Blogging

In this version of SpyJournal (its the third website I have had) there have been some stand out blog posts. Here is the list of the top 10 all time favourite posts:

Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting

Microsoft Releases Word 2007 Viewer for Reading docx Documents (written by Lena)

The reality of the Internet

Web Feeds and Links

How we use technology at work, school and play

Multiple Monitors

Expelled the Movie - No Intelligence Allowed

Windows Home Server and SBS2003

The Internet, Pornograpy, Filters and Sexual Predators

A blog hero contest has been announced on the BlogHer website.

Here's how AnITGirl announces it:

Announcing the “Who’s Your BlogHer Hero?” contest.  In a nutshell, here’s how this is going to go down…I quote from the official rules when I say that we’re looking for “a blogger that has made an impact in the life of women and how that blog inspires passion, innovation and ability to inspire a community.”  Said blogger can be male or female, btw.  The nominator will send in a 100 word essay on why this person is worthy of being the BlogHer hero, and a team of judges will pick one blogger to award an awesome prize to.  The prize in question is a trip for 2 to BlogHer in San Francisco this summer.

Check all the rules on the blog her site and then nominate yourself or someone you know.

Following a is a list of cool stuff I didn't have time to write individual posts about.

Random Web stuff

MyOpenID - If you don't know what OpenID is, think of it this way, one sign in authentication process for every website that supports it. Drupal 6 has it, Yahoo has it, lots of places have it - learn more about OpenID and get your own.

Tagurself - enter a feed link or a url and it generates a tag cloud for you.

TeamViewer - excellent remote desktop sharing software - and its free!

Microsoft SharedView - remote connection - sharing applications - great for training people how to do things remotely.

If you have several people posting to a blog, you might want to set it
up so that each person's name at the end of their posts links to their profile. Here's how to make it work:
First, what you'll have to do is get the profile addresses for each person who will be posting to the blog. You'll notice that each one looks something like this: http://www.blogger.com/profile/XXXXXXX where "XXXXXXX" is a particular ID number. Make a note of that number for each person.
Next, add the following code to your template, between the HTML tags:
var team = new Array();
team["First Member"]="XXXXXXX";
team["Second Member"]="YYYYYYY";
team["Third Member"]="ZZZZZZZ";
function makeprofilelink (authorname) {
var pid = team[authorname];
document.write("" + authorname + "");
}
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Hi my name is Amanda.

I am going to be writing on SpyJournal soon. I am working for Tim and will be reviewing new web technologies, gadgets and cool stuff for you.

Look out for my first real post in the next couple of weeks. Be nice to me, I am still learning some of this stuff!

Thanks
Amanda

Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now add the wonderful outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts.It's light, requires no registration and very intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post. Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well. You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment. Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post.

Found on Labnol

It never ceases to amaze me; the stupidity of people. As Charles Mackay wrote long ago in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

It seems there are some people who just really do not understand the Internet, and in their rush (or greed) to get rich quickly ignore all the commonsense and warnings of those who like Darren Rowse have achieved some measure of wealth from blogging. How? Darren explains often that his problogger.net website is not his mail money maker, rather his Digital Photography school website is. He provides a real product for real people.

And so to the point of this article, and the nature of the Internet that seems to have been forgotten in the glimmer of fools gold. As Doug McCaughan sagely observes, people use the web for Information, Utility and Entertainment, in that order.

So where are the fools? I think there are two types.

OpenID allows you to use a single username+password combination that lets you log into hundreds of websites including Digg, Blogger, WordPress, Technorati, etc. Unlike traditional web forms that require you to type both the user name and password, you just need to type a personal URL in the OpenID login box. To get an OpenID that is the same as your blog URL:

Step 1: Visit myOpenID and create your profile - it will be something like xxx.myopenid.com

Step 2: Open the HTML source code of your blog / website and add the following lines of code:

<link href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” rel=”openid.server” />
<link href=”http://xxx.myopenid.com” rel=”openid.delegate” />

Replace xxx with the user name that you created in Step 1. Save and you are done. Your blog URL is now your OpenID.