Blogging Software

Using ecto For Blog Posting

by Mark E. Mason on March 18, 2008

Greetings from Asia

One of the great allures of Internet Marketing is the lifestyle that it promises. Almost every Internet Entrepreneur that you run across will talk to you about the magic of being able to work when and where they want. In fact, Jay (from my favorite podcast Internet Business Mastery) recently moved to Buenos Aires ostensibly just so he could learn how to Tango. Now that is lifestyle management. He was able to do that because of the miracle that is the Internet (which was invented by Al Gore - not). Of course, what a lot of these Internet gurus fail to tell you is that they are totally addicted workaholics. But that, my friends, is a topic for another post.

As I have mentioned many times, I have a day job, and Internet Marketing is a hobby for me. This week, my real job has me in Asia visiting suppliers. It's a lot less exciting than it sounds, involving lots of jet lag, too many calories, not enough exercise, and too many different hotels. Anyway, I wanted to be able to do some work on the blog off-line on the airplane. I use WordPress, and the post editor (which is not that great) is an on-line tool. So, I started searching around for a good tool for off-line blog posting tool that would run on my Dell laptop.

It turns out that without too much searching, I was able to locate a tool called ecto. Now ecto is actually a "desktop blogging tool." I am not sure how it will behave off-line, but it is neat when you are connected to the Internet. Basically, you tell it about your blog and it interfaces to the blog backend. This post is my first try to use it. It is a pretty neat tool that is available for the Mac and for the PC. I hear that the Mac version is much better. Ecto has nice features -- YouTube, Amazon and Flickr integration, WYSIWYG editor, spell checking, category and tag support, and lots of other things that I have not investigated yet. I am still not clear if it will work well completely off-line (on the airplane). I'll be flying from Taiwan to Singapore via Hong Kong tonight, so I will test it then. Can you say "jet lag"?

Ecto comes with a free 21 day trial, so you can try it out yourself if you are so inclined.

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Adding FeedFlare to b2evolution with Multiple Blogs

by Mark E. Mason on January 3, 2008

b2evolution is a great blog tool that includes all the features of traditional blog tools, and add cool stuff like file & photo management, advanced skinning, multiple blogs support, detailed user permissions and third party plug-ins!

FeedFlare is a way to give subscribers to you b2evolution blog easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

So, the question is, how do you get FeedFlares to appear in your b2evo posts? At this writing, no FeedFlare plugin is available for b2evo. So, I document here the method that I used to hack a b2evo skin to display FeedFlares. In my installation, I have multiple blogs running on one b2evo install. FeedFlare code is specific to each feed (i.e. each blog), so I needed a custom solution that would change the FeedFlare code depending on what blog was being viewed.

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Running b2evolution: Multiple Blogs, Multiple Domains, One Install, Shared Host

by Mark E. Mason December 19, 2007

In this post, I try to describe what I did to get multiple b2evo blogs running on a shared host using only one install of b2evo. I did this on a Lunarpages shared host using b2evo 2.20. Note that this was only possible because b2evo rocks, and because of help I got on b2evo forums. [...]

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The Best Blogging Software

by Mark E. Mason December 17, 2007

For the last week or so, I have been playing around with blogging software alternatives. There are lots of choices out there. As you know from my last post, I use a web host called Lunarpages. Lunarpages implements user controls using comethign called cPanel. Inside of cPanel, there is a cool application called Fantastico. Fantastico [...]

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Choosing the Best Web Host

by Mark E. Mason December 17, 2007

In my previous post, I described my plan to monetize three sites: this site, a cochlear implant information site, and a real product site (PreciousOnPaper.com). Well, if you are going to have a site, on of the first things you need is a web host. (Actually, this is not strictly true as there are some [...]


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