Category Archives: Software

Binary Bonsai Transitions to Habari

For those of you that don’t know my history with blogging, you might not know that Michael Heilemann was the person that got me interested in WordPress thanks to his blog, Binary Bonsai.

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.

Originally posted on August 11, 2008 @ 5:49 pm

My Best RSS Newsreader

I am finding more and more that I am considered old fashioned by not using Google Reader, or one of the top pieces of software and online applications listed on Life Hacker’s recent post on the best RSS newsreaders.

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?

Originally posted on May 20, 2008 @ 6:39 pm

Cyber BLOGGER Review

Before I start the review of the Cyber BLOGGER software, I want to make it very clear that I do not like content scrapers, and have had my content shared with the world more than once, and it is very frustrating, and so when PHP Script Lab contacted me to review their software, I almost said “no”.

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.

Originally posted on January 19, 2008 @ 8:22 pm

FeedChief: Quick Custom RSS Feeds

Tired of trying to find all the best sites in a certain niche to subscribe to them and stay informed in your favourite RSS reader? Well FeedChief is working on covering that need. The idea is simply that you add some keywords, pick your language, and FeedChief generates an RSS feed for you to subscribe to covering your interests. It grabs information from blogs, search engines and other data sources.

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.

Originally posted on December 12, 2007 @ 5:48 pm

WordPress.com Review: A Hosted WordPress

WordPress.com

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.

Originally posted on August 19, 2007 @ 7:14 pm