Voting for the 2008 Weblog Awards closes soon, and our gadget-obsessed sibling title Gizmodo needs your support in the Best Australia or New Zealand blog category. So case your vote over at the the awards site, and give Nick and the team something to brighten their day. Remember, it’s all about the geeks!
YackTrack is a comment tracking service. If you’ve ever wondered who is talking about a blog post or news article you can enter the URL and see who is talking about it and where. YackTrack currently tracks comments on Blogger/Blogspot, Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Google Blog Search, Google Reader, IntenseDebate, Mixx, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati, TypePad/MoveableType and WordPress blogs. Additionally there is a “Chatter” function that lets you search for key words instead of single URLs. On the time saving side of things it’s possible to set up a bookmarklet to help you search YackTrack and you can turn a search term into an RSS feed to plug it into your favourite reader and stay abreast of new comments. YackTrack [via Download Squad]
Windows only: Windows Live Writer, Microsoft’s multi-platform blogging tool, was one of many Live Essentials apps that recently received a few upgrades, and they’re really helpful for anyone writing on the web. Most helpful in this release candidate, for anyone writing a blog on Live.com, Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, or any other supported platform, is the ability to search through local drafts and published posts for text in any post, letting you get at older posts for editing and unfinished ideas quickly. WordPress.com and self-installed WordPress users get the same kind of auto-completing tags as on their site editors, and new plug-ins for Writer have been released that let you upload and link pictures from Flickr, auto-tweet your posts on Twitter, and do more. New to Live Writer? Head over to blogger Jared Goralnick‘s tips and tweaks for Windows Live Writer. The release candidate of Windows Live Writer 2009 is a free download for Windows systems only.
Windows Live Writer 2009 [via Digital Inspiration]Need to give your blog or personal site a more modern look? AjaxBuddy, a free repository of Web 2.0-style site tools, is great for site owners who don’t have time to learn an entire programming language, or just need a starter block of code to get building. Grab free, easy-to-modify code for Flickr-like editing fields, quick-loading slideshows and tabbed galleries, instant graphs, date-choosing calendars, and dozens more examples. Many require replacing just a few values to get working, but even the more complex tools are great learning tools.
AjaxDaddy [via Online Tech Tips]Writing your blog should be a fun way to stretch your mind and stay connected to trends, friends, and the greater world, not another computer task that takes far too long to get done. But that’s exactly what it can feel like if it takes you more time to find your post ideas, tweak your markup, and make everything look right than to actually get your thoughts down. Being somewhat experienced at this blogging thing, your Lifehacker editors have pinpointed a few tools and tricks that make our posts go faster and smoother. After the jump, we round up 10 of them.
The Guardian has published its list of the world’s Top 50 most powerful blogs. Top of the pops is political blog Huffington Post, followed by ‘geek ephemera’ site Boing Boing. Maybe skip this one if you’re trying to pare down your blog subscriptions. But if you’re looking for more blog reading material, the list is worth a look.
Career advice blogger Penelope Trunk has launched a career blog network called Brazen Careerist. The network of 50 young bloggers will focus on Gen Y professional and entrepreneurial issues.The headline story over there at the moment is “Improve your life with video games” and I spotted another story about how to use entrepreneurship for social change – both in keeping with the ethos of Penelope’s own blog: “advice at the intersection of work and life”.I’m a little older than Gen Ys but I recently read Penelope’s book Brazen Careerist and found a lot of the things she identified as important to Gen Y are important to me too – ie work life balance, having fun and learning on the job and feeling like an important part of the team. So I don’t think the “Gen Y” label should put older careerists off reading. I look forward to reading more from their blog network. :)
A few months ago, 43 Folders writer Matt Wood realized he was running five blogs, two Flickr accounts, a del.icio.us page, and a regular stream of Twittr, IM, and email messages. This year, he’s resolved to trim his online “commitments,” and he offers a few tips on how anyone can do the same. Wood recommends casting a hard, cold gaze at your online activities for the sake of prioritizing, one login at a time: Take baby steps – Chances are there’s one online outlet that you know you just don’t have the heart to maintain anymore, be it a blog, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. Drop one of them, then see if any other candidates fall to the bottom by attrition.
If you were committed to canning one of your online outlets to stay better focused, where would you start? Share your executioners’ tales in the comments. Photo by Kevin.
Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments [43 Folders]If you could look back on a week, a month or even a year’s worth of how you felt, how you slept, and your caffeine and alcohol intake, what would it say about you? Morale-O-Meter, a free embeddable web app, provides a space to log those morale indicators, graph them, and compare the results with friends, or even embed them in a blog or web site. The site can send daily email reminders to those who tend to fall off the daily entry wagon, and 43 Things users can use their existing login to start their own graphs. If looking back at your results makes you realize your job is wreaking havoc on your life, consider trying a few ways to deal with burnout without quitting.
Morale-O-Meter [via MakeUseOf.com]
BackType Tracks Your Comments or Others’ Across Blogs
Free web service BackType aggregates all the comments you make on various blogs and web sites. The site uses the URLs entered in commenter forms or in the posts themselves to track a person’s musings, or can combine URLs under a single account URL. It’s a great tool for those who want to catch up on discussions they left behind, but the site also provides a search engine of its indexed comments and links to see another social-browser’s comments. This type of URL tracking would normally leave the door open for comment impersonators, so BackType offers a moderation option to have you approve any comments posted under your name. BackType is a free service, requires a sign-up to use. BackType [via Download Squad]