This is too cool. ieSpell:
is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do alot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).
If you've ever had to read my un-spellchecked suff, you can appreciate why I'd like this.
Using the patch found here, I'm trying to get Google API support working right for my blog. It doesn't seem to want to go, but I'll whack on it a bit longer and see what happens.
Here is proof that they're evil. One of the biggest physical spammers around. Nasty.
w.bloggar is a great little (free) Windows program for doing blog sumbission from your desktop. It uses the blogger API, to do its work, and that means it can talk to many different blogging back-ends. The only trouble I had was making it work via SSL. So I'm temporarily using it via normal http until that's figured out.
Well, I've spent the better part of today (literally, since I got up) playing with MT, browsing other blogs and blog-related sites, and a bit of catching up on e-mail.
To try and track my discoveries, I'm going to make a list of the more interesting or useful stuff I've come across. Here goes.
SQLData's RSS Reader -- contains a list of some high-profile sites that provide RSS feeds (or scraped feeds of other big sites). There's also a quick tool you can use to check out a feed if you already have the syndication URL handy.
Ye Olde Phart -- this guy has an amusing weblog. I'll be checking it out from time to time. Don't have a clue how I found it, but that's what's fun about this.
NewsIsFree -- a great free service that will pull RSS feeds and agregate them on a series of pages for you. Has alerts, shortcuts to blog what you find via the Blogger API, and other cool stuff. I've been looking for a good service like this. I can see myself using it quite heavily.
Syndic8 -- a great collection of RSS feeds. Has a ton of useful stats. As I write this, there are over 6,700 feeds but only 700 users. Wonder why more people don't go there. Ah, it doesn't appear ot have a customizable interface like NewsIsFree does. That could be it.
The Snewp -- a simple search engine to help locate feeds and individual articles. Once you find one, it's easy to integrate with other systems.
The Open Directory has a good list of RSS links as well as RSS newsreaders.
Registering and publishing with RSS -- an undated (why do news sites do that?) article on webreference.com about how to get a new RSS feed syndicated at some of the more popular RSS portals.
All of this has given me a most excellent idea for a project at work.
I'm really getting into tweaking MT templates and adjusting style sheets. With a little bit of futzing, I've figured out how to give my site a relatively decent look without going too far overboard.
My next task will be to attempt pulling all the old content from my nearly 3 year old on-line journal and getting it into MT. Yeah, I was doing the "blog thing" before people really called 'em blogs.
After a brief attempt at using UserLand's Radio to maintain a blog I had setup, I've given up on it. There were several problems I had with it:
So at the suggestion of Jon Udell, I've begun using Movable Type (MT). It seems to be one of the clear leaders in this area. And since it runs completely server-side, I can install it on a remote server, put it behind SSL, and use it from anywhere I want. Ah, the power of the web.
Anyway, things will probably be rough going here for a few days while I shake down MT and get used to it.