Another great way for people to get to know you is to show your face around the web too. You can combine both methods of letting people know who you are by using Gravatar.

Gravatar is a service that works in coordination with WordPress, Intense Debate, VideoPress and PollDaddy. Gravatar is a development from Automattic, which are the same people behind WordPress itself.

One of the things I really like about Gravatar is that I’m able to login to the Gravatar website with a single login, but setup multiple avatars to be used for multiple email addresses. With this functionality I can login and comment on various blogs and represent different entities with each comment. I blog for a variety of sites and like to be able to comment on sites and represent each of them independently. Gravatar allows me to do this very easily.

Post from: EveryJoe

Show Your Face Online with Gravatars

The problem is I’d like to more accurately group, consolidate or disperse the comments as needed so that when someone leaves a comment, anyone could read the comment from the blog itself. Right now I’m not sure of the best way to accomplish that task. I know there’s a plug that will let you pull in twitter mentions of your posts, I haven’t implemented it yet. I don’t know of anything that exists right now that would somehow pull in comments left by people on my Facebook feed of my posts and publish them to the blog post itself.

Has anyone out there achieved this in some way? If you have please, please, please let me know.

Image: Snagit of Facebook blog feed by Jason Bean

Post from: EveryJoe

Dynamic Comments on Blog Posts

Although the BlackBerry app is in beta and the developers caution users and testers to be careful in using the application, we need more of these types of devices being built for phones and mobile devices.

I do quite a bit of blogging and there’s plenty of times where I’m sitting somewhere without my computer and have a quick post idea. The ability to pull out my phone and start typing away would be terrific! Especially with the ability to take a quick photo or video with your phone and pop that into a post immediately!

The BlackBerry application currently works with WordPress.com and custom hosted WordPress installations. Just what I’d be using for my blogs and numerous other client sites.

Source: WordPress for BlackBerry App Launched in Beta

Image: Image created by Jason Bean from WordPress dashboard and product images from BlackBerry

Post from: EveryJoe

We Need More Mobile WordPress Applications

I want to be able to type out some quick blog posts while I’m out and about with my cell phone. My cell phone has a full, slide-out keyboard that I’ve become quite adept at typing on efficiently.

I’m very surprised that the WordPress dashboard doesn’t have a mobile friendly interface. Without that option available I’ve been wondering if perhaps someone hasn’t developed a mobile blogging application. My cell phone is running Windows Mobile 5. Does anyone know if that exists?

If it truly doesn’t exist, why won’t someone please develop it and let me know when it’s ready for me to test.

Post from: EveryJoe

Is There a Good Mobile Blogging App for WordPress

Prior to using Evernote I was using a combination of simple text files and Google Notebook to organize websites and other things I’d find online.

The Evernote application has been great. Mainly because it allows me to add items through the stand-alone application, the website if I’m on someone else’s computer, there’s an application for my mobile phone to use, and I can even send things to my Evernote notebook via twitter as well. How much better could it get?

Because of a tweet from geechorama who let me know there’s a way to import everything I had in my Google Notebook into Evernote nice and easy. Just visit this blog post on the Evernote website to find out how, and of course, while you’re there, go ahead and sign-up for your own account with Evernote.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Import Google Notebook to Evernote

When a blogger posts a blog through Windows Live Writer, it also maintains a copy of the post on the local machine. For regular bloggers, that adds up to a lot of space with time. A “proper delete” through the Open –> Delete makes it clear that deleting a post is equivalent to deleting it from the local machine as well as from the blog.

Some might like the backup, but we won’t mind an option to delete posts from the machine alone, do we? I am currently using a dirty trick to get it done.

All the posts you are working on using Windows Live Writer are stored as .WPOST files in the folder “My Documents\My Weblog Posts” under two sub-folders “Drafts” and “Recent Posts”. Delete the posts you want from them.

There is also a “cache.xml” file in the “Recent Posts” folder. This is the file responsible for keeping posts on the local machine in sync with those on your blogs. It is better left alone.

Please let me know if there is a cleaner way to do this. I am still a beginner user of Windows Live Writer.

Post from: EveryJoe

How To Delete Posts From Windows Live Writer

Milo recently summarized a Sandra Gittlen series called “Mac Vs Vista” quoting her excerpts. The series covering Manageability, Reliability, Security, Price and Others is going to surprise every reader in more than one way. Be sure to glance through them if you don’t have enough time to go over the actual series itself.

You’ve all heard about Microsoft and Yahoo! talking. Again. But have you heard of the new M$ phone or whatever? Jason uncovers the news apart from a video of a best man delivering the ring in a wedding. You must see it; you will get a better idea about whom not to choose as a best man.

Speaking of Yahoo!, Jayvee has some gossip about its disastrous tryst with Netdisaster. On a serious note, he has a strong point about PR firms hurting bloggers’ journalistc streak indirectly by taking their guest lists very seriously. With the blogosphere growing exponentially, they shouldn’t disallow bloggers just because they aren’t Michael Arrington.

Colleen has an excellent post introducing Google Gears. It is a must read for those who aren’t aware of the powerful tool. And yes, a trick to monitor out-of-office messages using Outlook is an overkill. Actually, that is an understatement.

Post from: EveryJoe

Tech Channel Roundup After Thanksgiving Week

I had been opinionated about using push buttons and organizing program files, worried about the rising types of blog fraud and spam mail, conscious about the precautions to be taken in a cyber cafe and disposing e-waste responsibly, sad about the layoffs and the Mumbai attacks, and excited about the Ancient Rome 3D and the LIFE photo archive projects. I also began an ongoing series on Cygwin: pre-introduction, introduction, installation. For all the things in between, refer the November archives.

I thank the readers for stopping by here, the fellow bloggers for link love, the spammers for spam that couldn’t be caught by Akismet, and the fraud bloggers for blog clones. Or not.

Looking forward to a better blogging experience this December.

Post from: EveryJoe

November Month in Retrospect

Blogging is increasingly being seen as a sustainable model of income. Where money is involved in large sums, there is also fraud. Problogging is perhaps at too early a stage to discuss at length about blog fraud, but there is undoubtedly an upward trend in these cases.

A blog with too many advertisements, IMHO, is not a fraudulent blog. It is simply a bad idea, and sometimes not altogether bad either.

Here are three common types I have come across:

Fake Blogs: The Internet provides a mask for users, allowing them to lurk anonymously. This is true in the case of blogs as well, though less frequently. While bloggers using a fake name is not necessarily fraudulent, nor is it unlawful by default, there are instances where fake bloggers abuse their anonymity to defame or hurt or cheat organizations or people or readers.

Sell-out Blogs: Affiliate blogging means selling products through blogs, which is good because the sale often comes through a feature overview and a review, and the reader can make a decision based on that. But unlike salesmen who believe in the product they sell, sell-outs have a pride in selling even trash. Sell-out bloggers excessively do affiliate blogging, providing positive reviews to every product they come across.

Pseudo Blogs: While sell-out bloggers take pains in creating original content, however untrue that may be, pseudo bloggers have tons of content all of which is dutifully lifted from elsewhere. The shrewder psuedo blogs post content taken from other not-so-popular blogs so that readers don’t easily recognize the content. Some take a step further and make disclaimers that they mostly pump feeds from various blogs across the Internet. However, no acknowledgements nor links to the original source are ever made, unless by accident.

You can help curb blog fraud. When you suspect a blog as fraudulent, raise an alert in any open forum. The best remedy is to inform the original source if possible.

Post from: EveryJoe

Types of Blog Fraud

It’s never easy to do but its a necessary evil. Sometimes you have to open up and tell the people what’s going on. This is something that Twitter has learned recently. With all of their downtime and problems, they have found that simply notifying their users that something is wrong makes everyone feel a bit more comfortable that their favorite micro blogging service will be around.

The IT folk out there could really learn from this. Inform, don’t shelter.

Photo Courtesy of: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004566.html

Post from: EveryJoe

Let the user in on your little secrets