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Sunday, August 3, 2008

iWellsoft RM RMVB to 3GP MP4 PSP iPod Converter 1.7 (Demo)

A powerful application able to to encode your RM, RMVB files into other popular video formats. Read More

Question: What Will You Not Blog About?

In What Will You Not Blog About? on the Blog Herald, I asked readers to tell me what line they will not cross when it comes to blog content. What will you NOT blog about. The responses have been very interesting. A few bloggers take a no-holds-barred approach, blogging on everything and anything they want. However, [...]

A few bloggers take a no-holds-barred approach, blogging on everything and anything they want. However, even they have lines they will draw. Jeremy Steele admitted that he won’t report on conspiracies, other than poking fun at them.

Paul of the Opera Blog admitted that he avoids the negative:

I will generally avoid writing negative reviews about performances or recordings. I’ve only made one exception to this rule over the years. I figure there’s no point in discussing how bad something is, especially when there’s so much good stuff out there. I’d rather save my writing effort for worthwhile projects and simply ignore the crappy ones.

Chris Garrett agreed. “I would rather be a positive than destructive influence, like a ‘do no harm’ thing.” Many agreed with his Star Trek Prime Directive philosophy, including Barbara Ling (aka Owlbert):

I will not blog about anything that is meant to bring another person down. I’m a big believer in treating others the way I’d like to be treated myself.

The concern over the impact a blog can have on a worker’s life and position was brought up by Shortshire and Rhys who both agree that anything that involves their jobs or fellow employees isn’t worth the risk.

Almost all agreed that they like keeping it clean, avoiding offensive, abusive, and offensive language content from their posts as well as their comments. Richard H said, “And no foul language. It’s just not necessary to get a point across, in my opinion. A wise man once told me, ‘a foul mouth is a sign of a feeble mind trying to express itself forcefully.’”

Big Fella, like many, believe in sticking to the main focus of their blog without stepping over any moral boundaries:

I do not do gossip, I don’t like to use gratuitous profanity in my postings, I am not a shill for anyone. Just a guy sharing my observations on what piques my interest at any given time and creating commentary reflecting my values, and exercising my activist urges.

Graeme Hunter summed it up very nicely:

I tend towards the maxim of “If it will cause me or others trouble, don’t write it”. I don’t mind a good argument over opinion on a topic, but I see that as different to actually causing trouble. I have both a personal blog in my own name, and write on a work blog, with links between, so I have to be on my best behaviour.

We all have lines in our blogging sandboxes that we won’t cross. What about you?

Site Search Tags: blog writing, blogging tips, crosing lines, how to blog, blog content, blog focus, what will you blog about, what will you not blog about, blog choices, editorial, editorial content, editorial guidelines

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

How to style an Atom Feed

In order to have browsers render an XML Atom feed into HTML such that it is far easier for users to read, there are two things you must create. The first is an XSL stylesheet which instructs the browser on... Read More

Countdown to E for All Expo

Countdown to E for All Expo
Countdown to Video Game Expo 2008

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!!!!!

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES!!!!!
We love the cool games we played when we were kids, so we found them and put those games in our widget platform (Thank You, Neave!!!!).

http://springwidget.com/widgets/byCategory/12

Check them out - they are in the "Fun and Games" category of the Widget Gallery.

We have the following:
Asteroids
Tic-Tac-Toe
Simon
Hexxagon
Snake
Space Invaders

They are pretty addictive - I spend more time than I'd like to admit tie-ing the computer in Tic-Tac-Toe - but I figured out the one move that always wins - hehe.

Have fun and let us know what you think!

Get this widget!

3 things you really want to know about RSS

I have been doing some digging into the statistics for Newsniche to try and discover what you are really interested in when it comes to RSS. So I have come up with the imaginatively titled 3 things you really want to know about RSS. So here are the most wanted to know things about RSS in reverse order.

RSS publishing tools

The third most popular topic is on RSS publishing tools. Rather than an article this is a section of the site dedicated to letting you know how you can publish RSS on your site. Being able to publish RSS on your site means that you have a constant stream of updating content for your readers.

Which is the best RSS feed reader

The second most popular item on the site is an article on Which is the best RSS feed reader. You certainly want to know which is the best way to read your feeds. This is not surprising as RSS is all about being able to have information from your favourite sites available to you without having to visit every you like frequently. Why not subscribe to their feed and have the content come to you.

Using Javascript to display RSS

I guess deep down everyone wants to display RSS using Javascript as the number one most read article is Using Javascript to display RSS. This is an article I wrote ages ago showing you how you could easily place content from an RSS feed on your site using a snippet of Javascript. That is so 2006.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Welcome FineTune!

SpringWidgets welcomes it's first third-party developer uploaded SpringWidget.

Only days after our silent launch of widget uploading, Tony MacDonnell and the rest of the team from Teknision have uploaded a Finetune widget, the first on our platform not built internally.

I have to say that I'm really impressed! The combination of a comprehensive music library, the ability to set a 45 song playlist and being viral is a killer idea. I was able to find all the songs that I wanted to add to create a playlist that truly reflected my musical tastes.

The interface for the widget is fantastic and fun. When you have a song selected, the album art is displayed in a style that looks like a row of CDs sitting in a shelf. It reminds me of the very cool "coverflow" effect that Apple recently put into iTunes.

Of course, with the age of songs that I like, a stack of records metaphor might have been more appropriate ;-)

Here is my live SpringWidget, go ahead and play around:

Get this widget!

I've added this widget on my personal blog and my MySpace profile to give it a whirl and I'm very happy with the results. While the size of the widget is not configurable, it's designed at a size that fits nicely into the music section on Myspace and almost any blog sidebar.

What does Tony have to say about developing on the SpringWidgets platform? - I pulled the following quote from his blog:

"We've used WidgetBox, Yahoo Widgets, Google Gadgets, OSX Dashboard, and so far the Springbox was the most fun, and rendered the coolest final product at the end of the day."

Of course, the real cool thing for FineTune is that they were able to make it down to the desktop months before Adobe Apollo is to become available and they made it there with SpringWidgets. This begs the question: "were there already footprints on the moon when Neil Armstrong landed?"

We are very glad to have FineTune, Tony and his Teknision team on board with SpringWidgets, and we love the product they have built. Go ahead and give it a try and see if you like it as much as we do!

-Don

PolyMonRT 0.9.0.0 (Freeware)

PolyMonRT 0.9.0.0 (Freeware)
A real-time monitoring system that allows users to create custom dashboards

VelaClock Deluxe 2.1.8

A world clock widget that can be configured to display the time of sunrise/sunset, daylight duration, phase of moon, and more.

About VelaClock Deluxe
A world clock widget with a highly configurable user interface. VelaClock Deluxe has all the features of the standard version, plus:

- Change the current date: a Change Date pane provides the ability to view information for any day in the past or future (from 1932 to 2020). This allows one to determine sunrise, sunset and twilight times for days in the past or future. In addition, one can determine moon rise and set times as well as phase for any day. This is great for photography and outdoor events.

- Add user-defined places: to add a new place to VelaClock Deluxe, launch a small utility application from the back of the widget to specify city, country, time zone and a latitude/longitude point. Daylight Saving Time rules are historically accurate.

Full Description: Besides displaying local times, users can quickly display the time of sunrise, sunset, or twilight, duration of daylight, current phase of moon, time zone information, and much more. The interface can easily be configured to use a minimum amount of screen space or, if the user wishes, multiple lower panes can be opened to display more information and take up more screen space. The top pane of VelaClock displays a list of cities and corresponding local times. For more detailed information about the currently-selected city, the user can choose whether to display up to four additional panes (each pane has a full and a minimized version):
1) A light level bar that gives the user a picture of the 24-hours of natural light (bright daylight, three kinds of twilight and night) for the current day. A thin white bar indicates when the moon is visible. Daylight duration and the change in minutes of daylight from the previous day are also displayed.
2) Specific times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset. Begin/end times for civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight can also be displayed.
3) An image of the moon as seen in the sky above the currently-selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle of the moon’s crescent. Because this angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated once a minute, as is the moon’s phase. This view also contains the name of the current phase, as well as local times for the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).
4) An analog clock and time zone information. The relative time shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current time zone, as set in System Preferences.
5) A Change Date pane that provides the ability to view information (sunrise time, etc.) for any day in the past or future (from 1932 to 2020).

No internet connection required. VelaClock is a unique widget in that it is completely self-contained. Many widgets are light weight front-ends to web services; such widgets require an Internet connection. By contrast, VelaClock is designed to function without an Internet connection, and so is particularly useful for laptop users away from their home or office. Astronomical calculations are performed by an internal code module.

V1.1.2 of the SpringWidgets SDK is available!

We published a new version (V1.1.2) of our SDK today - adding the following features/functionality:

"Right Click" menu support
New Fixed Size widget template
Option to remove Default Close Button
Event for content pasting - (CTL-V)
Title attribute in OPML
Larger text node wrapping in OPML

We made these modifications based on the feedback we've received since our launch from developers and users in the community - so please keep the feedback coming.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Eazy Code 6.4 (Trial)

A VB.Net RAD tool that helps you develop forms. Read More

Radio Classique

Une fois installé sur votre bureau d'ordinateur, ce Widget diffuse Radio Classique en direct sans que vous ayez besoin de lancer votre navigateur Internet ! En plus du flux audio, le Widget Radio Classique affiche les informations sur le morceau en cours de diffusion, le titre de l'émission et l'animateur. A tout moment un clic lance votre navigateur vers le site de Radio Classique Read More