Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

The “recommended content” aggregator

Nov 28, 2006 No Comments »

Om Malik has reviewed a new link-sharing social media tool called Spokeo that lets you recommend blogs posts, links and videos to your friends and family. It’s almost like Digg but more interactive and personal.

As Om says, there is so much content available on the Internet that day by day it is becoming harder to decide what to read and what to skip. Tools like Spokeo can help readers make educated decisions in this regard.

The RSS readers people use

Nov 27, 2006 No Comments »

A few days ago I published the top blog trends featured at Modern Life is Rubbish. Now they have published stats about what RSS readers are being used the most. I’m still using RSS Bandit – I’m not very happy with it, but it is better than the Thunderbird RSS reader I was using. Or perhaps the Thunderbird RSS reader was better. Well, I’m not sure. I think I’ll use RSS Bandit for a while and then decide. I’m definitely not going to try Bloglines (it comes at the top of the RSS-reader-usage graph, below the “Others” tool) because it is an online tool. I prefer desktop applications for the time being. May be after five years I’ll start using remotely hosted applications.

5 essential OSX blogging tools

Nov 27, 2006 No Comments »

I have never in my life used a Macintosh computer; never even seen it. But I know a lot of people who use them; even some of my clients use them. Problogger recently published a blog post on 5 Essential OSX Blogging Tools (I got this link from Lorelle’s blog). Oh yes, I can see Ecto in this list; many Mac users I’ve read use it for publishing blogs and until a few months ago it was not available on the Windows platform (I think I read about Ecto at Gigaom for the first time). Yesterday I downloaded it and tried using it. Wasn’t much impressed. Actually I’m using Windows Live Writer these days but it’s got some issues with trackbacks (well, even my WordPress installation has some issues with trackbacks) and excerpts (there is no place to insert excerpts). So I thought of trying some other software. Right now I’m writing my posts using Live Writer and then using the WordPress control to publish them.

Vox — a new blogging tool

Nov 27, 2006 No Comments »

Vox is a blogging tool that lets you decide who can read your blog. This means if you want to write your posts for only a selected few, you can do it using Vox, according to this review. I’ve been trying to nudge my relatives, scattered all over the globe, into blogging and sharing what they’re up to with all of us. This might be exactly the tool we may use because, as the review says, you don’t have to dabble with code in order to manage your blog, as it happens in most of the blogging software. Since it’s free — at least for now — I’ll check out its features some day soon.

RSS Bandit - for reading RSS feeds

Nov 22, 2006 No Comments »

I’d been looking for a decent (free, of course) RSS feeds readers for a while. Up till now I’d been using Thunderbird’s RSS reader function. Although it’s quite good, with all that emails things becomes quite cluttered, and sometimes I feel it keeps updating the same old feeds again and again.

Today I found RSS Bandit, an RSS reader built on the .NET framework. It’s far better than any RSS reader I’ve used so far — not that I’ve used many. Try it if you want to. As soon as the feeds are updated, you get a popup window at the bottom of your screen (it’s not intrusive) so you know when your favorite bloggers are posting and then be the first one to comment ;-).