Watch out MySpace you are about ready to be replaced.

With all the problems that plague the giant online meeting place, a shift to person-centric social networking is primed to take some share of users from MySpace and Facebook.  After all why would you want to rent space when you can own your own home.

WordPress and its upcoming sister product bbPress are offering a multitude of options for users who would are making the switch from social networking to blogging.  Why not start your WordPress site today?

Reference:

http://gigaom.com/2007/12/11/the-next-social-network-wordpress/

Eye-tracking studies are hot in the web design world, but it can be hard to figure out how to translate the results of these studies into real design implementations. These are a few tips from eye-tracking studies that you can use to improve the design of your blog or site.

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Recently Microsoft released Windows Live Writer, a blog authoring tool from its BETA hell to, well, Live.  The tool has a lot of promise and is a vast improvement over the default editor in Community Server.

If you are a corporate user of this software that uses Community Servers integrated login module, you were out of luck, sort of until I discovered a forum post by Telligent employee Kevin Harder.

Windows Live Writer and Integrated authentication – Community Server

Windows Live Writer does not natively support integrated logins at this point and requires a username and password to setup a Community Server Weblog account.  To do this you need to perform one of the following workarounds.

Method A – Manipulating Community Server DB

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. Now connect to your Community Server database, and find your username in the aspnet_Users table.  Note the UserId value for it.
3. Find the row in the aspnet_Membership table for your UserId.  Update the Password column value to be something that you will remember.  In addition, update the PasswordFormat column to be 0.  If you do not set the PasswordFormat column you will receive an error from Live Writer.  “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 0 Occurred” User does not exist, you must correct this error before proceeding.“
4. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

Method B – Using the CS Administration Panel

1. Open IIS manager and drill down to your Community Server installation.  Find the /blogs/metablog.ashx file, right-click on it and select Properties.  Then click the File Security tab, click the Edit authentication button, and check the enable anonymous access checkbox.  This tells your web server to allow anonymous access to just the MetaBlog API service.
2. In your CS administration panel, click the membership panel tab and then Create New Account.  Create an account that you want to connect using Live Writer and assign it appropriate permissions within CS.  No database changes required.
3. You should now be able to connect with Windows Live Writer using your username and the password that you chose.

In either case you need to allow the metablog api control permissions to be accessed by anonymous users.  Method B works around using the existing user and creates an account just for use with Live Writer.

This implementation was tested with Community Server 2007.1 (SQL2005 data store) and Windows Live Writer 2008 (build 12.0.1366.1026). 

One of the great advantages of the WordPress blogging system is the ability to add plugins and widgets. This article offers 3 suggestions to help with Google Adsense, add Gravatars, and highlight author comments. All three are great ways to improve your audiences experience.

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Introduction 

One of the greatest things about the Internet is the ability to “borrow” many of the cool things that are out there for your own site.  You don’t need to be a web design guru, just be able to find articles like this one.  Flickr has become an extremely popular free photo service and offers many services to its users including the ability to play a flash slide show of your photo sets (albums), tagged pictures.

Why Would I Want To Embed The Slideshow?

Simply put it saves you bandwidth , storage space, and you don’t have to have anything special on your site.  If you host your site via a provider and have bandwidth limits, this is a must use technique.

How do I embed a Flickr Slideshow?

Step 1 – Create a Flickr account

The first thing you need to do is create a Flickr account if you already don’t have one.

Step 2 – Determine Your Flickr UserId

Once you have a Flickr account, you should either have created a unique url for yourself or you can go into Flickr settings and create one.  Your url will look something like http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourname/.

Go to http://idgettr.com/and enter your Flickr url to determine your id.  You’ll need it for the next step.

Step 3 – Insert code into your blog

When you are writing your blog, your editor usually has an option to enter code/html mode.  Copy the code block below changing the item in bold to your user id.
 

<iframe src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=12345678@N00" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no" height="500" width="500"></iframe>
This is the simplest possibility and will give you all the pictures in your Flickr account that are public.

Step 4 – More options

One way to limit the number of pictures in a slideshow is to add a tag parameter.  To do this add the bold text below and change the italicized text to your tag(s).  When you want to use multiple tags, separate them with commas.
 

<iframe src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?user_id=12345678@N00&tags=birthday,mark" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no" height="500" width="500"></iframe>
Flickr also offers the ability to make sets (albums) that can be very useful to organize your photos.  Replace the number with the number of your set in the code below.

<iframe src=http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=10101010101010101" frameBorder="0" scrolling="no" height="500" width="500"></iframe>