Blogging with Flock

What Blogging Platforms Does Flock Support?

A table of supported blogging platforms is detailed at: http://wiki.flock.com/index.php?title=Blog_compatibility.

I am trying out Flock’s blog posting feature which you can do directly out of it’s RSS feeder. I’m using it to post to Blogger and WordPress. The Blogger one didn’t work that well. The font style and type was screwed up. Here’s the WordPress test to see if it is any better. I also couldn’t select tags which sucked.

I tried to paste a picture captured using FastStone Editor but couldn’t. Embedding pics should be an option.

Blogged with Flock

Typepad vs WordPress Analytics

As a blogger I like to know how many folks are visiting my blogs, what posts are popular, how they got to my site etc.

Out of the box analytics is a KEY factor for non-technical folks. As far as I’m concerned it must be provided by Blog providers in order to be taken seriously. But more importantly, it must be provided out of the box with no configuration or add ons or extensions…etc.

So, here’s two examples of out of the box analytics from Typepad and WordPress. I pay $150 USD for Typepad and $0 for my WordPress account.

Typepad:

One word: Sucks

WordPress:

Note – to view this clearly click on the image, then click on it again and you’re good.

This shows number of visitors, page views, trends and search terms used by a person to get to my blog.

And there’s more!

This shows how many RSS feeds are being capture by RSS readers.

So, what am I getting for $150? Good question. Typepad, care to answer this question for us?

WriteToBlog test

I’m trying WriteToMyBlog “out of the box” so to speak. Some initial observations:

 - it’s a free service, cool.

- it offers more functionality then blogger posting interfaces such as highlighting (how does one turn it off though?) Oh, I figured it out either select a white background or press the return key and backspace.  They should make it so that the you can select a default hi-lite so you can just select a word and it automatically renders the hi-lite though

- is the default font size 8 pt?  Can this be changed and stay changed or does it reset to 8pt?

• bullets  are cool, maybe sub-bullets in the future? Already there see below!
  • Here’s a sub bullet
    • Here’s a sub sub bullet

- Inserting pictures is a problem. There is no way to access, from what I can tell, an image from my local hard drive. 

- Superscripting^{Superscripting} and Subcriptiing_subscripting seems pretty cool. I’d take the subscription down a shade maybe.

- bolding works well as does italics. Just a heads up that you’ll know if the feature is active if it has an opaque blue shading around it.

- lets try some pictures:

 I dragged this Superman logo from Google images. The default setting is as you see this post. I imagine that I could tweak this but it would be better if the text wraps around the picture more eloquently. 

- Tags…this is a problem (maybe just for my first post?). I cannot access a menu of tags from my blog. Using LiveWriter I can. This means that I have to login to WordPress and select my categories (tags). This would not be an issue with Blogger because they don’t support tags. Or at least I’ve not figured this out yet. Tags are the key “index” of a blog. Tags are displayed for selection during the publishing process. Can they allow for adding tags at some point? 

- So let’s try to post this now! 

H2H Task: Posting entire webpage

Tool Used: WordPress
Ease Factor: :-0
Efficiency Factor: :-0
Effectiveness Factor:
Grade: Passed(Barely)
Comments: This time I uploaded the JPEG image directly in WordPress and sized the image to 500×750. You can now right click on the image and select view image and then you can magify the page to actual size. The problem is that a reader my hover her mouse over the image and if she doesn’t think to right click on it she won’t be know how to see the full page view either. There has to be a better way!

Summary: WordPress worked. Performancing and LiveWriter didn’t for a image this big. While WordPress won, it wasn’t the easied thing to do. Three clicks or less is best. If LiveWriter can be enhanced to allow full in-post or one click full views it would win hands down. LiveWriter has all categories in full view so it’s easier to remember and select categories. With WordPress you’ve got to scroll within a frame. I’ll put some comparison shots up sometime so you can see what I mean. This H2H Round goes to WordPress.

H2H Task: Posting an entire webpage

Tool Used: Microsoft LiveWriter, Capstone Capture
Ease Factor:
Efficiency Factor:
Effectiveness Factor:
Grade: Failed
Comments: This time I inserted a JPEG image which I saved to my computer using Capstone Capture. Unfortunately, you still cannot see the report.

H2H Task: Posting Entire Webpage

Tool Used: Performancing, Capstone Capture
Ease Factor:
Efficiency Factor:
Effectiveness Factor:
Grade: Failed
Comments: It didn’t work. Efficient and Easy  but not effective.

H2H Task: Posting entire webpage

This Lab mash up ties in these Lab Experiments: WordPress, Performancing and LiveWriter.

My task will be to upload a screen capture of my Top Posts Web Report for the past 30 days. Not only will you see the most viewed posts on my blog but you’ll also learn which method worked best uploading a fully webpage into a post.

This Head to Head to Head comparison is between Microsoft LiveWriter, Performancing and WordPress editor.

Web stats should be simple, WordPress beats Blogger

[TO VIEW FULL PAGE: Put your curser over the screenshot above>right click on your mouse>select view image. You should then be able to magnify the image to full size - I'm using Firefox.] 

I’ve spent way too much time figuring out how to use Performancing blog traffic stats reporting for my Marketing Superhero blog which uses Blogger.

WordPress includes blog and feed stats and below is a screen shot from today’s results.

We need to remember that ease of use is critical. WordPress may not report as much as I will want one day, but they’ve wet my appetite for blog analytics. It may make sense for them to offer an enhanced service for a small fee.

Embedding Google video-second attempt

UPDATE: No plugin needed just use [googlevideo=] and put in the URL for the google video after the equals sign. My thanks to the Neurophilosophers blog for the answer.

Google Video Test

This was my first attempt to embed a Google Video into my blog. It’s not happening! There are plugins for WordPress that allows the user to add videos from within the text editor. However, these plugins are not available in the free hosted version of WordPress. You guessed it my blog uses this free service. I’ll keep my eyes open and will figure out how to do this at some point.