Everything is new…

domain hosting: We have shifted to Blogger (for better and not for worse…)

new name: layman tech tips

(http://laymantechtips.blogspot.com/)

authors: nice try… they do remain the same…

new content: ofcourse… we will be shadow blogging on this blog for the next 5 posts and after that we will discontinue entirely. though the archives will be still available no updates will be posted 5 posts hence… if you notice a glitch pls. comment or mail, we will try to smoothen that out…

reason: well there are many reasons

1. wordpress makes no adsense (check out the screenshot below optionally follow this link)
2. wordpress was is very restrictive in terms of what it allows you to insert in posts
3. you cannot customize your layout
4. you cannot add lots of widgets
5. you have to use predefined tags… and that sucks…

Blogging Tips

This blog has talked about everything from Blogging tools, comparison of Blogging tools to photo Blogging. This post is about people who want to start their own blog but are note sure how to go about it. I will not be giving you a step by step tutorial on Blogging platforms or posting articles, I will be telling you what all to consider when you decide to blog. So here we go –

Research other Blogs – When you want to start a blog on a topic/product/service/experience, it is highly recommended that you first research similar blogs on the Internet, this will give you an idea, what popular blogs have in them, why people come back on these blogs, how they are written, style etc. Please don’t think that this is plagiarism, this is inspiration; it is not a bad thing to learn from a successful blog.
Clarity – Be very clear what you want to write and how do you want to write posts on your blog. If you are creating a blog to give your views on a topic/product/service/experience then stick to that, in these kind of blog you can also have news and give your own views on that. This helps, but give credit to the source from where the news was taken.
Layout/Design – The layout/design of your blog should mirror your interests or it should match with the total theme of the blog. Initially managing this will be problem, but once you get familiar with templates, it will be a cake walk.
Credits – When you start your blog, you will obviously take articles or insights or nuggets of information from other websites/blogs, give proper credits. This helps your in building credibility in the Blogosphere.

Tracking – If you have a blog don’t you think that somebody should keep a track of visitors/keyword for you? Don’t worry, just register your blog with FeedBurner or Google Analytics, they will do the rest for you. Just follow the instructions they give you and your blog is ready to be tracked.
Blog Indexing – Do not forget to index your blog with Google or Yahoo’s Webmaster service. It is free and once again their simple tutorial will help you in indexing your site. Indexing will primarily help your blog to come in search results of these search engines.
RSS Feeds – Once your blog is up and running, use FeedBurner to create feeds for your blog. This will help other people to subscribe to your blog in a reader or through their mail.
Promoting your Blog – These are some tips, which will help you in promoting a new blog

• When you send mails to friends and co-workers, put your blog’s URL after the closing salutation. The moment that person will read your mail he will notice the URL and click on it and if your blog is really interesting and insightful the person will congratulate you as well as ask others to read your blog

• Putting the Blog’s URL as a customized message, which gets displayed in your Google Talk or Yahoo or company’s internal messenger. Whenever you are online, the blog URL will get displayed and people in your friend’s list will click it out of curiosity and if they find it interesting rest will be history.

• There are Blog search engines where you can search blogs on the topics, which can be of interest to you. Search such blogs, read articles, if you like the articles comment on them and in that comment also put the URL of your blog. Next time the person, on whose blog you have commented, will read your comment he or she will definitely visit your blog.

These tips are not as efficient and accurate as Search Engine Optimization but they work thats for sure. I have experienced that.

Blogging is good and will help you enhance your skills and gain subject matter expertise. If you are done with the above things then you can click here to learn more about what all you can do with Blogging.

photoblogging with shozu…

One more photo-blogging tool apart from the ones already mentioned is Shozu…

Here are all the ways in which ShoZu keeps you connected.

Upload Photos & Videos. ShoZu enables one-click uploading of camera phone videos and pictures to over 30 online social networks, blogs, photo sites and other popular web destinations and of course email…

Download Friends’ Feeds. With ShoZu you can get your friends’ Flickr photos on your phone. Every time your friends add new photos to Flickr, they’re instantly sent to your phone so you’re always in the know.

Read & Reply to Comments. Posted a fun photo to your online profile last night? As your friends post comments, they’re sent to your phone where you can read and reply to them all.

Update your Status. Away? Keep your friends in the know while you’re on the go. Change your status for your different accounts direct from your phone with ShoZu.

Add Tags, Titles and Descriptions. Keep your photos and videos organized online with tags or do a little moblogging with descriptions. With ShoZu you can add tags, titles and descriptions before or after uploading your photos and videos.

Geo-tagging. Have a GPS enabled phone? ShoZu can geo-tag your photos and videos.

photo blogging

I had written about photo-blogging ideas now there is an addition to that list…

With twitxr you can share a moment, a picture, a thought, instantly with your mobile phone coz a picture is worth a thousand words…

Currently though it only has an iPhone native client they assure that nokia and android clients are on the way…

photoblog ideas…

Some people lead a very bored and idle life… Are there people who like to track every wrinkle, spot or hair on their face and think that it is a meaningful and interesting task? Probably no. But if your life is getting boring and you need some silly entertainment to perk it up… then well, a new website, Daily Mugshot, allows you to record and share how you look every day with the rest of the world, atleast the world that’s on to the web…

You can visit Daily Mugshot here

they mystery of rss readers…

What problem does RSS solve?

Most people are interested in multiple websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. For example this weblog, you would not know if there will be two posts in the same day or one post a week but to know that you would have to keep checking the blog repeatedly. Repeatedly checking each website/weblog to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem, which was quite widely used. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites/weblogs they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

What are RSS readers?

To handle the RSS ‘feed’ as it is called, you would need an RSS reader… Basically, it’s a way to clump all your RSS feeds from various websites into one handy interface. Here are my picks for the top three RSS, or feed, readers on the Web:

• Google Reader: Hands down, in my personal opinion the best feed reader out there. Great organization, super fast, and hardly ever in for maintenance. You don’t need to register if you have a Gmail account.
• Bloglines: A great rss reader too. Uncluttered and simple.
• Newsgator: I’ve heard a lot of good things about NewsGator; the best thing about it is that feeds can be delivered right to your Microsoft Outlook in an organized fashion.

You can subscribe to our RSS here

Here’s How:

1. First, find a Web site that you’d like to stay updated on. Let’s pick takeonlogyk for example…
2. An orange feed icon (displayed on the right, oh and it’s black in our case) is pretty much becoming the standard for feed subscription. If you happen across this symbol on the Web site that you wish to subscribe to, click on it and you’ll be subscribed to that particular site’s RSS feed; it will then start showing up in your feed reader of choice (a feed reader is simply an aggregator of RSS feeds; makes it easy to read them all in one place).
3. Subscribe to this feed. Plenty of sites nowadays will give you a variety of options in order to get you subscribed via RSS to their site. You’ll either see it written out (“subscribe to this site”, for example) or you’ll see a list of feeder chiclet icons all mooched together for easy access. Clicking on any of these links will enable you to be subscribed to that feed’s content.
4. Subscribe via a feed reader button. Most feed readers have made it possible for you to do a “one-click” subscribe: you find a site you’re interested in, you notice that your chosen feed reader has an icon displayed, and you click on that icon. The process differs from reader to reader, but overall, the process is the same and pretty simple – you just click and you’re subscribed.
5. Once you’ve subscribed to a site’s feed, you can view updated content in your feed reader, which is basically a way to aggregate all your feeds in one handy place. It’s super convenient, and once you realize how much time you’re saving, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without RSS feeds.

Best of luck!

mobile fusion…

MoFuse – an online mobile site creation app which lets you use your blog’s RSS feed as a basis of your mobile website – just launched their MoFuse Grow beta app today and it’s really nice. In just one step, you can enter the address of your blog, and instantly get a mobile website and unique URL created from your site’s feed, and then if you want you can continue to optimize it from there using the rest of MoFuse’s tools. It looks gorgeous, and works super simply. Definitely go check it out.

MoFuse Features:

• Custom domain name* – Use your own domain name or sub domain. (paid membership feature)
• SMS Widget – Place MoFuse SMS Widget onto your blog so your readers can get your mobile link via SMS message.
• Automatic Redirect – Use Automatic Redirect code to detect and redirect your mobile visitors to your mobile site.
• Brand your mobile site* – Upload your own image header/logo, grow your brands presence. (paid membership feature)
• Generate revenue – Enroll in revenue sharing program and earn 50% of all advertising profits using Google AdSense Mobile and AdMob!
• Automatic Image Resizing – Got images? Too big for a mobile screen? No problem, they’ll shrink them down for you!
• It’s affordable – By affordable we mean free. Yes we have a Professional level account, but all of their core features are available to everyone free of charge.
• Fully Compliant – Your mobile site will render perfect on your visitors mobile devices as they’re 100% .mobi compliant!
• Fully Hosted – No need to download anything! Just create your mobile site and they’ll do the rest!

Become a member here

Blogging tools – 2

I started with ‘blogging tools – 1‘ and now it’s time for part 2.

When you blog and blog frequently at that sometimes you worry about everything getting lost… To remedy that we recommend you to two of the best blog backup services…

Blogbackuponline – BlogBackupOnline offers an easy way to create full blog backup, schedule and store backups online, and restore/export blog from a backup file.

BlogBackupOnline Features

• Securely store and backup your blog data online (SSL 128 Secure site…)
• Schedule automatic backups (daily, weekly, monthly) and backup reports
• Export: Download and Save backups to your PC
• Restore Backup: quickly restore or transfer your blog to another location
• Supported blogging platforms: Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Friendster, LiveJournal, Serendipity, Windows Live Space, Movable Type, Terapad, and Vox
• Receive up to 50 MB of free backup space (this is more than enough for almost all of you…)
• Backup blog images (JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP)

[Update: BlogBackupOnline is out of beta and are now offering full range of service. The good news is that they will still have a free account, they call it 'freemium' apart from this they offer professional and enterprise accounts. The freemium offer includes 5MB of space this means for you that subscribers using less than 5 MB of storage space will be upgraded to the newest version automatically. Those users using more than 5MB of storage space will have an extended period of time (6 weeks) to continue to use the service while having the opportunity to decide if they would like to upgrade to a Professional or Enterprise account. After 6 weeks, they will continue to store your backups for one year, however new backups will not run. Techrigy will provide you with a guideline for exporting everything in your account and will continue to provide access to the backed up content.]
Blogbackupr is a web-based backup service for blogs. It takes less then a minute to setup and can automatically backup all blog articles and comments on a daily basis. It also comes with one-click restore functionality. The only problem, it requires your blog login details. And while this may not be a big issue for small personal blogs, for bigger blogs it definitely is an area of concern.

 

BlogBackupr – Feature List

• Automatically backup posted articles, user comments and blog categories.
• Automatic blog restore option: WordPress.com, Blogger.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.
• Works with all blogs that offer RSS-feeds.
• Backup multiple blogs at the same time.
• Download (export) backup files as WordPress RSS, standard RSS, Text or HTML.
• Easily preview backed up articles online.
• Coming: Ability to backup images and template files.
• For additional details go to BlogBackupr FAQ page.

Spell with flickr

This is an excellent tool that helps you spell words with images from flickr…

See the sample implementation here or here

To use spell with Flickr head over here…

Blogging tools – 1

After the comparison between different blogging domains in one of my previous posts the next logical step would have been to talk about several blogging tools that you can use…

Today we are featuring two of the most basic blogging tools…

JDarkRoom is a popular, simple full-screen text file editor with none of the usual bells and whistles that might distract you from the job in hand. If you are writing a novel, essay, thesis or just need to be able to concentrate on your writing, then JDarkRoom will definitely help. It comes immensely handy when you are writing a long post, a story, or recounting an experience to the community at large and need to focus on your content. (Download here) Type: Freeware

Windows Live Writer is a desktop blog publishing application. It features What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Authoring, Photo Publishing and Map Publishing. Windows Live Writer is currently compatible with following. (Download here) Type: Freeware

• Windows Live Spaces
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• WordPress
• All blogs that support RSD (Really Simple Discoverability)
• MetaWeblog API
• Moveable Type API
• Community Server
• PBlogs.gr
• JournalHome

the clash of the titans…

I’ve been in the blogosphere for almost two years now. During this time I have fiddled around with blogger.com (B) and wordpress.com (WP) exploring all the options and would like to post some a comparison of the two.

NOTE: In this comparison I have only taken into account the free wordpress.com hosted domain.

• Both are free blog sites that require nothing more than an ID and Password. That’s perfect! No need to worry about hosting, domain names, blah blah blah. Score: WP 1 | B 1
• Blogger is owned by Google. That’s cool. Word Press is open source. Even cooler. What does that mean for most people? Nothing really. But for those who care, it’s cool. Score: WP 2 | B 1
• With Blogger, you have much more control over the template. They give you access to the code so you can add all the sidebar junk you want. Of course you can also change the images, colors, etc. With WordPress.com you don’t get any control over the template except for uploading custom headers or changing theme colors in a few templates. Advantage: WP 2 | B 2
• Word Press allows you to use tags for each post which is great since it gives a perfect brief about the post that you have written. Tags are not supported in blogger. boo Score: WP 3 | B 2
• Word Press allows you to create pages of static info like an “About Me” (you can even change the name to ‘Author’ or something more apt) page. Blogger uses a profile that isn’t a part of your site. But that’s just for the “About Me” page. In Word Press, you can create as many pages about anything you like. Score: WP 4 | B 2
• If you create a post with a date or time stamp in the future, in Blogger it’ll show up with that date in the correct place. In Word Press, it’ll wait and publish that post at the time of the date stamp. Score: WP 5 | B 3
• WordPress.com allows trackbacks (a comment notification that someone blogged about you). Blogger does not. Score: WP 6 | B 3
• At least at this point, it seems WordPress.com’s Akismet spam blocker works better than Blogger, but it’s close very close call. Score: WP 7 | B 4
• Word Press provides you with basic stats. Blogger does not. Score: WP 8 | B 4
• Blogger and WordPress.com both allow multiple blogs on one account. Score: WP 9 | B 5
• WordPress.com has a very cool and easy import function so if you wanted to leave blogger, typepad, etc and go with wordpress.com, it’ll import all of your old posts and comments so easily. Blogger doesn’t know what import means. Score: WP 10 | B 5
• Word Press gives 3 gigabytes of storage as compared to a paltry 1 gigabyte of Blogger. Score: WP 11 | B 5

Overall winner: Word Press

My conclusion if you are into customizing your template and making your own template and blog, go with Blogger. You have more control over the look/design/template. However, the look/feel of wordpress.com’s templates are nice and clean and they are giving you a lot of options in the sidebar now. WordPress.com has many more options that are favorable like tags, pages, and trackbacks. This makes your blog better for visitors and encourages better conversation.

Also, I have more confidence in wordpress.com adding more features than blogger.com.