Category: Blogging

If you're running several Wordpress blogs, your life just got a lot easier. Wordpress 3.0, codenamed "Thelonious," has finally arrived, and it supports multiple Wordpress blogs. You can manage them all from a central dashboard, too, with no logging out and back in. There's also a sexy new default theme called 2010, which is highly customizable and lets you post small "asides" in addition to ...

For some people and in some situations, using a regular RSS reader is not feasible. Sometimes you may want to, or have to, listen to your feeds, rather than read them. BlogRadio is one possible free solution for such a use case. It's an AIR application, which purportedly uses a "natural voice". Excited, I downloaded it to marvel at what new text-to-speech technology they may have cooked up; I was ...

It's weird to get excited about a blogging platform adding pages you can customize using your browser (doesn't everyone have those?) but for Posterous, it's a bold new feature. The lightweight blogging service distinguished itself with a unique post-via-email interface that meant you didn't even have to sign up for an account to get started. That works great for impromptu short posts, but what if ...

Screenpresso, my favorite free utility for taking screenshots, has just updated to version 1.1. The most notable change in this version is that Screenpresso can now "clean" transparent title bars in screenshots; this means that even if you take a screenshot of a window in front of another window, it would still come out crispy-clean. This was one of the major features which "Goliath" Snagit had ...

Microsoft has received an awful lot of positive feedback about Security Essentials. It's easily one of the best options Windows users have -- paid or free -- for malware and virus protection. InfoWorld thinks, however, that Security Essentials has a rather irritating and serious flaw: its update mechanism. The post I'm talking about takes issue with MSE "taking liberties" with users' ...

MicroPoll is a nice, free service for setting up single-question polls that you can easily embed on any website or blog. You give them your email (that's the only scary part, but it's inevitable with a service like this -- and you can always use a disposable account), create your question, quickly set up the possible answers, and you're done. You then get a piece of JavaScript that you can put on ...

Okay, so it turns out that Download Squad writers use the word "Facebook" more often than they use the word "an." At least that's what Copyc.at claims. This cleverly-named site tries to provide advanced readability metrics for your Web page so that you can figure out whether or not you're making any sense. It claims to rate your content using several highbrow scales, such as Flesch-Kincaid ...

I don't get it. A Web application for "writing in private?" What's the point? Penzu apparently received glowin praise from some of the best-known media outlets on the Web. PC Mag gave it the "Best Free Software of 2009" award. Am I the only one left wondering what the ...? Penzu puts you in front of a neat little paper-like "page" that is lined and everything. You can then write your thoughts and ...

So you want to quickly share a screenshot with someone. Take a screenshot, put it in your Dropbox Public folder, right-click the file, copy the public link, and paste it in the chat window ... lather, rinse, repeat. This gets tedious after a while. Gyazo makes short work of this workflow, paring it down to one simple operation. You run Gyazo, take the screenshot, and you're done. A browser window ...

Just a couple of weeks ago, we gave out some beta invitations to Regator 2.0, the new and improved version of a very useful tool for searching and exploring blog content. Well, you must have been amazing beta testers, because Regator is open to the public today. Regator's front page shows you the most-blogged stories of the moment, and you can get deeper analytics once you start searching. My ...

Let's start with the part you all want to hear: TechSmith is celebrating Snagit's tenth version, and so has graciously provided ten Snagit 10 license keys for us to give away to DLS readers! So if you want one, just leave a comment and you may have a chance to win. You have until 11:59PM EST Thursday 13 May to enter the competition. Full terms and conditions follow. Open to legal US ...

by treehouse1977 When writing a post without a specific screenshot, a blogger (such as myself) needs to come up with an appropriate image. That image must be licensed for use -- you can't just take any old image. What I usually do is go to Flickr and search for Creative Commons licensed images, with a "commercial okay" provision. I then upload the image and tag it manually, because you still ...

We've covered After the Deadline before -- from its emergence as a WordPress plug-in to the arrival of the Firefox extension. Now, Google Chrome users can get in on the grammar-y goodness: After the Deadline is now available from the Chrome Extension Gallery. The new extension is loaded with options, allowing you to whitelist certain phrases and websites, automatically check textareas prior ...

DLS commenters are quite the savvy bunch ... I don't mean the commenters who keep urging me to get Viagra and BMW (what kind of weird spam is that, anyway?) but guys like Philip, who commented on my post regarding the rather-cruddy Desktop Google Reader and pointed me in the direction of something much cooler: FeedSquares. FeedSquares is a Chrome extension (and an Android app) which puts a pretty ...

Feedling is a fledgling desktop RSS reader. Well, I'm not sure if "reader" is quite the term for it. It's really more of a single-purpose widget. As you can see above, it takes one or more feeds and just overlays a list of headlines on top of your desktop. If you're looking for a serious RSS reader, this isn't it. In fact, this thing seems rather half-baked; I could not left-align the headlines, ...