Archive for the 'Tools' Category

Wordpress Plugin - smart update pinger

Published on August 19, 2006 in Wordpress. 0 Comments

This little plug-in has a very simple, silent, and useful feature. Essentially it ensures that your blog will only ping the various blog tracking servers when you publish a new blog entry, and not when you edit an existing entry. There is really no reason to ping these servers when you have updated.

This plug-in  can be found at: http://www.daven.se/usefulstuff/wordpress-plugins.html

Desktop blog editor - Zoundry

Published on July 14, 2006 in Blogging and Freeware Applications. 1 Comment

This particular post is being written in a free WYSIWYG blog editor called Zoundry. So far it looks pretty good—in fact I would say it is the best offline blog editor I have tested. Here’s some of the key things I think it has going for it:

  • It has a good range of dictionaries for spell checking, such as the UK English that is missing from w.Blogger. The languages options built into it are English UK, US, CA; Dutch; French; Swiss French; German; Swiss German; Italian, Norwegian; Russian; Spanish; Swedish. It will automatically download the dictionary data file for which ever language your choose.
  • Very feature rich. The only feature I like to have on hand which is not here is the ability to manually define the Wordpress post slug. I’ve not found an offline editor that allows me to do this as of yet.
  • Nice interface, with great support for multiple blogs, blog accounts, blogging systems, etc.
  • Great storage system for existing and unpublished entries.
  • A built in code (XHTML) validation tool. It’s a little slow but does the trick for those that want to know their XHTML status.
  • A nice preview system that allows you to import or download your template
  • It has a localisation function in it, which I’ve not tested as the default is English but I assume non-English users can download localisation files in their language.
  • You are able to specify a “media repository” where Zoundry will upload your media files to for linking to from within your blog entries.

Zoundry also provide an affiliate sales system. Essentially Zoundry is an intermediary for a range of affiliate providers. The current options are Amazon.com, Buy.com, and Cooking.com. I understand they will be adding more in the future. The Zoundry editor is set up to allow the easy insertion of items from any of these affiliate stores. You then get a percentage of the affiliate commission and Zoundry keep some for themselves. It ranges from 70% - 80% for you and 20% - 30% for them. Might come in handy for those that want an easy solution to reviewing items on the net and generating affiliate sales.

For now Zoundry is my preferred offline blog editor. The others I have tried are w.Blogger (nice features but no UK English spell checking), and Blogjet (UK English but bare minimum of formating features).

UPDATE: 14 Nov 2006

Zoundry continues to be my prefered desktop blog editor.

If you would like a way to easily post blog entries via Zoundry from your browser check out the various browser extensions here.

PSPad editor

Published on May 25, 2006 in Freeware Applications and Tools. 0 Comments

There are many text and code editors available today. Many of them are free and many at low cost. For some years I used UltraEdit and found it to be very good. I was, however, using a pirated copy of it and I eventually decided that was not necessary and began a search to find an equally good editor that was free.

What I found was PSPad. The latest version which I have just now updated to is just great. I can’t think of any reason a coder would want to use any other editing tool. It has excellent built in FTP support which makes updating pages online a sinch.

If you are into coding or editing text files (.txt, .html, .php, .asp, etc) then check it out.

The home site for PSPad is www.pspad.com

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