Today’s Bloggers’ Support Group was a bit chilly due to a broken furnace, but we were pretty excited to meet and make progress towards our end-of-year blogging activities.
There are 20 days left to finish our 10-post Blogging Challenge. How are you doing?
Wanda suggested looking at past success. What have you accomplished in the last 12 months of blogging?
As for technologies, we discussed a couple of useful tools:
- Print-on-demand books, which are available from a number of places. The link takes you Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which aggregates and reviews a number of choices.
- For Mac users, there is a community of iWork template creators (iWorkCommunity.com). You can download great templates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes for things like books,
Anca taught us about Jing – a tool for Screen Capture and Screenshots.
- Uses Jing to annotate screenshots
- It’s good to rehearse to get it just right
- Likes to specify the size of the screen grab – you can shoot an entire window, or just a little bit.
- Now it can do webcam recording, too!
- Great for working with clients– showing them how to do things. Anca uses videos to teach people how to do technical stuff with their sites.
- Does image capture
- Can annotate images
- Upload to YouTube, Flickr, and other sites.
An alternative to Jing is Skitch, which does screenshots, annotations, and uploads to your favorite sites as well.
Both of these tools have a hosting service where you can upload your files and share them with others.
Ted’s favorite plugins this week:
Google Ajax Translation – puts a link into your blog posts that connect them up to Google Translate, so your readers can get your content in something roughly resembling their language.
Ajax Plugin Helper – Sets up your WordPress installation to activate and deactivate plugins via Ajax, saving you time when it comes to configuring your blog.
Social Grid – produces a grid of social networking sites that you connect to your blog.
This week’s suggested exercise – Top 10 Lists
One thing that many sites are doing at the end of the year is creating top-10 (or more) lists.  This is a great way to produce something of value for you readers (and maybe a bit simpler for you to write).
Send us your Top 10 list and we’ll post it for everyone else to read.