Despite increasingly better software, blogging on phones is still a real pain compared with doing it on a regular computer. However, credit is due to WordPress, which has gone to great lengths to make the latest version of its iPhone app much better for users to both create and manage their blogs on a small screen (and without a keyboard).
Besides a new look, one of the biggest changes is that the app remembers exactly what you were doing between sessions, so that if you quit it, or get a phone call, it will take you right back to the page or menu you were looking at. This also keeps you from losing anything you hadn't saved if you're interrupted--even if you were in the middle of a writing a sentence when your phone rang. This should change the beginning of such a conversation from "I am so mad at you right now" to a simple "hello."
In addition to remembering what you were doing, the app does a much better job at letting you manage user comments. The approval screen itself looks almost identical, but the app now lets you quickly switch between the ones that have been approved and the ones that still need to be looked at. It also displays each users' Gravatar (user icon) next to their username and URL, which ends up taking up a little more space than it did in the previous iteration of the app but adds a sense of familiarity with its desktop sibling.
Other small changes include the app remembering which order you uploaded the photos in so that they display in that same order in your post. Although the app still hasn't been updated to include videos, which means 3GS owners will have to add whatever video they shot through WordPress' Web interface instead. The app also now stores passwords in a user's keychain, which means those credentials could be accessed by other applications you may want to give access to later on down the line--like, say an app that lets you post videos to a WordPress blog.
Oddly enough, the new WordPress app is completely different from the original, which still exists but will no longer be updated. The company attributes this to having switched between having an outside contractor make the first version, whereas this new one was built in-house.
The new look makes it simply to hop between comments, posts and pages. User Gravatars are now visible too.
(Credit: WordPress)
WPtouch from Wordpress.
(Credit: Wordpress)In an attempt to make its blogs more mobile-friendly, Wordpress has launched two themes that will automatically be displayed when a Wordpress.com blog is accessed from a cell phone, the company announced Tuesday.
The type of mobile phone a user employs dictates what the different blogs will look like, the company said in a blog post. A modified version of WPtouch will be displayed on phones with "modern Web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones," the company wrote. A second, unnamed theme from an old version of Wordpress Mobile Edition will be displayed on all other mobile devices.
The themes will be displayed automatically, regardless of the themes used for normal browsing.
According to Wordpress, those who access Wordpress.com blogs from their iPhone or Android-based devices will be able to access the particular blog's "posts, pages, and archives." WPtouch will also support AJAX-based "commenting and post-loading." Header images will be scaled to fit the device's screen.
Those accessing blogs on other phones won't be treated to all the bells and whistles. According to the company, those visitors will see a simple page that focuses mainly on loading blog content as quickly as possible.
The decision to automatically display two themes was rooted in the success of mobile devices, Wordpress said in the blog post. So far, the company said, mobile devices have helped its Wordpress.com blogs generate 60 million page views per month. But content was loading slowly or, in some cases, not at all. By automatically displaying these two themes, Wordpress can limit those issues.
If you're a Wordpress.com blogger and you want to learn more, click here.
If you're not an advanced Web designer, and you don't want to pay a company to create a Web site for you, there are services across the Web that can help you create the site you want. All of the tools listed below are designed specifically for beginners. If that's you, give them a whirl.
Get your design on
Color Wizard: Having trouble finding the right color for a portion of your site? Color Wizard will help you determine which color works with your current color scheme.
When you get to Color Wizard's site, just input the color you want to match. From there, the service will spit out several colors that match well with your base color. If you're unhappy with all the colors on your site, you can also use the site's sliders to create a color you desire. It then gives you a color tag that you can place in your site's HTML. It's a simple, neat tool that I use quite often.
Color Wizard helps you match colors or create your own.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)CSS Typeset: If you're looking to quickly edit portions of CSS from your site, CSS Typeset is one of my favorite tools to do just that.
The premise of CSS Typeset is simple: take some CSS from your site, modify it with the drop-down lists featured at the bottom of the page, and CSS Typeset generates the CSS code you can paste back into your site. You can change the font type, its color, alignment, and more. If you need a little help with CSS, CSS Typeset is the service for you.
CSS Typeset will help you change your site up.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Automattic, the company behind blogging platform WordPress, announced Tuesday that it has acquired After the Deadline, a service that finds spelling and grammar errors in blog posts. The deal's terms were not disclosed.
After the Deadline's spelling-, grammar-, and style-checking tools are now available to 7.5 million WordPress blogs. It's also available as a downloadable plug-in for WordPress users.
Looking ahead, Automattic plans to make After the Deadline open-source. It hopes the community will play a part in improving it. After the Deadline's founder Raphael Mudge, will stay on at Automattic to deliver After the Deadline to non-English-speaking bloggers.
After the Deadline was first discovered by the Automattic team when WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg saw a comment on Hackernews from After the Deadline's founder discussing how his tool found errors in a New York Times article. He was intrigued and contacted the tool's founder. Just a few months later, After the Deadline is now a part of WordPress.
I've had the opportunity to use After the Deadline on a few occasions. (You can too by inputting content into its demonstration module.) It's one of the most capable error-correction tools I've ever used.
After the Deadline, available now to WordPress users, is free to use.
With the help of plug-ins, you can extend the functionality of your Wordpress blog far beyond what's available to you when you add it to your server.
One of the best ways to get the most out of your blogs is through social plug-ins. These simple plug-ins can be added to your blog to help you connect socially with both your readers and their friends. They offer a fine way to build traffic to your site.
Go social with your blog
Add to Facebook If you want to make it easy for readers to syndicate your content to Facebook, Add to Facebook is the plug-in for you.
The plug-in provides a simple option at the bottom of each post, called "Share on Facebook." When the reader clicks on that link, they're immediately delivered to their Facebook page, showing a thumbnail of the image in your blog post, as well as the beginning of your post. If Facebook followers click on that link, they'll be delivered to your page. It's a neat utility. And it's a great way to share content through social channels.
Add to Facebook makes it easy for readers to syndicate your content.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Digg Digg Although its name might suggest that Digg Digg is a way to get readers to share your content with the popular social news site, it's much more than that.
Digg Digg allows you to add voting buttons to your blog. You can add a TweetMeme retweet button, a Yahoo Buzz button, and a "Submit to Reddit" option, along with your Digg button. The plug-in also allows you to decide where to place those buttons. You can choose the top, bottom, left, or right of your post.
Digg Digg is a great way to syndicate your content around the Web.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
As I have said in recent stories about short URLs, I believe that content management systems (blogging platforms, for example) should have their own short-link generators. Why hand over control of your traffic -- and your analytics -- to a third party, after all?
Automattic's Wordpress.com has launched just exactly this: its own built-in short-link generator. When you're creating a post on the Wordpress.com service, you get an option to create a wp.me link alongside the post's default link.
Wordpress.com users can now get short links from the blog entry page.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)The big advantage to these links, over links from third parties, is that they are pretty much guaranteed to work as long as the Wordpress.com system lives. There's no additional point of failure you introduce by using one of these links. They're also really easy to generate -- you get a short link as you're writing your post.
Short links have been created for every post created using the Wordpress.com platform, which also means that the short links aren't as short as they could otherwise be. When I tried to get new short links for posts on my own blog, the identifying part of the link was eight characters long. New and sparely used shorteners create shorter links: Vb.ly is still creating two-character identifiers.
The Wordpress.com link shortener is "bespoke," Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg told me. "The whole point," he said, "is to couple the permanence of the shortened URL with the canonical one."
Mullenweg also said that Wordpress software users (as opposed to users of the Wordpress.com platform) can get access to the shortener if they use the Stats plugin. Update: That feature isn't available just yet.
If you're not using Grooveshark to try out music on-demand before buying it, you should be. I've found no other service that offers its combination of simplicity, features, and song selection--10 million and growing, according to the organization.
Today, Grooveshark announced a couple of extensions that should increase awareness. If you're on Facebook like most of the world seems to be, Grooveshark Share Song will let you share any song in Grooveshark's database in only three steps. There are other Facebook apps that offer similar features--iLike has been offering full-song playback on Facebook since last August--but Grooveshark is impressive in its simplicity. It doesn't ask you to register. It doesn't try to get you to take quizzes or create playlists or listen to world exclusives. Just type a song name--you can add the artist if you want--then share it with individual friends or post it to your profile, and you're done.
That's really all there is to it.
Grooveshark also released a Wordpress plug-in that lets you post songs to your Wordpress blog, and a new API for its link-shortening service, Tinysong, which makes it easy for anybody with a Web page to create a short, simple link that goes directly to a song on Grooveshark. Simple enough for a rock musician to understand!
Follow Matt on Twitter.
GooseGrade, the service that lets your blog readers correct any mistakes you've made, has a new plug-in for WordPress users that makes it easier for blog administrators to approve and implement corrections suggested by readers.
Once installed, corrections get sent directly to WordPress' dashboard, where administrators can then make a fix just like they would approve or deny a user comment. Because the plug-in is given privileges to write over your content, it then goes back into the post and makes the edit, without the administrator having to do it manually. Best of all, it shows you a before and after preview of what the correction would look like, so you can eyeball it without having to visit the post in full.
To aid in the correction process the plug-in supports multiple administrators, meaning a multi-author blog can decentralize who has to take a turn at the copy desk, and can pass off the responsibility if one of the members is out of the office. The plug-in also throws in a few nice tweaks like a complete history of suggested user corrections, and a summary of your blog's accuracy rating, which gets updated with each user-requested fix.
GooseGrade is working on a public API so others can come in to make similar tools, so expect to see similar plug-ins for other blogging platforms in the near future.
Google on Friday released an open-source project, Google Blog Converters, intended to help people move their blogs from one service to another.
There are a number of popular publishing systems for housing blogs, some of them services and some of them software people can run on their own servers. But if you want to change infrastructure, it's rough going. Information isn't necessarily locked up and inaccessible, but the practical barriers of moving it to a new publishing system are high.
Google, which actually has a "data liberation team," announced the Blog Converters project to deal with the situation. It released a collection of libraries and scripts, written in the Python language, that converts between the export formats of LiveJournal, MovableType, WordPress, and Google's own Blogger service, said J.J. Lueck of the team in a blog posting about the Blog Converters project.
That means that a person could convert an exported file into a format another blog system comprehends, permitting the data to be imported into the new system. That could make it easier for a person to move to Google's own service--but also to move off it.
Of course, you'll have to be proficient in running Python scripts to use the technology. But it could get easier soon: Google said the scripts can be hosted on Google App Engine, its service for running Web-based applications written in Python, so perhaps somebody will set up some tools to make blog migration easier for the non-programmers out there.
Future versions of the technology will support the BlogML data format and a mechanism to synchronize blogs with services that have an API (application programming interface) for accessing data but not import-export abilities.
Google added an import-export feature to Blogger in December. The company's "don't be evil" slogan got its start in a discussion about the company's commitment not to lock up people's data such as e-mail archives.
Web-based blogging tool WordPress.com is getting a big update in a few hours with the release of version 2.7. The update is going out to all WordPress.com users at 5 p.m. PST Thursday, with a release for self-hosted WordPress.org users to follow later this month. Brave beta testers who want to get an early jump on 2.7 early can install the latest release candidate which has been available since Monday.
(Credit:
Automattic)
Version 2.7 brings a host of changes, with the biggest one being a complete overhaul of the blogging tool's dashboard interface. Instead of having navigation elements on the top of the page, everything has now moved over to the left side of the screen, similar to most Web mail services.
As an added benefit, you're able to minimize the new menu bar completely, giving you the entire browser window to compose a post and tweak various options. When minimized you can still get at the features though, as hovering over the edge of the menu item will pop it out, letting you quickly change an option without bringing the bar back out.
Another noteworthy addition is "QuickPress," which lets you write and publish a new post right from the dashboard without having to enter the composition screen. It's a little reminiscent of FriendFeed and Facebook's latest publishing offerings in keeping things simple, with no text-formatting options, and simple buttons to add YouTube videos, photos, and videos.
Other improvements include a new automatic WordPress software updater for self-install users that will download and install the latest version with one click. Previously users had to install a special third-party plug-in that would do this for them. Users can also now change the color scheme of the administration pages, and upload media without having to create posts. A full list of changes can be found here.
