Brittanica Online is offering free one-year subscriptions for bloggers, webmasters, and writers who publish “regularly.” This is fabulous news for bloggers who need a more reliable source than Wikipedia for background and supporting quotes.
Fill out the form requesting access, and they’ll get back with you.
Update: Apparently there were some issues with MarsEdit, the blogging software I and many other Mac bloggers use to compose blog posts offline, and its compatibility with WordPress 2.5. According to this post at The Blog Herald, that’s been fixed. I can happily report I haven’t had any issues with WordPress and Mars Edit after the update of each — they seem to get along quite well.
I’ve been working with WordPress 2.5 for a few days now, and am ready to report back on what the new release is really like.
First, the dashboard. Don’t let the underplayed descriptions on the WordPress blog fool you. This is a greatly redesigned dashboard, both in look and function. And while it took some time to get used to it, I admit, it’s an improvement. 
I also love the new feature that allows you to change your permalink without radically altering your normal architecture across the board.
Overall, it’s a much cleaner appearance, which makes it easier to compose, I think
Working with images is greatly improved as well, although it requires some getting used to. Formerly, the upload box was on the same page as the post editor. Now, it’s a pop-up box that allows you to work with each file individually. There are many more options for working with your images, too — from changing the URL, adding a new size (medium) to the old options of thumbnail and full sized, to (best of all) automatic positioning. Check it out:
The post editor is pretty nifty. The same old code buttons (or, if you use the visual editor, the formatting buttons) are there, but there’s that “add media” function now, which makes adding podcast files or images a snap. Then on the right, the “Related” list shows the most commonly used tasks (managing comments, managing all posts, managing categories, etc.).
Below the post editor box, there are tools for working with tags, categories, and all the other tools you’re used to — except now they’re below the post, out of the way, leaving a more uncluttered working space.
Way, way up. Kudos to the WordPress team for a wonderful release.
WordPress 2.5 was released last week, and the question arises: Should I upgrade my blawg?
Short answer: Yes. Here’s a longer answer.
You can read all about the new release and its features and improvements over prior versions here at teh WordPress Blog. What follows is a brief summary.
The first thing to realize is that this is not a baby-step release. These are some serious improvements! Many new features have been introduced, and lots of improvements from small to huge will make for a more pleasant blogging experience all the way around.
Some of those features are:
And much more — you can see a 4 minute screencast of the various new features here.
If you’re wondering what a salted password is, by the way, this Wikipedia article offers a pretty good, if somewhat technical, explanation.
While much of these improvements are going to be beyond the ken (or caring) of many bloggers, including blawggers who don’t care how the engine works — they just want to get where they want to go! — some of the new benefits are pretty valuable. Consider “plugin upgrades” about which Matt writes:
[I]f the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory since 2.3 we’ve told you when they have an update available. Now we take that to the next logical step — downloading and installing the upgrade for you. This is dependent a little bit on your host setup, and it may ask you for your FTP password much like OS X or Windows will ask you for a password, but it works well on majority of hosts we were able to test, your mileage may very, plugins in mirror may be larger than they appear.
Also, consider the joys of a “friendlier visual post editor” about which Matt writes that he isn’t sure how to phrase this exactly except to say “it doesn’t mess as much with your code anymore.” Descriptive enough for me! Most bloggers have had this experience with a WYSIWYG editor (which is what the WordPress visual editor is): you blockquote a paragraph, but then can’t get beyond the blockquote to write your own thoughts without going into the Code itself and physically placing the cursor after the closing tag. Or you try to insert a hard return between bulleted items, as good formatting dictates, but when you post it all ends up crammed together. This release should alleviate much of that tedium.
There’s a new built-in gallery option for images — I’m not sure this will be highly useful for most blawggers, but I do think blawggers can as a group utilize images much more than they currently do. For some of you, this might be just the ticket to distinguish your blog from your competitor’s site!
The Codex (which was also improved with this release) has everything you need to know to get started with your upgrade process. Just remember to backup your blog before you start. And for super-easy upgrading, might I suggest a plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade? Makes the whole process much simpler, including the essential backup of your blog pre-upgrade.
Blogged.com has launched a new blog directory which features not only referral links but ratings and reviews of the blog entries. Over 200,000 blogs are indexed so far — most not currently rated yet — and the number promises to increase.
Andy Merrett, writing for The Blog Herald, mentioned Blogged.com earlier this week, and some of the comments are pretty interesting. One user wrote:
I think Blogged.com is a great place to start when I’m going to look for blogs about a certain topic. I find myself wanting to delve into a new subject and blogs are a great way to do it, but trying to find good ones (or even a decent list) via other methods or searching Google is a chore. Blogged improves on this area and makes it much easier to find new sites in certain areas. So far, I like it!
However, as Andy pointed out, there are some issues. Blogged.com entries feature a “related” resource that purports to list blogs that are — well, related to the entry blog in question. Andy quibbles with the relation of one of his blogs, about families and relationships, to gambling sites and something called “Webster’s Is My Bitch.” Yes, I can see where that might be problematic.
Another issue is the search function. A search for “the inspired solo” (in quotes) resulted in over 400 entries, most with neither “inspired” nor “solo” in the title — although The Inspired Solo is, in fact, in the directory (though not as yet rated).
Certainly, I think Blogged.com has some value, and it’s definitely a tool to keep an eye on in the coming weeks and months. If, as Andy points out, it gets sufficient ad revenue to keep itself healthy and robust, it very well could be a valuable resource both for blawggers and those who read their sites.
After much angst and such, we finally got the contact form working again. Actually, there was a conflict between the plugin and the blog’s theme. Tinkering with the CSS didn’t seem to resolve it, so I went with a simpler form plugin. I’d actually preferred the earlier plugin’s resulting form, but this gets the job done without the conflict.
Lesson for blawggers: Sometimes you just have to tinker until you get it right, and don’t get married to one solution too quickly. Keep looking until you get it right. And what’s right for one blog isn’t necessarily right for another.
Also: whatever you do, get that contact form up! Treat it as a priority, which it is.
From Blog Herald:
Clusty is a cluster search engine. Carnegie Mellon computer science researchers began researching search clusters in the 1990s and eventually brought the first “high-quality text clustering search engine” online through Vivisimo in 2000. The idea behind clustering is to gather related information into groups or folders, thus directing the searcher to more specific information rather than just a big list. The result eventually became Clusty.
I tried Clusty out today, playing around with several searches I conducted recently for one of my blawgs, The SC Bankruptcy & Consumer Law Blog. Here’s what I experienced, in a nutshell.
One of the biggest topics in bankruptcy-land recently is HR 3609; here’s a recent post of mine on the subject.
I performed several searches on Clusty for each of the following assorted keywords:
For purposes of this post, however, I’m only covering the first and the last searches, as they had the most interesting results.
For the “HR 3609″ search, we had some interesting results. The two paid links at the top of the page had nothing to do with HR 3609 (HP printer toner cartridge and basic human resources training from something called “EmployeeHandbooks911.com”). The top 4 organic links were related to the bill; number 5, oddly enough, was about the herpes simplex virus.
However, on the left side of the page, we see the “clusters” list. This list included several categories that could be incredibly useful in a blog search, as shown in this screenshot:
I can imagine this feature giving some welcome context to law bloggers. Being able to distinguish between links associated with the Act itself and those associated with foreclosure generally. Let’s test it out.
I click on the first link in the clusters list: Emergency Home Ownership and Mortgage — an abbreviated form of the Act’s name. Here are the results:
The first link from OpenCongress.com is an information and status page about the bill. The second link from The Orator is the text of the bill. The third link is a call to action from the Center for Responsible Lending.
What about the “Legislation/Law” cluster?
The first link is the text of the bill, a link that was #2 under the first cluster. Number 2: again from Open Congress, showing a collection of news articles about HR 3609. Third up is what looks to be the suggested text of a letter opposing 3609 from the Arkansas Bankers Association. The fourth link is a PDF from the US International Trade Commission — a memo on “proposed tariff legislation.”
Let’s test the “Foreclosure” cluster next.
It looks as if these links do indeed focus more on the effects of the bill on the foreclosure crisis. The first two links are from a blog linked to something called the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, and both advocate for passage of the bill in light of its effect on homeowners facing foreclosure (among other social effects). Third is a press release, also focused on the bill’s effects on foreclosure; fourth is from Banks.com but also stresses the foreclosure link.
Now we’re getting somewhere:
These links all tag off the word “blog,” or some variation thereof, in the linked-to page’s title. This could be incredibly helpful for bloggers who want to seek out what other bloggers have to say on a particular issue. That’s a necessity for bloggers who are writing on any debated issue; presenting the “other side” is a critical part of any attempt at persuasion, after all, as well as for any attempt to cover an issue impartially.
So let’s see if that Blog Cluster repeats itself with another search.
Well, drat:
No blog cluster. (And I checked the full list. Nada.)
However, looking at the main results, as well as the clusters that do show up, it’s easy to see how this particular search could be useful to someone blogging about the legislator’s background and voting record.
As for the blog cluster, it may well be that no one’s blogging specifically about Representative Miller, apart from his connection to the main topic of HR 3609. So, don’t rule out the utility of blog cluster just yet.
Will Clusty replace Google? I don’t think so. For one, the results in many instances seem to mirror, if not straight out duplicate, Google results; at least, they’re not so different for some searches to make a meaningful difference. For another, Clusty is a good bit slower on my machine (a 13″ MacBook early ‘07 model with 2 GB memory) than Google is; analyzing those clusters might be quite a task.
But as an additional tool in the blogger’s toolbox, it’s a valuable addition, and definitely worth playing around with from time to time.
Yaro Starak, the mastermind behind the Blog Mastermind course I took recently, sent me this video with his permission to share it freely with my readers. This is definitely something you want to take a look at, if you want to build your traffic to your blawg.
Yaro’s teachings are pretty generic to all blogs, whether you’re selling affiliate products and services, relying on AdSense (never a good idea, but that’s another blog entirely), or selling your services, as we talk about here on Blawg In A Box. One part of Yaro’s training that most of us found incredibly helpful was the “case study” video process. Yaro took one to three blogs per video, and went through the blog point by point offering his thoughts about what the blogger was doing right, and what the blogger could do better. The one he did for The Inspired Solo for me was incredibly helpful.
In this video, Yaro looks at Peter Cunningham’s Aquarists Online blog, and offers some constructive “food for thought” in terms of Peter’s stated goals of increasing subscriptions. Peter does a couple of things that might translate well to a blawg. First, I notice that he uses landing pages for e-books he’s written about his chosen subject of aquariums. I think a lawyer could quite easily do the same thing by focusing on the ideal client, and writing a short e-book to offer information about a particular area. This kind of book could be sold for some small amount, or even given away for free (talk about creating value!).
Second, he promotes his feed. I do the same here, with a larger-than-usual RSS button (that big orange and white thing you see in the sidebar there). This was one of the first pieces of advice Yaro gave out in the Blog Mastermind lessons, and he’s so right about this. RSS isn’t as heavily used as it ought to be, it seems, but part of that is the responsibility of the blogger, to promote it and explain it properly. So, use those RSS buttons, increase the size to make them prominently, and do what I haven’t done yet - provide an explanation about RSS and how to use it.
If you’re ready for a formal blog training program and you’re not able to wait for Blawg In A Box’s upcoming direct training and membership course (set to debut in mid-February 2008), give Yaro’s program a try (click here for a sample lesson for free, or if you know you’re ready, go here to sign up) - but you’re going to need to hurry. Yaro’s shutting down subscriptions as of this Monday in order to change over his subscription management system, and you’ll have to wait until it’s all done before signing up afterwards. So, check out the video - if you think Yaro has something to teach you (and I can guarantee you, he does), give it a try for a month and see what you think. I believe you’ll find, as I did, that Yaro’s principles really do help you build your traffic and make the most out of your blog.
Or maybe it helps your readers find your serial postings… whatever, it’s a good plugin to take a look at, especially for law bloggers.
From the plugin’s home page:
In Series is a plugin that lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. It adds a new set of controls to the post editing screen, allowing you to add the post to a series (new or existing), re-order the post within a series it’s already in, or remove the post from a series entirely… The plugin also adds a new “Series” configuration sub-tab (under the “Options” tab in the admin pages), providing a highly-flexible mechanism for controlling how In Series renders content within your posts. … Best of all, you don’t have to edit any theme files or PHP to get In Series configured and working!
For lawyer/bloggers who aren’t also coders, the ability to use a plugin like this without tinkering about in the PHP or theme files is a huge benefit. I’ve downloaded the plugin myself for both TIS and for this blog, and will be putting it to use in the next few weeks. Let’s give it a try and see how it works.
Thanks to Lorelle on WordPress for the “head’s up”!
Technorati Tags:
WordPress plugins, serial posts, blog tools
In the last post on this subject I wrote about RSS and how it will reduce the importance of the “looks” of a blog, as it begins to gain greater acceptance. I also wrote that the day of RSS saturation or prevalence hasn’t arrived yet, but that even so, the value of your blog rests, not in the blog’s appearance, but in how well you meet the needs of the people you’re targeting, and how strongly those targeted readers (TRs) “fit the bill” as your prospective ideal client (IC - and that’s the last 2-letter acronym I’ll throw at you this post, I promise).
And it looks like I already got my first naysayer! Kevin puts out very nice-looking blogs through his company LexBlog and I believe he’s invested in the idea of aesthetics though clearly he recognizes that good content is prime. (That’s pretty much beyond argument at this point in the evolution of blogging.) But I quibble - strongly - with this assertion: “I don’t think you are going to get top quality design for 500 to 1,500 and get that design developed with the other necessary services you’ll need to be an effective blogger.”
How do I disagree with these statements? Let me count the ways.
These - along with a source for information (which you have at your fingertips if you’re reading this on the web) - are all the “necessary services” you need. Everything else (including RSS widgets, Amazon book affiliate widgets, related posts code, and much more) is available through plugins - also available for free.
In short - I guess I do agree with Kevin on one thing. You can’t get everything you need to blog for $1500. You can get it for free.
Well, OK. $8 a month.
Technorati Tags: blawg, blog design for lawyers
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See, the problem is that too many so-called experts out there are teaching 2004’s methods - keyword-stuffing, blog-and-ping, get massive links. That sort of “get traffic fast” approach will get you nowhere fast today, and worse - it might even get you shunned from Google, MSN, Yahoo, and other search engine results. How’s that for shooting yourself in the foot?
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So, sign up for an account here, then go check out Long Tail Traffic Secrets for yourself. I should also note that I’m working on an ebook myself that will cover many of the same information but for lawyers - but it’s about 3 months away at least, so if you want to start making improvements in your traffic now, start with Long Tail Traffic Secrets.