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Blogging
I just recently ventured into creating my own website again. There is something about doing it that is so fulfilling for me. Over the years, I have learned a lot about websites by creating them, and have found what should and should not go into it. Now, don’t let me mislead you: I am no pro at this by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, when you start talking about coding, you lose me right away. But, what I have started to learn more and more about is using the amazing resources that are out there to help you create your own site. I am finding that you really don’t have to know how to code to help you come up with a decently good looking website.
Take for example, the app that I am reviewing today called Feeder Ninja, which does something so simple in nature, but yet can come in very handy when you are creating your own site. Feeder Ninja takes your social media feeds and creates an embedable window that you can insert into your website. Again, simple in nature, but they make it so easy to do and it looks very professional.
Competition is always a good thing, right? At least I think so, and this “finding a replacement for Google Reader” scenario presents us with this opportunity. It is good to have choices, to find what we like and don’t like and settle on something that works for us. I bet you can get ten different tech nerds in a room and they would all have their own opinions as to why they like their favorite RSS reader. It’s the nature of the beast and that is okay, it pushes developers to make quality products and apps.
Bloglovin is one that is just a little different than some of the others that I have reviewed. For one, their focus is on reading blogs, but don’t let that turn you away from this web app. It is more than just reading blogs and it takes a fresh approach to the RSS feed reading situation that some may actually like. Let’s take a look at it more to see what it is all about.
Blogging. It’s taken over the web and with its rise in popularity, several blogging platforms have emerged that have taken this incredibly popular media by storm. You might have heard of WordPress (it’s hard not to). Over 62 million websites across the globe use the software and this is probably down to its incredibly user-friendly interface, its ease of setting-up and its general communal adoption.
However, there are times when WordPress can be a little too bloated and it’s often been noted that it’s almost shifted its focus towards being a framework as opposed to a tool to encourage and enable blogging. In short, WordPress can sometimes feel too big for small sites.
If only there was a new, simpler tool, ready to change the face of blogging. Enter Anchor. It’s beautifully-designed, a pleasure to use and the theming system is so simple, you can mock up a theme from HTML/CSS in less than an hour. I did.
Let’s take a closer look.
If it wasn’t for my Kindle, I seriously doubt I’d read half of what I do now. Whatever about the incredible Kindle store or the high resolution e-ink display, the main selling point is having thousands of books, magazines, newspaper and journals condensed into one little device.
Listed under Experimental on my Kindle lives the world’s worst Internet browser. A suggest use is accessing websites for further reading, yet trying to read a blog on Kindle is like reading War & Peace on a Tamagotchi.
The obvious solution here is to use something like KindleFeeder to send RSS feeds to my kindle. The unobvious flaw is that regular reading of blogs is best set for a PC or tablet given the usual inclusion of video and other media. What’s more I rarely read every article a blog publishes. I prefer to read by the subject. If I have a insatiable hunger for FarCry3 reviews, I want only FarCry3 reviews.
In sweeps Readlists like a squirrel in one of those flying squirrel suits. Loads of articles, all derived from related lists, straight to my kindle, inbox, phone or PC. How does it work? Should I even bother? Let’s check it out. (more…)
For the past few years, blogging has taken over the internet and it’s no surprise that blogging software and platforms have been increasingly easier to quickly access and use. However, if you just want to write the occasional post and aren’t too bothered about maintaining a full blog, these tools can seem incredibly bloated. Themes, categories, tags — these can quickly become a major pain to maintain. That’s where Feathers comes in.
Feathers gets you focused on the writing again and you can be up and blogging in seconds — relieving the need to configure a full blog. Read on to find out more!
Anyone who has published content online knows how difficult it is to create tables – especially if HTML is a foreign language for you. Be it a simple specification sheet or a more complex comparison chart, it’s an absolute pain to have to make tables suited for publishing online that actually look good.
It’s a problem I faced often when I was writing for a phone blog. Every time a new handset launched, I wanted to create a comparison table with a competitor. While making that in Excel was easy, translating the table into an eye-pleasing online experience drove me nuts.
Compare Ninja seemes to offer a solution, as an easy-to-use table-making app with beautiful results. Let’s take it for a spin. (more…)
Blogger is one of the original hosted blogging platforms, from the guys that went on to start Twitter after Google bought it out. Blogger is where many of us cut our blogging teeth, and was the first place many people moved after leaving their old Geocities sites behind. Today, though, Blogger’s popularity has been eclipsed by WordPress.com, Tumblr, and social networking in general which has kept many from focusing on writing a full blog.
Blogger seemed to stagnate for years, but in the past year, Google has done a lot to make it a much more modern blogging service. Let’s take a look at the new Blogger and its improved default themes, then check out 8 of the best new Blogger themes from our parent company Envato’s ThemeForest. (more…)
Ever find you’d like to share a bit more than your Facebook status update or Tweet will let you? Perhaps you’d be interested in writing more long-form content, or sharing more context with your images, but you don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a blog. You have a story to tell, and you don’t want to have to figure out 50 thousand settings to just write and share what you wrote with your social network friends. And if you discover other great stories from other people in the process, that’s great.
Sounds like you need Storylane. It’s the latest twist on an almost-blog app that feels more like a social network. Similar to Tumblr, but even simpler, it lets you have the space to tell your full story, not just 140 characters of it. And it’s rather fun to use, too.
It seems that in today’s world, sharing things with people you know really is the name of the game. Over the past few months, apps and even whole operating systems have been changing to include those all important sharing features, and it seems like you can’t read an article nowadays without having to send it to someone you know.
Blogs are also a great way to share your thoughts with people out there on the Internet and previously unknown people have transformed themselves into big names on the Internet just via their writings and posts. Yet now there is a new approach to blogs, one that allows you to harness the power of social media on your own blog, or meeting fire with fire, and it comes by the name of OverBlog. It’s a European blog platform that has recently expanded into the US and boasts over 3 million active users with 34 million uniques, according to TechCrunch. But what makes it so interesting, and is it worth a shot? Let’s find out. (more…)
People love WordPress for a good reason: it’s so user friendly that basically anyone can use it. Making a new blog post is as easy as logging in and pressing ‘Add new’. With such a wide variety of free and premium plug-ins, most users wouldn’t see a reason to not go with WordPress when starting a new blog. I too thought this, and was really happy running my personal blog on a self-hosted WordPress install. But this all changed a few months ago when I was given an opportunity to test Squarespace.
If you don’t already know, Squarespace is a relatively new service which we’ve reviewed before. And while a lot of things remain the same, many improvements have been made to the service over the years, including better pricing and added features. In this review, I will be going over what I think of Squarespace, and the features that stand out the most to me and that matter to most users.
