Introducing Blog`a`zine, a blogger's magazine

What is Blog`a`zine?

Blog`a`zine = Blog(ger) + Magazine.

Blog`a`zine - a blogger's magazine for blogger's. A magazine about blogger's, blogging tools, and blogger’s interview will be released every month. Magazine will feature articles / posts from the blogrtools blog. Magazine will be available for free in PDF format. Subscribe to the RSS feed to get to know more updates....

What will the Blog`a`zine contains?

Following are the list of items at present I have in mind for publishing every month. I will try to add more to the list as and when anything useful that comes to my mind. You are welcome to add more to the list which I will try to cover in next edition

• Interviews from blogger's,
• Tips written by me,
• Snippets,
• General Information's about blogging

If you would like to contribute to Blog`a`zine, please contact me via email. Lot more to come in the next November editions.... Meanwhile you can download the October edition here or view online here.

Technorati Tags: blogazine, blogging, blogger, blog, magazine, interivew, tips

Live Writer Technorati Tagging Bug

Windows Live Writer has a feature of adding tags from various website's like Technorati, deli.cio.us, LiveJournal, and Flickr etc. When inserting the Tag links for Technorati like below

Technorati Tags: Live writter

The problem with the above is that it appends the '/' slash after the tag. i.e the above Live Writter links to

http://technorati.com/tags/live%20writter/

which is wrong. Because the Technorati tags does not have a 'tags' word and '/' in the end appended to it. the right way of doing is show below

http://technorati.com/tag/live%20writter

In order to generate like this, click on the Tags you have Inserted. on the right sidebar, you would see Tags Properties. Below that you would see the Options where your tags will be displayed. Below this, is the Tag Provider drop down. Select the (Customize Providers...). A dialog box with Tag providers list will open. select Technorati and click Edit button. You would see some thing called HTML template for each tag textarea which contains below text

<a href="http://technorati.com/tags/{tag-encoded}/" rel="tag">{tag}</a>

change the above text with the below one by removing the trailing slash '/' after {tag-encoded} text

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/{tag-encoded}" rel="tag">{tag}</a>

Press Ok and close. Re-Insert the Technorati tags. Now your Technorati tags will be properly visible as below

Technorati Tags: Live writer, bug, technorati, tools

Live Writer + Blogspot

This Post is written using Windows Live writer. Its so cool that windows application automatically detects the blogspot blog and downloads the templates and provides a great user experience in writing blog.

Installation

• you need to have administrator privileges to install this application. If not, ask your system admin to install
• Download from here and open the setup and continue the Installation Wizard.
• Give your Blog URL, Username, Password. I suggest you not to save password.
• Wait for some time and it will ask you whether to download your blog template. Say Yes to it so that you will get a blogging feel. software industry say it as WYSIWYG abbreviating What You Say Is What You Get

User Experience

• Pretty Neat user experience from setting up blog and up to writing a blog post.
• Bit slower for me (I have 1 G RAM and Pentium M processor) when doing right click while writing posts
• No font selection on the toolbar. You need to traverse to the top Format menu > Font.
• you can author multiple blogs.
• Write blogs offline and save it as draft. once you are connected, you can publish it.
• You can add tagging for Flickr, Technorati, deli.cio.us and many...(check insert drop down)
• Have the option of including online / offline pictures and videos directly without any issues. Below picture is inserted from live writer.

Design

     Elegant Design. Will not look like typical windows application. Looks like Vista based application. Shadowing menus gives you a pleasant drop down experience.

Technorati Tags: live,writer,live writter,blogspot,blogging

Tip3: Using Feedburner and Sitemap together

Feedburner is a RSS Feed provider for blogs and other websites. It helps you to track your RSS Subscribers, its Statistics etc. you can even make money using them. they place ads on the RSS feed and share the revenue just like Google Adsense does for blogs / websites.

Google Sitemap is a tool that helps you to make your blog / websites, search engine friendly. it give you suggestions on the content, proper html generation and lots many ways.

How can i make use of both?

You can employ Feedburner in your blogspot administrator page > Settings > Site Feed. Sign up for feedburner and generate the Feedburner RSS url and update in blogspot. All of your RSS request on your blog will be redirected to Feedburner RSS. They provide you stats about your rss and tools like email subscriptions etc. You can try adding this blog which is powered by Feedburner. Feedburner is now owned by Google. soon we can see hassle free integration from blogspot.

Once you have added the rss, then sign up for Google Webmasters Tools (formerly Sitemap i guess) and add your blog url http://[your blog site]/rss.xml?orderby=updated. if you are not using Feedburner, you can simple add http://[your blog site]/atom.xml. In this way, Google crawler will get to know about your websites and the contents in it. It will start crawling within few minutes which depends on how Google resources are free. some times it may take an hour for your sitemap to be said OK. If you encountered any errors, please let me know. i can help you to kick of the error.

If all goes well, you would be able to see your blog crawled by Google Bot. Hope this helps to get you kickstarted with Feedburner and Sitemap.

Tip2: Indic Blogging

If you are from India, and you would like to blog in Hindi, you can now do it in blogspot. Google India labs gives a transliteration technology attached to the blogspot editor which enables you to type in English which automatically gets converted to Hindi. for example if you like to type हिन्दी , just type hindi. for more advanced typing you should be familiar with writing Hindi in English. for eg. kaesa hai will be like कैसा है like that.

If you are from south India and you would like to type in tamil, you can use a tamilkey firefox extension which does the transliteration job. for eg type thamiz for displaying தமிழ். you can also use quillpad.in which also suggests word based on user input. If you would like to type in telugu, you can use a telugutoolbar firefox extension which does the transliteration job.

Technorati : blogging, hindi, india, indic, tamil, telugu

Tip1: Write Blog directly from your Email

Blog from any where and using any thing. all you need to have is the browser or a email client which can send a email to blogger.com . once you set up a blog site with sites like blogspot.com, you can specify the the email address under Settings > Email > Mail-to-Blogger Address

I blogged this article using the email sent from my Yahoo! email account.

more over, you should not reveal the email address you specify in the above column to any one. there is also a option below the above mentioned Mail-to-Blogger Address settings about to publish or keep the post as draft that is posted via email.

I am testing it out this feature.. such a cool feature huh!

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