After a lovely but somewhat short Holiday break in Virginia, USA. I’m back in front of the machine again. I was hoping to write a couple of posts on the plane to keep things updated, but after unpacking my laptop when the no seatbelt sign finally illuminated, I decided against it – But hey let’s move on.

If you’re like me and find yourself easily distracted while writing, I’d like to share with you a neat lightweight text editor that I discovered yesterday. Even though I now exclusively blog using Windows Live Writer, Q10 is an entirely different beast which serves a completely different purpose altogether. ⁽¹⁾

Q10’s primary goal is to totally immerse and focus your attention on text. Upon launching the program your screen will turn entirely black. No Windows task bar, no desktop, no nothing – just you and your text. It’s a different experience but I’ve found writing this way has boosted my productivity somewhat.

The program is shortcut driven, so if you’re not comfortable with using shortcuts on a regular you may struggle. But in all honestly, it’s not at all complicated and you’ll be up and running in no time at all.

Although the program has no toolbars, there is a small but non intrusive statistics bar at the bottom of the screen. Which gives you information on word count, pages and the number of characters in your document. It also comes with a handy spellchecker which other similar programs such as Darkroom do not provide. ⁽²⁾

Q10 is available to download free of charge. ⁽³⁾

1. http://burlyape.com/2009/03/on-windows-live-writer/
2. http://they.misled.us/dark-room
3. http://baara.com/q10/

After heading over to Windows Live, ⁽¹⁾ I decided to download and test-drive Windows Live Writer. ⁽²⁾ After using Scribefire for awhile I decided I required something with a little more punch. ⁽³⁾

First initial thoughts where very pleasing, the interface is very easy to navigate and the GUI is everything you’d come to expect from Microsoft. So if you’re familiar with Microsoft Word you’ll feel right at home.

Adding images into your posts couldn’t be easier, in fact the minute I saw how easy it was I was instantly hooked.

Simply browse to the image from your hard drive and insert it into your post. From there you’ll be able to tag it change the dimensions and add various built-in affects such as custom borders, emboss and all that jazz.

The image will be uploaded into your media library (Wordpress), and linked to and tagged accordingly. Live Writer can also be expanded by downloading free extensions from the Windows Live Gallery. ⁽⁴⁾

There are various plug-ins available to download, most notably for Flickr and YouTube – so for example, say you inserted a video into your post, when it comes time to publishing Live Writer will upload the video to YouTube or Soapbox and link to it automatically – cool.

Live Writer is compatible with Wordpress, Blogger, Live Journal, TypePad and many more, give it a try – and let me know your thoughts.

1. http://windowslive.com
2. http://windowslive.com/Desktop/writer
3. http://burlyape.com/2008/08/accelerate-your-blogging-with-scribefire/
4. http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?pl=8

Decided to try my hand at a little bit of video blogging.

Sharing your content by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and distribute your content with like minded people around the web. Is a great way to increase rankings, generate buzz! and promote your website or blog.

If you are using a blogging platform like Wordpress, there are a bunch of plug-ins you can download and activate free of charge. Once installed you’ll see neat little share-it buttons like the ones you see below this post.

Popular Share Software

The most popular share-it software has to be ShareThis and AddThis. Both are available for Wordpress as plug-ins or the less than manageable copy and paste variants. But which software do you choose? And which services do you want your content shared on?

If tracking how many visitors shared your content is important to you, then I recommend you try either of the above. As both ShareThis and AddThis offer free analytics as part of their service. If analytics are not that important to you then I recommend Sociable.

Be Sociable

The reason I preferred Sociable over the other two was simple. Sociable is non-intrusive, customizable and available as a standard Wordpress plug-in. I wanted to keep the design at J.T clean and I dislike Ajaxy buttons that expand and take over precious real estate.

aideRSS Rocks my Socks

Secondly I use a great RSS analytics package called aideRSS. If you’re not using aideRSS then I highly recommend you give it a try. Basically aideRSS tracks the popularity of your RSS feed by using what they call PostRank™.

PostRank™ ranks each article on relevance and reaction and you can judge which posts or content you deliver to your visitors where the most popular or relevant across the web.

Using aideRSS you can also view who digg’d, twitter’d, and bookmarked your content. Hopefully they’ll add other social services in the future but for now those options are available to you.

Which Services to Choose

This is a tricky one and there really isn’t any right or wrong. The choice is after all up you, I touched upon the importance of not overwhelming your visitors with too many options here. But if you’re really stuck I found a great article that discusses the most popular ShareThis data.

Using that research I whittled down my services to 11 choices. Strangely enough they don’t provide a MySpace button yet, but I found a temporary remedy here. Also including Twitter and Pownce was a no brainer for me, but you might decide otherwise.

Ultimately the choice is yours but I hope this information was somewhat useful in your quest to share your content like a pro.

Adjix the new URL shortening service with a twist. Enables users to monetize any outbound link they create using the service. With Adjix you can earn up to $0.10 cents per unique link view, and $0.20 for each unique click-through.

How it Works

Simple really, when an ad supported Adjix link is clicked, the user is redirected to the original web page with an ad displayed at the top. A slight concern is that the page is actually displayed within a frame, which may cause problems further down the line.

Analytics

The real benefit of using Adjix to shorten your URLs is the analytics. Although quite simple, when using the service, you will be able to track who and how many users are actually clicking on your external links.

Ad-Free Version

Adjix announced an ad-free version today for people who want to track the usage of their external links without ads. The ad-free version uses standard URL redirection as you would expect from TinyURL.

Having re-discovered just how valuable Google Reader is, the application has once again become an essential part of my Internet weaponry. If you are a recovering bookmark addict like me, you will undoubtedly appreciate this post.

The Problem

Before time began I bookmarked everything I found somewhat interesting. This habit over time became so unmanageable, that I often found myself scrolling endlessly to find the site that sold the toy with the Kung Fu grip.

Enter Google Toolbar

I needed a solution fast so I researched bookmarking applications and settled upon Google Toolbar. What a lifesaver, now I could simply search my bookmarks and synchronize them across all my computers, voilà.

Google Toolbar is great, those little search boxes you can download are awesome too. I would say 50% of the sites I visit are searched for using this application.

Enter RSS & Google Reader

As time progressed my browsing habits had changed, I started moving away from bookmarking to RSS. You see I didn’t want to jump around from site to site anymore, I wanted one place to go where I could view everything all at once. I dabbled around with iGoogle but found it annoyingly slow, my Fiancee loves it though.

Finally I settled on Google Reader, I must sound like a Google fan-boy. But seriously now I subscribe to almost everything, previously I would only bookmark sites I found interesting or worthy of my attention.

With RSS, it doesn’t really matter; I have literally tons of content to browse through in the morning. If a headline captures my attention I visit that site, if it doesn’t, I move on to the next one.

What tools do you use to manage the web?

Affspy is an excellent affiliate intelligence tool for those using affiliate marketing on their blogs or website. Using AffSpy you can search for affiliates from a variety of categories ranging from automotive all the way over to technology.

The results page of a search presents you with a break down of the amount of income you can earn with each sale or referral and the ad network that offer belongs to. In addition you can join the network with the offer all from the same interface.

I’m finding AffSpy very useful when searching for suitable affiliates and recommend heading over to the site and giving it a whirl if you are using affiliate marketing on your blog or website.

Scribefire is a Firefox plug-in that enables you to post to your blog without having to log into Wordpress or leave your current browser window.

I have just started using the application today and I already love it. What I truly like about Scribefire is the ability to split your Firefox screen into two sections.

If you’re like me and you like to read articles that you are referencing and blogging about at the same time, you might find that switching between your post and the article a real pain.

With the split feature, you can scroll and navigate websites while you write your post, making referencing a breeze. Other cool features include HTML and Rich text editing, selecting your categories, writing notes, and previewing your post.

I highly recommend trying Scribefire out if you haven’t already.

The hype machine continues to roll for this vastly overrated web application. I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about, and TechCrunch just need to stop writing about it every five seconds.

Okay I get it; you can tell thousands of random people what you are doing. But is it really that breathtaking? To find out I signed up for an account. And needless to say I found the service a complete waste of time.

Now if I owned a people business, then I can see where Twitter might be useful keeping your customers engaged and what not.

But other than that, I rather spend my time doing more constructive things, like writing this post.