New Comm Biz

There are a few things I’ve been wanting to set up for my blog. But like a lot of non critical projects they tend to take a back seat to the ‘real’ work that fills up our days. Now that the holiday break is here I’ve been able to make some of those changes.

You’ll start to notice Amazon, Diigo and ScribeFire used more in the site. You’ll also notice that in order to condense the front page I’ll be using a read more link that requires site visitors to click through to read the full article. This won’t affect anyone subscribing to the RSS feed. It’s intended to make it easier to scan my most recent articles by giving a taste on the front page, without having to scroll down forever. Shorter posts won’t require this.

• Amazon
  I read, I read a lot. (Look for several ‘book reports’ in the near future.) Some of my most popular posts have to do with books I’ve read. Having realized that I have decided to write more about the books I read and how I’m applying them.Because of this I decided to take advantage of Amazon’s affiliate program. This is actually something I debated about for along time. I’ve never tried to sell you -my readers- anything. So I kind of felt weird about it for some reason.

  I got over that quickly. But in the spirit of full transparency, and warning, I will be using Amazon product links where ever it’s appropriate. You’ll also notice two new widgets on the side of my blog. ‘What I’m reading’ (yes I’m reading 3 books at the same time). ‘MY Top 5 Books’, these are books I highly, and not lightly, recommend you read. Rent them from the library, buy them from a brick and mortar, or feel free to click threw from my site.

• Diigo
  I have also been playing around with Diigo’s daily blog posting. Diigo is a social bookmarking service, like Del.icio.us but has a lot more services. Also like Del.icio.us you can set up Diigo to post your bookmarks to your blog. The cool thing you can do with Diigo that you can’t do with Del.icio.us is post certain tags and not all tags.I set up a special tag for this blog and anything I tag with it will be posted here. If you look at my last three posts these were posted individually instead of all at once. Future Diigo posts will come all at once. Diigo has a much better editor and lots of room for commenting. One thing I don’t like is that you see the link, followed by my comment and finally the quote from the article. The way it’s laid out makes it look like my commentary is the quote. I think the quote should be indented and not my comments.
• ScribeFire
  Okay, I’ve actually used ScribeFire before but I just got it set up on my Ubuntu laptop (where I do most of my blogging from). ScribeFire is a FireFox plug in and a great blog editor. The only better blog editor that I’ve used is Windows Live Writer, which I use when I blog from work on my other laptop.While ScribeFire doesn’t have quite as robust an editor as Live Writer it let’s me do in line Technorati tags and I don’t have to leave my browser to blog.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Diigo, ScribeFire, blogging

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