Tag: blog-tools

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Blogs

I want my Crazy Egg

Updated: I just got an invitation to the service through this blog post (check the comments).
When Crazy Egg starts accepting signups for its free service there will be a stampede. Pete Cashmore of Mashable is gushing: “Wow! Just wow. Crazy Egg will absolutely blow you away.”

Crazy Egg is a website tracking script that will tell you where your users click on your site. It will then generate a heatmap overlay on your site to show you where your users are clicking.

Cashmore says in the comments of his post that you just use “a tiny bit of script” for the service. Updated: you just put in a two-line javascript to start tracking.
I’ve signed up for the waiting list and there’s this nagging thought to keep on signing up and pester the service into giving me an account. Here’s a screenshot I took from the Crazy Egg site:

Categories
Journalism Personal

CEGP seminar: putting campus newspapers online

Among the things that I’m really passionate about is encouraging student publications to go online. Not only is online publication cheaper than dead-tree publishing, it’s also very easy to pull off right now because of the existence of easy-to-use content management systems.

Online campus journalism also allows student publications to go beyond the one-issue-every-few-months-or-so publication cycle typical of campus papers.

I discussed online journalism with members of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines yesterday and I was a bit surprised that in a group of 20 plus participants, only two have blogs. I had expected more bloggers in the group, in fact I assumed more than half would have blogs.

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Blogs Personal

Upgrading to WordPress 2.0.1

I finished upgrading this blog Wednesday night to WordPress 2.0.1, which was released two weeks back to fix bugs in WordPress 2.0. I was a bit wary in upgrading the blog because of problems posted on the WordPress support forum by those who upgraded their installations.

I already lost a lot (close to 50) of blog entries when I botched an upgrade to Serendipity, the blog script I used before WordPress.

But I took the plunge, anyway. I backed up all my blog files. I did not bother getting a database backup because the recent database backup file sent to my GMail account by the WordPress database backup script was still current.

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Blogs Personal

Some notes on upgrading to WordPress 2.0

All the sites in my domain are now using WordPress 2.0. I just finished updating last night. I also spotted the plugin that’s preventing the new visual editor from loading. It’s Linknotes, a plugin I used to put footnotes in some posts in my blog. Luckily, Linknotes is well crafted so that even if you turn the plugin off, the links to the footnotes just turn into regular hyperlinks.

Later today, I’ll be upgrading other WordPress sites I help manage.

I did encounter an error in this blog because of the Akismet plugin. The Akismet plugin file previously resided in the main plugins directory. The Akismet plugin that comes with the new WordPress is inside a subfolder and when I uploaded it, the site started spewing out errors because there were already two akismet.php files in different locations. But overall, the upgrades have been trouble-free.

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Blogs Personal

Painless upgrade: Cybercafe Experiments now runs WordPress 2.0

I have just upgraded my blog to use the just-released WordPress 2.0 version. The upgrade was painless and trouble-free. For someone who lost close to 50 posts in a reckless, ill-advised and ill-prepared upgrade to an alpha version of a previous blog, the first few minutes after the upgrade was akin to feeling your hand whether you still have all your fingers after a firecracker explodes in it (believe me, I’ve been there and done that).

The upgrade was done half an hour ago and it seemed everything is working flawlessly save for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get-editor (WYSIWYG), which I never planned to use anyway. I went to the Write interface expecting to see the WYSIWYG editor enabled but it wasn’t, even if it was enabled in the options field.

Curiously, the WordPress 2.0 beta version running in my demo blog displays the WYSIWYG editor. But it is just a minor irritant. For WYSIWYG editing, I recommend that you use the Xinha Here! plugin in this site.

What’s great about the new version is the improved blog administration interface. Since it uses Ajax, you can add things without having to reload the entire page. While writing a post, for example, you can add categories without having to leave the Write interface.

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Blogs Free services

Performancing.com releases visual editor for blogs

Performancing.com, which is turning out to be an excellent resource on blogging, released a Firefox extension that puts a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) blog editor in the open source browser.

I tried it out for a few minutes (screenshots below) and even used it to publish the previous post and found that it worked flawlessly. The editor allows you to assign your blog’s categories to your posts. It doesn’t have a button, though, to allow you to split your posts the way the more link works in WordPress but since you can edit the code generated by the

You can just right-click on a web page you want to blog and launch the WYSIWYG editor. With the plugin plus the del.icio.us extension, Firefox now has the capabilities introduced by Flock.

The plugin visual editor works only in Firefox 1.5 and the following blogging services and platforms:

Blog services:
Blogger
WordPress.com
Typepad
LiveJournal

Blog scripts
WordPress
Movable Type

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Blogs Open source

Instant WYSIWYG editor Xinha Here now comes with options

The developer of Xinha Here! has released version 0.4 of the must-have Firefox plugin for bloggers and online content creators. The new version runs only on Firefox 1.5 so if you haven’t upgraded yet, get the new installer at Mozilla.

The new version comes with options for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor. The options interface allows you to specify plugins to use with the editor as well as the themes of the editing screen. The new Xinha Here! version comes with seven themes and 22 plugins-such as character map, table operations, find and replace, character counter etc.

Below is the screenshot of the new version using the XP Blue theme. If you aren’t familiar with Xinha Here!, here’s my earlier post on the plugin.

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Blogs Free services Open source

Instant visual editor for your blog, website

Putting a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor for your blog or website content management system used to involve installing a software package in the web server. Not anymore. I found this link to a Firefox plugin that would allow you to use the Xinha editor on any HTML text entry area.

Xinha Here! (photo below) is a must-have Firefox plugin for anyone who publishes online-whether on blogs, news portals or even forums. What’s good about using Xinha Here! instead of a server-side WYSIWYG solution is that you can turn WYSIWYG editing on and off without having to change settings.

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Blogs Free services Open source

Using yet another blog message board

I took down my earlier shoutbox, which was using Wordspew, after two people used it as their personal chatboard-writing close to 200 exchanges on their personal lives. The only option for moderation in Wordspew was to require registration, which I do not want to implement because this is a single-author blog and I do not want other users registered in the system.

When I deleted the entries, I could no longer recover the earlier messages posted by readers because these had apparently been overwritten, Worspew stores only the last 35 messages.

I looked for other shoutbox programs and found a link to Smiletag, an open source PHP message box that also uses Ajax. I immediately installed and used the program (see sidebar). The program isn’t a WordPress plugin but it’s very easy to install and configure to work with WordPress.

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Blogs Free services Highlights

Sign up for a better blog tracker with Measure Map

I got an alpha tester account with Measure Map this afternoon and was so impressed by the service that an hour into using it, I just had to get screenshots (posted after the link) and write about it. I signed up for the service in early October yet after reading this TechCrunch article.

Measure Map, according to its site, “helps you understand what people do at your blog.” It does the job of most free site counters and trackers out there and more. It tracks a lot of activities in your blog: inbound links, outbound links, number of people reading your posts and commenting on them. It even presents data on your most visited blog articles. It presents all these data in a beautiful Ajax interface.

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