November 14th, 2008
by
admin
There is a new WindowsLiveWriter Update available. I had a chance to test drive the technical preview of this last month and it has been fantastic!
Just a reminder this program runs on your desktop and enables you to update WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal and many more blogging platforms from one location, managing multiple blogs.
One of the weird new features is the picture tilt option, and for some reason the reflective image option (creates that web2.0 looking reflection below an image is now missing) but all in all the new version is pretty damn good. 
Image and video publishing enhancements
- Insert videos from Soapbox and YouTube
- Upload videos to Soapbox and YouTube
- Image cropping and tilting
- Additional border styles for images (such as reflection and rounded corners)
- Support for LightBox and other image previewing effects (like Slimbox, Smoothbox, and others)
- Support for centering images
Blog authoring enhancements
- Spell Checking in more languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Serbian-Cyrillic, Serbian-Latin, Spanish, and Swedish
- Auto Linking
- Smart quotes/typographic characters
- Word count
Experience improvements
New toolbar makes more commands – like Font formatting - readily available
Tabs for view switching
Improved category control with search and type-down filtering
New look and feel
Writer Zone: Releases
They have made a number of wholesale changes to the look and feel of the program, especially when you switch between views which are now labeled as lower tabs of ‘edit’, ‘Preview’, and ‘Source’.
No complaints here other than it is still a little tricky to find the latest version on their site which also gets plagued with comment spam and I’d really like to see that reflective image thing come back along with rounded corners!
November 13th, 2008
by
admin
Over the last couple of days a number of bloggers have been targeted by a new type of comment spam. The spam typically comes from a different name and email address, but the same IP number range of 94.102.60.15x. The x can be anything from 0 - 4.
The comment text is populated by about 17 characters of what appears to be random text. In fact the email address populated in the comment also appears to be randomly populated.
The IP address appears to be the only item that remains the same. This then becomes the easiest thing to block via WordPress or at a CPanel level.
To block using WordPress, simply login to WordPress and go to Settings>Discussion and scroll to the bottom to the Comment Blacklist section.
Some older versions of WordPress locate the Discussion tab under Options.
Once you are there, in addition to actual words that you want to blacklist, you can also individually on separate lines list IP addresses.
I’d recommend adding this IP range right away:
94.102.60.151
94.102.60.153
94.102.60.152
94.102.60.150
November 12th, 2008
by
admin
Associated Content has added a Facebook application (who hasn’t?)
This new application like many others hopes to enable people to leverage Facebook to virally spread their content amongst the people they know on Facebook. A good example of a company that gets it, AC continues to grow, and might just one day eclipse some old world media companies if they can keep riding this wave…
In response to Content Producers seeking more ways to promote their content and engage their friends, Associated Content launched the AC Portal application for Facebook this week.
This new application allows you to easily discover and share content with your Facebook friends, promote your content to your entire social network, invite others to join the AC community and stay on top of the latest Calls for Content and Performance Bonus updates.
To get started using the AC Portal, follow this link to add it to your Facebook account: http://apps.facebook.com/ac_portal
Once you’ve added the application, be sure to read our Getting Started Guide.
