ScribeFire is a handy blog publishing too available for those of us who use Firefox for browsing. This Firefox Add-on supports the following blogging platforms:

• Wordpress
• Movable Type
• Drupal
• Textpattern
• Roller
• Meta Weblog API
• Blogger

For example, let’s say you want to write a post about Coffee chains and you have multiple tabs open (one for Starbucks, Tully’s, MoxieJava, and Seattle’s Best). With Scribefire you can switch between the tabs for each coffee company, copy text and images directly into the Scribefire editor, format, edit, and publish the post - all without ever logging into your blog.

To put it another way, if you’re an “alt-tabber” like I used to be, you probably open your blog in one Firefox window, and open the web pages you’re using for your topic research in other Firefox windows. That way you can quickly switch between the research pages you have open and the blog post you are writing using alt-tab. With Scribefire you don’t have to do that anymore.

You can setup Scribefire so it opens in a new window, new tab, or perhaps most useful - in a split screen mode with the editor located at the bottom of your browser window.

You can drag in photos, copy and paste text, and even insert Youtube video quickly and easily.

Another nice perk you’ll find with using Scribefire is the fact that you can use it to ping some or all of the following sites:

• Technorati
• Weblogs
• Blo.gs
• Blogrolling
• Icerocket

This ensures that each of these sites know right away that you’ve posted new content to your blog.

One final interesting feature of Scribefire is the “blog this page” option that allows you to highlight content, right click, and select “blog this page”. Doing so pasts the content directly into your Scribefire window where you can quickly tweek the content and post it. Pretty slick!

If you’re using Scribefire already, leave a comment about some of the features you find most useful. Since I’m a new user, I’m sure there are plenty of features that I’ve yet to discover.

Popularity: 57% [?]

E-mail spiders have become a full-blown epidemic (er… infestation?) on the web, crawling sites and collecting email addresses for evil spammers. Fortunately there are a number of ways you can protect yourself.

The number one thing you can do to prevent your address from being harvested is to not provide it to your visitors at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t practical for most people. Visitors generally feel a site is more reputable if contact information has been provided.

If you feel you must provide your email address to visitors, here are a few methods to secure your address, as well as a few methods to avoid.

…read full articles of "How2: Protect Your Address from Email Spiders"

Popularity: 100% [?]

One of the most popular plugins out there for WordPress is the Popularity Contest Plugin by Alex King. This plugin ranks the popularity your posts by pageviews, trackbacks, comments, etc and displays a popularity value at the bottom of the post.

It also allows you to put a list of “Most Popular Posts” on your sidebar.

Unfortunately, WordPress 2.5.1 users get a fatal error when trying to activate the plugin. The good news is, it’s a fairly easy fix, especially if you were using the plugin in a previous version of WordPress. If you weren’t using the plugin before upgrading or installing WordPress 2.5.1, the fix is a bit more involved, but still doable. Please note, this fix isn’t my own. I learned about it here. I’ve rewritten the steps to hopefully provide a clear step-by-step account of the process (complete with screenshots for those of us who like pictures).

…read full articles of "How2: Get Popularity Contest Plugin Working in WordPress 2.5.1"

Popularity: 95% [?]

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can be confusing for even the most knowledgeable bloggers and web designers. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of SEO taken from their article on SEO:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

If you’re confused about what SEO is and what it means for your site, don’t worry. A quick Google search will produce numerous articles that can help you understand SEO (I recommend starting with Wikipedia’s overview of SEO first).

But here’s the good news! You don’t really have to understand SEO to start improving your web site or blog (although understanding it certainly helps). Free SEO tools like Website Grader can help you understand where changes to your site are needed to help improve your site’s SEO.

…read full articles of "How2: Optimize your Blog or Web Site with Free SEO tools."

Popularity: 66% [?]

I wanted to change the TYsTIPS.com’s favicon (the tiny image associated with a web site’s name/url). It turns out that there are a lot of posts about how to do this, but the method has changed for the newest version of WordPress.org (currently version 2.5.1) so the old methods don’t work. Also, this only works if you are using WordPress.org, WordPress.com users don’t have access to the necessary files to make this change - sorry!

Here’s my generic favicon in Internet Explorer:

And here’s my generic favicon in Firefox (notice Yahoo’s nice little favicon - I’ve got favicon envy!).

Changing your favicon in WordPress 2.5.1 isn’t hard, you just have to make sure you’re following the proper directions for your version of WordPress. So, for WordPress version 2.5.1 here’s the steps:

…read full articles of "How2: Change Your WordPress 2.5.1 Favicon icon"

Popularity: 39% [?]