  hit enter and you’ll be given the U.S. Dollar equivalent.

Google Docs – Who doesn’t use Google Docs yet? Ever heard of cloud computing? Google Docs is a very good and useful example of a cloud storage service. I use it for drafting long posts which I need to edit from time to time even when I’m using different computers.

Honorable Mention:

Copyscape - If you’re not sure if you are plagiarizing other people’s content, especially true if you’re writing about original topics and not regurgitating news items, Copyscape is an invaluable tool.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

If you’re a GoDaddy customer planning to register a new domain, you might want to try using the new GoDaddy GeoDomainMap tool. GeoDomainMap uses Microsoft’s Bing Maps in providing a map-based interface for exploring available domain names with location information included in the name. This tool will be most useful if you’re planning to start a location-based fan site  or a blog for your local business.

The tool works something like this – you type in a location first, then a keyword that you want to use. The GeoMapTool will then search for all the available domains containing the keywords you used appended with the location. The location name is either appended before or after the keyword.

If you’re wondering why GoDaddy just return available domain names with associated location, that’s because the GeoDomainMap tool will use this to triangulate the current location and nearby location to represent them on the Bing map.

When you hover on the balloon markers displayed on the Bing map, a pop-up will appear showing you some details as well as a link to the GoDaddy domain purchasing page. You can also opt to add the domain name to your wishlist.

GeoDomainMap is a pretty cool tool that serves a good purpose. You may try it here.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

A while ago I published a similar but shorter list on BloggingPro. Although I only mentioned the then poplar options, I went a little more in-depth and compared pros and cons of listed platforms.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

It showed me what WordPress could do in a design sense, and how useful the software could be, and as a result, I have always followed his site, and kept tabs on the projects he has worked on.

Today, his feed let the world know that he is moving his site from WordPress to Habari, a new blogging platform that he has helped design and develop.

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

I have tried out Habari, back when it first came out, and while I was impressed, it wasn’t mature enough for me to really take a keen interest in it, but with its recent 0.5 release, many people are jumping back on board to see if Habari has the new “it thing” that many bloggers are looking for.

Currently, his blog looks relatively basic, which has been the presentational direction he has been heading in for a while, but I hope he adds his own stylistic touch to the site over the coming days, and also blesses the world with his transition guide, helping those interested in taking the leap know how he managed to move his extensive archive over to Habari, and get his blogging work flow back on track.

Will others now take the leap and join Michael in trying out Habari on their own main blogs? It is too early to tell, but this is definitely an interesting development in my world.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

They included in their list Google Reader, NetVibes, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and Sage.

I am a fan of Bloglines. I have been using it since I started with reading RSS, and I have tried other software, especially desktop applications in the years since starting to read blogs in such a manner.

Why Bloglines?

Being that it was my first RSS reader, I have become accustomed to the keyboard shortcuts that Bloglines has, as well as the workflow, and user interface that it includes.

Everything is simple, includes the features I need, and seems to update with the latest posts fairly rapidly.

I really don’t think there is any other reason I use Bloglines, other than it was my first RSS reading tool, and I have become accustomed to it and it has been very stable for me. I haven’t suffered through any major changes in usability or stability.

What Would Make Me Switch?

I don’t like the “improvements” in the open beta version of Bloglines which changes a few things, mostly in design, and so if that happens to become the only version, I might switch.

Also, if I found some system that did have a better workflow for me, then I would switch.

I doubt I would ever move to a desktop client, as I work on two or three different computers every day, and each one uses a different operating system, so it would complicate things further, so my choice would probably be to move to Google’s RSS Reader, but when I would move depends on Bloglines, as I am in no rush, and it would be mistakes from them that would make me leave.

Which RSS reader do you use, and why? What are the advantages of using Google Reader over Bloglines, if you have tried both?

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Instead, I decided instead to give them the benefit of the doubt, and learn more about what Cyber BLOGGER can and can’t do. As with all reviews on this site, I will be giving the facts as well as my honest opinions.

Cyber BLOGGER bills itself as a powerful tool for obtaining free search traffic. Basically, the software allows you to quickly and easily set up an unlimited variety of blogs on Google’s Blogger blogging platform. Creating a blog on Blogger is free, and you don’t have to pay for bandwidth, allowing you to create as large of a blog as you’d like, and as it gets more and more popular, the traffic can all be converted to profit.

Once you’ve set up your blogs, you can then feed content into your blog from any RSS feed, allowing you to quickly build up a huge amount of content including hundreds, if not thousands of posts written by other people.

Surely by now, if you have been following this site, or blogging in general, you are asking yourself, why you would want to do this?

Google’s Blogger is well-liked by their own search engine, and as such content on Blogger appears in the Google search results fairly fast. Add to this the ability to monetize your blogs with Google AdSense, and you have a system that rewards people looking to make a quick buck, and so it is not hard to see the appeal of this software.

If you want to make some money using what people call the “long tail” effect on search engines, you can do it using Cyber BLOGGER.

I have seen time and again, people talking about how much money they made from similar systems, and while the software is amazing, what it does isn’t always the most ethical way to go about getting your content. I would suggest this software more for people looking to be a little more on the evil side of making money online.

One way I could see this being useful for someone in a non-evil way, would be to republish a certain category of their own blog on Blogger, leaving links back to their original blog intact. This could help drive traffic to your already established blog, without having to create new content.

As long as the duplicate content penalty was less than the incoming traffic from the Cyber BLOGGER run blog, you would be ahead of the game, and even better, you could be much more aggressive with your monetization techniques on the Blogger blog. That is just one example of where a blogger could use this software, without taking content that isn’t their own. I am sure there are many other uses for this software besides the nefarious purposes.

One feature that I wish they would remove is the ability for the software to remove links in the content. I think content scrapers should keep links in place, especially if the content that they are taking isn’t their own. I do like how the software can cut out images though, as they sometimes won’t work with the Blogger template you have chosen to show off the content.

Cyber BLOGGER isn’t a desktop application, and requires a real piece of hosting space that has at least Apache 1.3.x or above, PHP 4.3 or above, MySQL 4.1 or above and Zend Optimizer 2.8 or above. The regular price for this software is $95, but currently it is on sale for $65.95.

While I find it very tempting to go this route, and use other people’s content to make me money, I just can’t justify it to myself. That, however, doesn’t mean that this software isn’t well written, in fact, it seems to be a very strong product, and very good at what it does. I wish they would work on respecting the original content creators just a little more, but I think that is a flaw all republishing software currently has.

Also, it seems to me that the advantages of something like this will only continue until Google gets its act together and thwarts this type of abuse of their systems. So if you want to make more money online now, and you are interested in using software that allows you to create an unlimited amount of Blogger blogs, Cyber BLOGGER is it.

I found out about this from one of my personal favourite blogs, Sarah in Tampa.

From the company’s site:

FeedChief is an easy to use online service where you can create RSS feeds related to your area of interest. Entering keywords matching your search criteria will allow FeedChief to collect from a large variety of sources and yield one single feed that contains news, videos, images and blogs.

Customizing the language of the feeds makes FeedChief unique. When choosing a different language, FeedChief will translate the results automatically for a richer reading experience.

While I am not a fan of automatic machine translated text, this is a nice addition to their service, as so many sites are only published in one language or another, and as an English only citizen of the world, I find it frustrating when I want to keep informed with places that don’t have a very strong English coverage. (If I had the time, and energy to learn more languages, I definitely would.)

The service could definitely use some refinements, but the idea is very interesting to me, and I am always shocked that Technorati doesn’t capitalize on something like this. I would love to subscribe to all the blogs that mention WordPress with a reasonably high authority on Technorati.

Overview

WordPress.com was added to provide a service to those without the technical knowledge and understanding needed to run PHP software. It provided WordPress functionality to those that were stuck on other hosted blog platforms.

WordPress.com also allowed the Automattic team to test new features while controlling the environment of those tests. This has lead to some great features coming out in the self-hosted WordPress.org software.

Advantages

One of the biggest advantages is that you don’t have to find hosting, deal with server specifications, or even upgrade your WordPress.com blog. It is all dealt with by Automattic. They pre-install many great themes, as well as give you some great statistic software to track what is going on with your blog.

WordPress.com is also the test bed for new features for WordPress, meaning WordPress.com users get cool features that the self-hosted WordPress.org users have to wait a few versions for.

They also have a community feel which is separate from the WordPress.org community, making it feel smaller, though with more than one million WordPress.com blogs, it is still amazingly diverse and interesting.

Limitations

Unfortunately, WordPress.com is not without its issues, but many bloggers just starting out, won’t see the problem here, and honestly, neither will some higher level bloggers.

You can’t edit themes directly. You can change the cascading style sheets for a yearly fee. Cascading style sheets are a way to control things like what color your headlines are and how your content is displayed. Having this ability is great, but it can still leave you somewhat limited in how your blog can look, and function.

You also can’t have any form of advertising on your WordPress.com blog, meaning no way to monetize the hard work you put into it.

Lastly, if you need more than 100 megabytes of hosting space, a real domain, rather than being hosted on a WordPress.com sub-domain, custom cascading style sheets, for a custom design, or more than thirty-five private users, you will have to pay a fee. If you want all of these things, that fee can be a fair bit higher than you’d pay for hosting and a domain from a third party.

Conclusion

It really comes down to what you need, what your expertise is, and what you are willing to pay. For the starting blogger, a free WordPress.com blog has more than enough features. Never needing to go through the upgrade process, while fairly simple on WordPress.org blogs, is also provides some great peace of mind.

I can’t say that power users won’t like WordPress.com, as I have seen many happy with the service, but I think that most power users that know how to FTP, and want more flexibility with their blog will want to stick with the hugely expandable WordPress.org software.

Check out some of my favorite WordPress related books on my Books page.