Philoking.com

Being a hybrid PC-Mac user, one thing that always drives me bonkers on the Mac, is the lack of a decent blogging app. I have tried Ecto, Mars Edit, Qumana and countless others, but nothing has been less painful that booting up a VMWare copy of Windows and running a full, albeit slow, copy of Windows Live Writer.

Let me be clear in saying that no, Blogo is NOT better than Windows Live Writer. It’s not even equivalent. What it is, however, is decent. Decent will do when I don’t need to do something heavily formatted.

All of the other blogging clients forget about images and treat them like a 3rd class citizen. Blogo at least gives images proper priority and provides tools for using images in your posts.

It would be nice if it allowed you to preview your posts on your theme in realtime like Live Writer does, but at least it does give you the ability to open a preview window and see how it will look when it’s posted.

It’s nice that you can insert photos, crop them, add filters to them, but I am not a huge fan that you can’t edit and resize them in the blog post with handles like you can in Windows Live Writer.

Other seemingly missing features are the ability to specifically size the thumbnail and manually set the padding. It’s a little unintuitive to have to select the image, and then edit it via the thumbnail outside of the post.

I will also miss the tons of plugins for code formatting, videos, etc. That being said, it’s the best blogging client for Mac I have used so far and definitely worth the $25 price of admission. I guess that’s 25 more reasons I like Windows Live Writer better

I decided to start putting more time into my blog again. I updated my theme to something more pleasing for readers, I started working on new content, and then I decided to take a look at where I stand on traffic. It’s amazing to me that I had gone two months without writing something. I assumed I was left for dead, yet here I am with nearly 300 average visitors per day, 11,000+ page views in the last 30 days.

It was a lot of working building my blog up in the beginnings. It’s a testament to the work that you put in that after you get the love from the search engines, they don’t really forget you. Sure my statistics are terrible. 93.45% new visitors? That’s all search engine traffic. 25 seconds per average visit? That means they are finding the content, reading and leaving. Looks like I need to invest in some more relevant content. 89% bounce rate? Obviously I don’t present interesting content in a way compelling enough to get them to click through.

So I’ll start with adding some great new content. I’ll work on my layout a little bit to make sure that my best foot is forward so to speak. Then I’ll get back into a building mode. This blog used to get over 30,000 unique visitors a month. I can get back there, I just have to put in the work.

We talk about a lot of blog topics around here. How to write great posts, how to write compelling titles and how to deal with Search Engine Optimization issues. There is one thing that is often overlooked, old blog posts.

Search engines never forget. If your blog post already has a good bit of traction you could stay highly ranked for a topic for ages. Take a look at my traffic example:

Top Blog Posts 10/19/2009 – 10/26/2009

• 2/19/08 Holy World of Warcraft Batman, 64-bit WoW 596 views
• 1/11/09 Is Windows 7’s Aero Peek a copy of Apple’s Expose 519 views
• 6/25/07 TVersity, PS3 Perfect Streaming Media Player 427 views
• 1/28/07 World of Warcraft, Poor Frame Rates on Vista 294 views
• 5/18/09 How to make a bootable Windows 7 Install Flash Drive 202 views

That is pretty interesting. For the last week, 3 out of the 5 most popular posts on my blogs were written before 2009, a year that is nearly over. Several are a few years old and still getting hundreds of page views a week.

What Does This Mean?

It actually means a few things. Without pandering, these are probably topics you should be writing about more, and linking to through updates to these posts. They obviously have the “Google Juice” so to speak, so why not take advantage of it.

Second is the less obvious, update these posts! Information changes, blogs are live and dynamic, do not write and forget. These posts have the potential to hurt your blog if you do not keep them current. Google and Bing are telling these people that you are an authority on this subject. Several years is a very long time to let technology information sit still. If the user reads your posts and finds the information to be irrelevant or even worse inaccurate, that hurts your reputation.

Use Them or Lose Them

Obviously my first advice is to update these posts and get the maximum value out of them. The last advice is that if you can’t or don’t want to, get rid of them. Make sure you have a compelling 404 page, preferably one that searches your blog for articles related to the query term, and try to convert that user to a reader.

As a blogger, your credibility is the only thing you have. Bad articles and inaccurate information will turn that 30 second page view away. Good information and quality content will turn that same fly by into a subscriber. Don’t let these old posts kill you. Use Google Analytics, keep track of which old posts are being regularly visited, visit them yourself, and make sure they still stand up several years later.

I have gone through many changes with this blog, and one reason I don’t update it as much as I would like to is that I try to keep this thing a constant topic (or group of topics) that draw a particular type of user. Now, I love blogging, and I will continue to, but just like my wife, I find myself struggling with one thing. There are often blogs that I want to write, and should write, but I don’t because they aren’t quite appropriate to my blog.

I am pretty sure I will never be a professional blogger, and if I become one, then I will have made many more changes than this to get there, but as far as that goes, I am going to start using this blog a little more like a journal in addition to technology articles. Some of the things I would like to add are photo-a-day type blogs where I post cool photos I take and the story or inspiration behind them, stuff about music I am listening to or movies I have recently enjoyed and just general life stuff.

I won’t be on here whining about stuff or blabbing out personal information, that’s still not an appropriate use of my blog, but as I have so many friends I have made through this blog that follow it (and often ask why I don’t post as much) I will try to make it more active.

Sometimes writing long posts on technological topics takes time and it makes for a slow blog, so with that, I’ll pick up the pace a bit and start writing more about things that may or may not always be of interest to you.

I’ll be sure to organize my feeds in such a way where you can subscribe to just the tech articles if you want, if not, get ready, hopefully it will start as a trickle but end up as a flood of information that you might find interesting.

I have been playing with this for quite a while now and nearly begging Joe Cheng and the Live Writer Team to let me blog about it.

I have raved about Windows Live Writer before but now you really have something special for your blog writing needs. Special enough that I even use it (via a virtual machine) on Mac because nothing for OS X comes close.

So what is new in this new version of Live Writer you ask? Well, let me show you…

Fun with Images

The most obvious change you will find on blog posts is the addition of new ways to view your images. The new image styles show reflections, pixel borders, rounded images and even allow you to tilt the image in question for dramatic effect…

In addition to these effects, you can also use the filter effects from before and even crop a photo from the original right in live writer!

In addition to these display features, you can also seamlessly integrate with your favorite modal popup type like Lightbox, Slimbox, etc. One other oft-requested feature is the ability to center images as well.

The beginnings of video integration are there as well with Soapbox support. Of course there are a myriad of plugins to work with your other favorite video sites.

Editing

One thing I am super excited about in this release is auto-linking. Not only can you create a database of words and phrases you use a lot and set them to link automatically, you can also do it as you create a link through the interface:

This is really useful to get your database going as you write instead of trying to think of things when you first set it up or forgetting to add them later when you think of them.

User Interface

Also big to those that really tweak their posts is the new tabbed interface for Edit, Preview and Source. Now you can quickly flip back and forth between these three modes with no effort.

The toolbar has been cleaned up a bit and for those of you like me with tons of categories, you can now search and filter for those quickly instead of browsing a monster list. This makes it really easy to get your posts in the right place.

SDK Updates

From what I understand this is where the real meat to this new version is. I don’t develop against it, so I can’t say for sure but for more details about the SDK, please see the blog post on Windows Live Dev.

Final Thoughts

Collectively these may not sound like a huge major release and I agree, if I was paying for it I would have to really need these features to pony up an upgrade, but this software is F R E E folks. It costs you nada, it’s not ad supported and has no nag ware. Windows Live Writer was already the best blogging software on the planet, and now it’s gotten even better. For those of you who are not already familiar with Live Writer as it stands now, I cannot recommend it enough.

The team that works on this product at Microsoft is passionate, brilliant and don’t ever stop thinking of cool things to make your blogging life easier. It would be interesting to try and take some sort of straw poll to see how many professional bloggers are already using this tool, there really is nothing like it.

So now you want it right? Get your butt over to the Live Writer Team blog and download it now.