"Blog Technologies" Posts
What platform should you use? What technical skills should your team have?
How Social is Your Blog?
By their very nature, blogs are the building blocks of Web 2.0. For those of you who don’t know, the term Web 2.0 was coined by Tim O’Reilly back in 2003, and is defined by wikipedia as:
… a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.
Tools We Love – Wufoo Form Builder
We love Wufoo! Wufoo allows you to create forms on the fly and easily insert them into your websites and blogs.
You don’t need to be a programmer or web designer to implement and make beautiful forms. The Wufoo interface is slick and intuitive – anyone can make a form, questionnaire, survey, and more (the possibilities are endless) in about 5 minutes flat.
Cool features:
- Use any web browser to build forms quickly, including the ability to drag and drop form fields.
- Easily customize the layout to match your site’s look with a few clicks of the mouse (or your own CSS XHTML styling).
- Integrate the form on to your site by simply cutting and pasting a snippet of code.
- No need to create a database or develop backend scripts to collect your data –
Wufoo does it automatically. - Email entries can be emailed to you or updated in your RSS feed as they are submitted.
- Wufoo manages your information securely, and it’s easy to export your data to excel.
- Track form usage with day, week, month, and year graphing.
- You can try ‘em for free (tho other paid plans are available).
Extending Your Blog’s Reach Via Feedburner
Feedburner rocks! This tool allows you add extra dimensions to your blog’s reach.
RSS Tools
By burning your feed, with Feedburner, you can:
- Publicize your feed and make it easy for people to subscribe
- Manage your feed (even find out if someone is using your feed in a less that “credible” way)
- Track your feed’s subscribers (see how many people are viewing your feed and which stories they are clicking to read)
- Optimize your feed’s performance (we love adding the Feed Flares into the posts and RSS feed)
- Troubleshoot your feed
How Can I Contact You?
While we live in a continuous wired-in existence, doesn’t it strike you funny that out of the box blogging software doesn’t offer much in the way of allowing others to contact us? ContentRobot offers some ways you can enhance your blog, so that others can reach you:
Email links
It’s easy to add your contactme@myblog.com link on your blog; however, it opens you up for a bunch of spam. To combat that, you can create a link that doesn’t explicitly write out the address – consider these formats: contactme [at] myblog.com or contactme[SPAM]@myblog.com (don’t forget to tell people to remove the [SPAM] when writing you).
WordPress Pulls Ahead
Although we have clients on a variety of blogging platforms, including Drupal, TypePad, and WordPress, we’ve been suggesting WordPress more and more. Why?
While each of the platforms has its quirks – and things we love about them – we think WordPress provides the most options and flexibility. We can offer the maximum amount of customizations and enhancements with WordPress.
We have been tentative to upgrade our clients to the latest 2.1 platform, but have found that our fears have been squelched with our latest client install. We are impressed with its stability and features.
