Well it looks like the iPhone is out for me.    I’ll have to look into alternatives with Verizon instead.  Why you ask?  Because Apple, in their ever so thoughtful consideration for the disabled decided to flip off those of us who were hearing impaired by designing a phone incompatible with digital hearing aids.  Thanks Apple! 

There was this whole stink about it last year too, but I would have thought by now they’d wise up to their asshattedness and produce a more compatible phone with the release of the iPhone 3G.  Nope.  I gave it a try today and immediately heard a grating buzzing sound as soon as I put my aids in telecoil (telephone) mode.  I can still hear the voice on the other end but the screeching banshee sounds as a result of electronic interference didn’t exactly make it a pleasure to use.  Beautiful.

Guess I’ll be sticking with Verizon then, at least for the time being.  I checked their list of Smartphone / PDA / Blackberries that were hearing aid compatible and found the following short list:

I have no idea how any of these phones differ from the iPhone, but I’m gonna guess they all suck flaming hog balls in comparison.    The Mx/Tx designation by the way determines how compatible they are.  Anything with the number 3 meets the compatibility standard, while any number above that exceeds the standard (in other words, 4 is better.)

Guess I’ll be doing some research today while I curse out Apple’s name. 

Tags: aids, apple, blackberries, compatibility, design, digital, digital hearing aids, disabled, hearing, hearing aid, hearing aids, impaired, iphone, PDA, phone, phones, Smartphone, sounds, telephone, verizon, Wireless
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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I’m often criticized for taking a lone ranger approach to life, and while it’s true that I’ve always been a loner, I’m not against looking for help when I really need it. I knew if I wanted to build a successful blog that I was going to need some kind of support to help me get going, and one of the things that held my site back in particular has been this irritating problem where the footer just wouldn’t stay where it belonged. It kept jumping all over the place and screwing my sidebars up, so as a temporary fix I removed the sidebars from most of my pages. That wasn’t really a solution though, so I started checking around for blog designers I could hire to fix the problem for me.

If I could tell you how many emails I’ve sent out to designers that never got returned, you’d never believe it. You’d think they’d want my business, but I guess I’m not enough of a lucrative prospect for them. Snobs.

Finally, one designer got back to me and worked on my site for a couple of hours, then gave up. He also left one of my sidebars crooked, but promised to look into it, as well as look into a javascript solution I suggested to him to fix the footer. I didn’t hear back from him again until almost a week later, where he sent me a “Dear John” type email suggesting that I’m better off going with a complete revamp of the site. Sure, what’s another 800 bucks or so to destroy the months of work I’ve put into my blog and replace it with whatever crap they had in mind?

Man, when you want something done…

That weekend I rolled up my sleeves and went to work on the blog myself. I only had a rudimentary understanding of CSS, javascript and whatnot, but I kept at it for the whole day and by some miracle of God, I managed to pull it off. The footer issue was finally resolved.

I spent a few hours more banging my head on the keyboard, trying to get my sidebars looking right across different browsers, but without much luck until I started using Firebug, which is quite possibly the greatest web development tool ever invented in the history of mankind. I was able to test and check the results of CSS modifications I made in real time, rather than saving the file, uploading it, reloading my browser, and repeating as necessary ad infinitum. It also helped me locate what file was causing my site to take forever to finish loading, and after I got rid of that it was like I had a new blog all over again.

Deal with THAT, you cheapskate freelance web designers.

Seriously, I learned a lesson here. One, that God is merciful. Two, that people suck big monkey balls. In the end, I realized my project here was going to be a solo operation after all. But I do faith that whatever I can put my mind to, I can achieve, not because I’m so talented and all, but because God is capable of opening up my understanding, and within His will, I can “do all things through Christ, which strengthens me.”

Tags: blog, blogging, christ, code, css, dear john, design, designers, firebug, footer, freelance, God, javascript, keyboard, lone ranger, loner, miracle, people, snobs, solo, success, tongue, troubleshoot, whatnot
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Evidently, letting on that I had more than 75+ WordPress plugins installed raised quite a few eyebrows around the blogosphere. At last count I now have 89 plugins humming in the background, and it might go even higher, if for no other reason than just to see if I can break the 100 mark. I know I know, I’m crazy, I may have fact even turned my blog into a weapon of mass destruction that could take out the entire infrastructure of the Internet in the Western Hemisphere, but I can’t stop. Where’s a Plugaholics Anonymous when you need one??

So how do I get away with all this without causing a NOC somewhere to implode? Well for one, many of my plugins are really not that big, just several lines of code to enhance a feature on my blog (like cleaning up my excerpts so they actually look nice.)

Secondly, the bulk of my plugins only get called on my index page, where they’re used to power most of my sidebar content. On the rest of my site I have no sidebars at all, so these plugins never get called. Ironically enough, I’ve gone with this setup initially because my footer wouldn’t stay in place at the bottom, and instead kept clashing with my sidebars due to using absolute positioning. Now I’m happy I went with this setup because there’s FAR less noise and distractions on my post pages, and it loads nice and fast too. My index pages are permanently cached by WP-Cache so they load quickly as well. Of course, there are still downsides to having a blog structured this way (including no sidebar space for ads), but the upside I think outweighs it all. Another good chunk of my plugins are also only used within the administrative interface, so they’ll never get called when a visitor browses the site either.

For the morbidly curious, here’s my current list of plugins, minus the 89th plugin (to which I’ve been sworn to secrecy not to divulge.)

©Feed
A plugin that helps copyright your feed. A report of copyright, a digital fingerprint and the IP of the feed reader can be added. In addition, some search engines are scanned for the digital fingerprint in order to find possible content theft. The feed can be also be supplemented with comments and topic-relevant contributions. The complete RSS feed can be delivered even if the “more” tag is used in WP 2.1+. Also makes it possible to view related posts using the plugin Simple Tagging. By Frank Bueltge.

Add Lightbox
This plugin automatically adds the rel=”lightbox[ID_OF_THE_POST]” to images linked in a post. ID_OF_THE_POST is unique per post so all images per post are grouped in one lightbox set. By Mdkart.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
Help your visitor promote your website or blog. Put the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on your site or blog, so any visitor can easily bookmark it. The widget works with all popular bookmarking services. By AddThis.com.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” By Matt Mullenweg.

aLinks
A WordPress plugin that automatically links keywords in your blog post. By Sean Hickey.

Author Highlight
Author Highlight is a plugin that prints out a user-specified class attribute if the comment is made by the specified author. It is useful if you would like to apply a different style to comments made by yourself. By Jonathan Leighton.

Bad Behavior
Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.

Bannage
Bans commentors by IP, username, email, or URI By Shane Neuerburg, Justin Shattuck and Dave Jansen.

BBInfo
This plugin will output the Bad Behavior logs for your perusal in WordPress’s Admin. By Pross.

Chunk Urls for WordPress
This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site. By whoo.

Comment Analysis
Various functions for analyzing comments By Mark Styles.

Comment Quicktags +
Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form. js_quicktags is a slightly modified version of Alex King’s newer Quicktag.js plugin, in turn modified from original found here. By Dan Cameron.

CountDown wp-plugin
Show how many days there are to the selected date. By Fiz Vazquez Ripoll.

Cricket Moods
Allows an author to add multiple mood tags and mood smilies to every post. By Keith “kccricket” Constable.

Custom Smileys
Personalize your posts and comments using custom smileys. By Quang Anh Do.

Dagon Design Form Mailer
The WordPress plugin version of the popular and secure php form mailer script By Aleister.

DiggClick
Displays a “digg it” button at the beginning of your posts, with a lot of configuration options. By Michal Nowak.

Digg Defender
Uses Coral Cache to quickly buffer hits from Digg, Slashdot, Fark, SA, etc. By Elliott Back.

Edit N Place
Allows you to edit your post inline, right on the front page of your blog. By Sean Hickey.

Enforce WWW Preference
Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www. By Mark Jaquith.

Extended Live Archives
Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.

Feedburner Feed Replacement
Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from. By Steve Smith.

Filosofo Comments Preview
Filosofo Comments Preview lets you preview WordPress comments before you submit them. It’s highly configurable from the admin control panel, including optional captcha and JavaScript alert features. By Austin Matzko.

Flashifier
Create flash code by enclosing the info in [FLASH]%filename%,%width%,%height%[/FLASH]. By Ryan Meyers.

Flickr Photo Gallery
This plugin will retrieve your Flickr photos and allow you to easily add your photos to your posts. By Silas Partners (Joe Tan).

Footnotes
Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.

Fuzzy Recent Links
A WordPress widget that lists a fuzzy number of recently bookmarked links. To use, call the_recent_links(); where you want the tile to appear. Alternatively, do nothing and the tile will display when wp_meta(); is called. By Denis de Bernardy.

Genki Announcement
Display an announcement on your blog By Genkisan.

Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. By Krischan Jodies.

GetWIKI
Get a WIKI article anywhere on yout blog. By Sajin Kunhambu.

Google (XML) Sitemaps
This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported By Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. By Arne Brachhold.

Google Analyticator
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics. After enabling this plugin visit the options page and enter your Google Analytics’ UID and enable logging. By Ronald Heft, Jr..

Google Sitemaps – Append UTW Tags
This plugin will automatically append the tags used by the Ultimate Warrior Tags plugin (v3.14+) onto your Google XML Sitemap. The Google (XML) Sitemaps plugin (v3.0b6+) must also be installed. By Stewart Farquhar.

Gravatar
This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. See the documentation for syntax and usage. By Tom Werner.

Head META Description
Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else. By Kaf Oseo.

Hotlink Protection
Prevents hotlinking images without breaking online feedreaders By Lim Dul.

IImage Panorama
Add 360° panoramas to your posts! By Martin Chlupac.

IM Online
Display status for MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Jabber and ICQ via onlinestatus.org. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

In Series
Gives authors an easy way to connect posts together as a series. By Travis Snoozy.

King Search Widget
Advanced Search Box Widget including Category Dropdown and Search Word Spellcheck Suggestion By Georg Leciejewski.

King_Framework
Framework for King Widgets + King Plugins. Contains Functions, Language, Javascripts used by all Widgets. On the Options page you can set some global switches. By Georg Leciejewski.

King_Text_Widget
Adds a Text widget Options are: in which category or Site Area to show + php/Html output + the html before and after the Widget. By Georg Leciejewski.

Kramer
Implements Technorati inbound links to a post as Pingbacks. Also provides a template function to display general inbound links. By Nik Cubrilovic and Mark Jaquith.

Lightbox 2 Plugin
Used to overlay images on the current page. Lightbox JS v2.2 by Lokesh Dhakar. By Rupert Morris.

Now Reading
Allows you to display the books you’re reading, have read recently and plan to read, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Rob Miller.

Now Watching
Allows you to display the movies you’re watching, have watched recently and plan to watch, with cover art fetched automatically from Amazon. By Steven Skaggs.

Optimal Title
Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. By Aaron Schaefer.

podPress
The podPress plugin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting. Set it up in ‘podPress’->Feed/iTunes Settings. If you this plugin works for you, send us a comment. By Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r).

Polite-ifier
Cleans up commenters’ profanity. Also includes a blacklist you can customize. By Elliott Back.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog. By Alex King.

Postalicious
Automatically create posts with your del.icio.us bookmarks. By Pablo Gomez.

Quick SMS
Allows your visitors to SMS messages direct to your mobile phone via email gateways. Many networks & countries now supported, see configuration panel for full list. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

Quoter
Allows commenters to quote other comments (dynamically or server side if they have Javascript disabled) and any other text in a page (Javascript only). By Daniele Mancino.

Random post link
A plugin to create a link to a random published post on your blog. By Fred A..

Random Quotes
This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console. By Dustin Barnes.

RedditButton
Displays the reddit buttons in your posts and can be configured to suit your liking. By Christian Inzinger.

Scripturizer
Changes Bible references to hyperlinks for Wordpress 1.5 and above. By Dean Peters, ported by Glen Davis, updated by LaurenceO.com.

Scrobbles widget
Displays recently listened-to tracks on your site. By Rob Miller.

Show Top Commentators
Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one). By Nate Sanden.

Sidebar Widgets
Adds Sidebar Widgets panel under Presentation menu By Automattic, Inc..

Simple Cache
Simple set of caching functions. Useful for plugin authors to build off of. By Jeff Minard.

Smarter Excerpt
Displays the excerpt using whole words, and includes links and styling. By Charles W. Stricklin.

Song Displayer
This plugin allows you to display the song that is currently playing in your Winamp playlist. You’ll need Winamp and the DoSomething plugin. See installation instructions. By Matthieu Biscay.

Sphere Related Content Widget
Automatically show related blog posts and news articles from Sphere thanks to Matthias Bauer for the thresholding and other ideas incorporated in this version. By Watershed Studio, LLC.

Spoiler Tags
This plugin gives your readers ample warning regarding spoiler information by making it unreadable until the user moves the cursor over the text. You have probably seen this functionality widely used in many different forums. By Navid Azimi.

ST Add Related Posts to Feed
Adds Related Posts to your full content feed. UTW is required By Chris Kasten, aka HandySolo with much help from Otto42 of http://ottodestruct.com/.

Star Rating for Reviews
Insert inline rating stars within your posts based on the score you assign, supports outputting list of reviews sorted by date or scores. By Yaosan Yeo.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. Based on version 1 from Scriptygoddess By Mark Jaquith.

Tiger Style Administration
Revamp the look of your WordPress administration area. By Steve Smith.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualization. By Christine Davis (Version modified by Joaquín Windmüller).

Ultimate Tag Warrior: Tag Archive
Renders an archive view, based on tags. Depends on Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.5.1+ By Christine Davis.

Verse-O-Matic
Displays a single random verse. Verses can be added and edited through the Wordpress admin. There is a ‘Verse-O-Matic’ tab under the ‘manage’ tab. Click here for usage instructions. By Chad Butler.

WordPress Database Backup
On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Scott Merrill.

WordPress Reports
Generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data By Joe Tan.

WordPress Reports Most Active Widget
A widget that displays the most active content (requires the WordPress Widgets plugin) By Joe Tan.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module. Composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. By Ricardo Galli Granada.

WP-CC
Facilitates the usage of Creative Commons licenses. Configure in Options ? WP-CC. By Firas Durri.

WP-Polls
Adds A Poll Feature To WordPress By GaMerZ.

WP-Polls Widget
Adds a Sidebar Widget To Display Poll From WP-Polls Plugin. You Need To Activate WP-Polls First. By GaMerZ.

WP-PostRatings
Enables You To Have A Rating System For Your Post. By GaMerZ.

WP-PostViews
Enables You To Display How Many Time A Post Had Been Viewed. By GaMerZ.

WP-Print
Displays A Printable Version Of Your WordPress Weblog Post. By GaMerZ.

WP-Stats
Display Your WordPress Statistics. By GaMerZ.

WP-Stats Widget
Adds a Sidebar Widget To Display Partial Stats From WP-Stats Plugin By GaMerZ.

WP-UserOnline
Adds A Useronline Feature To WordPress By GaMerZ.

WP-UserOnline Widget
Adds a UserOnline Widget To Display Users Online From WP-UserOnline Plugin. Please Activate WP-UserOnline First. By GaMerZ.

WP Movie Ratings
Wordpress movie rating plugin, which lets you easily rate movies By Paul Goscicki.

WP Plugins Tracker
This plugin helps webmasters track the new releases of the plugins they are using on their websites from their admin panel. By Sugan Shan.

Tags: blogging, blogs, content, design, plugin, plugins, sidebar, web, wordpress
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Inspired by Mashable’s latest streak of publishing insane link lists for their readers (covering images, audio, video, analytics and podcasting), I decided to publish my own personal toolbox for bloggers in general. Enjoy!

Analytics This

• Add This! – Make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your blog and subscribe to your feeds. Saves you the real estate of using tons of bookmarking icons, and also provides tracking stats.
• BlogStorm – A free service allowing you to track the number of websites linking to your blog posts.
• Clicky Web Analytics – One of the best stats services I’ve seen out there next to Google Analytics. They have a premium version you can try out free for 3 weeks, and it only costs less than $2 a month to use (if you sign up annually). Worth every penny, and offers even more features than Google does. Check here and scroll down for a comparison between Clicky and other analytic services.
• Google Analytics – Arguably the most comprehensive analytics service out there, now with a much improved interface and look.
• HitTail – Reveals in real time which keywords people use to find your website, while offering optimal keyword suggestions you can use for marketing and SEO purposes. They have a basic free service.
• Sitemeter – One of the oldest and most popular tracking service of choice for bloggers.
• Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem – Get a rough idea of where your blog ranks in the blogosphere. Determined largely by link popularity and Sitemeter stats.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

• Google Trends – You can view the latest Google search trends here. VERY useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ BlogPulse – Find out what the blogosphere is currently abuzz about. Also contains helpful tools to track stories and conversations between bloggers.
• Sphere – Excellent service that can help you find blog posts and media articles related to your content. They provide a widget you can install on your blog as well. Very helpful if you want to find other bloggers who are posting content similar to yours.
• Spotplex – Provides real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. Similar to Digg, but without the voting.

Everyone’s Got An Opinion

• Co.mments – I use this over coComment as it runs faster and it’s easier to use. Comment organization is rather simplistic though and can be hard to read through sometimes.
• coComment – This is more community oriented than Co.mments but it can get VERY buggy (and at the time of this writing there has been a lot of issues and complaints regarding its integration with Technorati.) Still, when it works it does prove useful.

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money!

• AdBrite – A versatile ad marketplace that offers you a variety of ways to publish ads and advertise your own site.
• AuctionAds – Display live eBay auctions on your blog for profit.
• CafePress – Merchandising, merchandising! Where da REAL money from da blogging is made!
• ChipIn – A cool widget that provides an easy way to do fund raising.
• Chitika – A contextual advertising company that offers the popular eMiniMalls ads you can place on your blog for profit. Best for blogs that are more product oriented.
• Google Adsense – Google’s ad publishing network, one of the foremost and most widely used networks by bloggers.
• Kontera – A service where you can change some of your text into link ads for profit.
• Openads – A huge ad-space community that offers powerful software to help you rotate and control ad space on your site. The ability to rotate ads will also make it far easier for you to use multiple ad services to help monetize your blog.
• PayPerPost – Write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion. As with most monetizing efforts, your blog should get a considerable amount of traffic in order to truly benefit from the service.
• Text Link Ads – One of the most popular context advertising services on the Internet, where you retain full editorial control over the advertisers that appear on your blog.

Multimedia Frenzy

• Radio.Blog.Club – One of the first stand-alone players that lets you stream sound on your blog.
• BlogTalkRadio – Host your own live talk show for free. A great alternative to podcasting, and allows call-ins to your show as well.
• BlogTV – Broadcast live and recorded video shows for your blog.
• finetune – A visually appealing widget that allows you to build your own custom playlist and embed it on your blog. Not as versatile as Radio.Blog.Club though.
• Flixn – Fast and easy way to upload a webcam video to the web and your blog. Very easy to use and perfect for those times you want to make a quick webcam vid on the fly.
• Gabbly – Chat service including code you can use to embed a chatroom on your own blog.
• Hipcast – A service that can take a lot of the guesswork out of podcasting for you. Offers audio and video blogging capabilities.
• Meebo – Meebo now offers you the ability to embed any chatroom you want on your own blog.
• myBlogTunes – Create your own radio station and embed it on your site.
• Odeo – Podcasting portal that recently assimilated Audioblogger into its service.
• Project Readon – If you’re a hearing impaired blogger, this site offers closed captioning for many popular Internet videos.
• Quizilla! – Got blogger’s block? Here’s a site with tons of quizzes you can take, the results of which you can post on your blog. There’s also a directory of lyrics, poems, stories, games and more.
• YouTube – Again, if you don’t know what this is by now, there is no hope for you.

Newsworthy

• Bloglines – One of the oldest and most popular free online readers for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content.
• FeedBlitz – Gives you the ability to offer email subscriptions to your readers, though it’s not without its problems. There’s a newsletter edition as well.
• FeedBurner – It’s FeedBurner. Nuff said.
• Feedster – A new service that gives you the ability to jazz up your favorite feeds and include them as widgets on your blog.
• Google Reader – Despite still being an experimental service, it’s already become one of the most popular feed readers out there. Neat and simple, though some features remain severely limited.
• Popurls – Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, NewsVine and more, get it all in one neatly organized page here.
• Topix – This might prove useful if you want to blog about local news rather than national or international (which is what every other blogger does.)

Picture Worth 1000 Blogs

• 123Flickr.com – Takes the guess work out of creating Flickr galleries for novices. The galleries are basic looking, but they can spare you a lot of coding grief.
• Flickr – You really, REALLY should know this one by now.
• PhotoBucket – Along with ImageShack, both sites provide one key service that will serve you well: the ability to offload your images elsewhere, thus relieving the stress on your own server during peak traffic times.
• SlideFlickr.com – Instantly turn your Flickr photos into a slideshow, which you can then embed on your site.

Promotion Commotion

• Blog Carnival – A directory of carnivals you can join to help promote your best blog posts.
• Digg – Want to try bringing in a horde of obnoxious, drunken, one time visitors to your site? Then Digg is the perfect place to go!
• Meshly – Not as popular as the major user driven news site like Digg, but it offers an interesting way to submit news articles (via instant messaging).
• Netscape.com – one of the largest user driven news sites, but it’s a bit slow and hard to navigate. However, it contains far more topics you can choose from to submit posts to, so your content is more likely to hit the popular front pages here than at places like Digg.
• Reddit – Another user driven news site, but one which can be more effective in bringing traffic to your blog. The quality of visitors also seem to be far better than the Digg community as well.
• StumbleUpon – Randomly surf the Internet with a toolbar to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. Also proven to be a great for bringing traffic to your site. (For more info on stumble promotion, read this article.)
• Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone – READ THIS THREAD from Webmaster World. It provides the best advice I have ever seen for optimizing your blog for search engine traffic, and truly reads like a “condensed SEO Bible.” Even though it was written in 2002, it’s just as true now as it was back then.
• Technorati – Where’s the Fire? – You probably already know
  about Technorati, but you may not know about their new WTF feature. It’s not as active as the more popular aggregators out there, but that fact means it also makes it easier to get your content voted into the front pages for more exposure.
• Truemors – This might be a good site to submit postings of a gossipy/rumor related nature.
• Twitterfeed – A free service where you can feed your latest blog posts directly to your Twitter account.

Reach Out And Blog Someone

• Blogathon – A blogging community that does an annual marathon (where bloggers post every 30 minutes in a period of 24 hours for the charity of their choice). Creates good exposure for your blog, as well as offering a chance to give something back to the community.
• BlogCatalog – A directory and community for bloggers. Contains a discussion forum and a well designed directory to help you find like minded bloggers and readers. In my view it’s far superior to MyBlogLog, which lately has become more stagnant and prone to spam.
• BloggerTalk – An up and coming blogging portal which includes a forum. Looks promising and may become the go-to spot for bloggers once they get enough members.
• Blog Mad – Traffic exchange network, where you earn credits while surfing other blogs. Great way to find new bloggers and expand your community, but the interface is HORRIBLE.
• BumpZee! – Similar to BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog but tedious to navigate, plus the community seems to be more narrowly focused on niche marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
• del.icio.us – You ought to know this one by now. Excellent and popular social bookmarking service, not blog oriented but it can be used that way. It’s a bit on the geeky side though, along with an interface about as attractive as Britney Spears without hair. If it doesn’t suit you, Ma.gnolia is a viable alternative that sports a much better looking interface.
• Feedslice – Currently in private beta, but keep checking back for its official launch.. It’s designed to be a niche social network themed around syndication feeds. Sounds very promising!
• LouderVoice – Review network that allows you to publish reviews both to their network and your blog. You can also use Twitter as well.
• MyBlogLog – Blog community that emphasizes connecting with readers of some of your favorite blogs. It’s more stats oriented than BlogCatalog, but it’s become stagnant lately and more prone to spam abuse.
• TheGoodBlogs – Clunky but interesting blog network. They still need to work out some of the kinks though.
• Twitter – A microblogging service where you can tell the entire world (who could care less) what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. Can also send tweets via IM and SMS as well (that is, when it works.)
• Webmaster World – Though some forums require premium membership and the site is tailored for web designers, there are still many free forums you can participate in to get help for maintaining and designing your blog.

Tools For Fools Bloggers

• .HTACCESS Banning Generator – Provides an easy way to modify your htaccess file for banning purposes.
• Browsershots – Want to make sure your blog still looks spiffy for Bulgarian readers using the Konqueror browser on their Linux box? Then this is the site for you.
• Copyscape – A Google like search engine that can help you find sites that might be plagiarizing your content.
• CSS Compressor – An online tool you can use to compress your stylesheets. Compressed CSS files can sometimes boost the response time and speed of your blog.
• Google Adsense Sandbox – Helpful tool to get an idea of what kind of ads might display on your blog from Google’s Adsense network.
• List of User-Agents – If you’re the sort of blogger who loves to check his logs regularly, here’s a directory of user agents you can look up to determine who owns or runs some of the spiders and bots that are crawling all over your blog.
• Market Leap Search Engine Marketing Tools – Several free tools you can find here, from checking link popularity to keyword discovery.
• SEO Toolset from Webconfs – A lot of cool tools you can use here, from checking backlinks to Kontera ad previews to making sure your URL redirects work.
• ServerMojo – Free monitoring service that can check your blog every 15 minutes to ensure it’s up and running. Includes various settings and notification options you can choose from.
• Test Everything – More online tools than you will ever need to test your blog.
• ZapTXT – Use this service to receive notification and alerts when sites are updated. The site relies on feeds to determine whether a site has been updated or not.

But I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Not to worry, here’s a list of sites I subscribe to via feeds, providing some of the best resources, tips and advice for blogging.

• Andy Beard – Offers lively blogging posts that focus on niche and affiliate marketing, social media and blog search engine performance.
• Blog Herald – A stylish group blog offering commentary and valuable articles from some of the Internet’s most prominent bloggers.
• Blogging Tips – Just recently added this to my feed, but so far he writes good stuff (though the Superman logo hurts my eyes.)
• Blogging Pro – News, plugins and themes for blogging applications, though most of it is geared towards Wordpress.
• Copyblogger – Emphasizes copywriting skills to help promote and build a successful blog. Note, that’s copyWRITE, not copyRIGHT.
• Daily Blog Tips – Shockingly, this site provides blog tips on a daily basis.
• DoshDosh – An always informative blog with articles focused on helping you promote and monetize your blog. Really wish he would drop the anime images though and replace them with Jessica Alba photos instead.
• eMoms at Home – Don’t let the name fool you. There’s some valuable content to be found here for blogging whether you’re a Mommy or not. Personally I’ve always considered myself to be my beloved car’s Mommy, so I fit in just fine.

Lorelle on Wordpress – She’s been around since before blogs became blogs, and provides some of the most insightful advice for successful blogging I’ve found to date. She also recently published a short book to aid beginners in successfully launching their blogs.

• North x East – An offshoot of FreelanceSwitch offering weekly but informative articles for bloggers.
• Problogger – Darren Rowse is a machine. Nonstop advice for professionally minded bloggers.

Addendum

For some reason I seem to have a hard time finding popular message boards and forums specifically dedicated to blogging. If you know of any that might be worth checking out, let me know!

Updates

As it turns out, Mashable also published a Blogging Toolbox a few weeks before I published this one, and I completely missed it (though this was before I started subscribing to their feed. And here I thought I was being so original too, *sniff*. The good news though is that there’s not much crossover between the two lists, so I’m glad to see I still managed to list a ton of goodies that went unnoticed by the Mashers.

Still, you should find their “toolbox” highly useful as well, so go check it out.

Tags: accessibility, ads, adsense, advertising, adwords, affiliate, aggregation, aggregator, album, alerts, analytics, audio, blog, blogging, blogs, bookmark, bookmarking, bookmarks, captioning, carnival, charity, chat, comments, communication, community, compressor, css, deaf, design, digg, directory, embed, feed, feeds, flash, forums, fun, gallery, generator, google, htaccess, IM, image, images, internet, journalism, Links, live, longtail, mail, management, marketing, merchandising, message boards, messaging, mobile, monitoring, mp3, music, network, news, nonprofit, notification, optimization, photo, photography, Photos, plagiarism, podcast, podcasting, preview, quiz, quizzes, radio, reader, recording, research, review, reviews, rss, rumors, search, seo, slideshow, sms, social, statistics, streaming, tagging, technology, testing, tests, tool, tools, tracking, trends, uptime, user agents, video, Videos, vlog, web 2.0, weblogs
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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My latest link discoveries and finds for today:

• Web 2.0 Badges – Useful collection of stylish web 2.0 badges and a badge generator.
• Bust a Name – Easy way to find available domain names using keywords you like.
• Top 10 Ways to Declutter Your Digital Life – Lifehacker – Useful suggestions for streamlining your PC habits.
• Online Music: 90+ Essential Music and Audio Websites – Yet ANOTHER crazy list by Mashable (they’re going to do this forever), this one for audiophiles.
• Podcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and Resources – Yet another crazy list from Mashable, this one for podcasting.
• Your Guide to Never Feeling Tired Again – Nice long list of suggestions to revitalize your body and get rid of that perpetual feeling of tiredness.
• FolderShare.com – Sync files, sync folders, transfer files and more anywhere – Great way to sync your content if you have more than one computer. Ideal I think for synchronizing your My Documents, My Pictures, My Video and My Music folders.

Tags: advice, audio, badges, blogging, bookmarks, computer, declutter, del.icio.us, design, domain, domains, free, health, howto, internet, lifehacker, Links, mashable, media, mp3, music, network, organization, podcast, podcasting, productivity, radio, resource, search, share, sleep, software, storage, sync, tips, tired, tools, web, web2.0, webdesign, widgets, windows
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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