When we heard that Steve Johnson was going to open a new restaurant in
our neighborhood, we asked him what he was planning in the way of a web
site.

He was looking into developing a “traditional” web site that would
provide customers with information about the restaurant. We suggested
he do the web site as a weblog instead. We explained that he could
have all of the features of a web site plus an interactive forum for
explaining his food philosophy and menus. He was persuaded and the
Rendezvous
Central Square weblog was born.

Now Steve can readily update his menus and post his thoughts on what is
being served at Rendezvous. He's got a place for people to comment on
his menu (so far all the comments are raves…). As he starts to get
press for the restaurant, he'll be able to post all his coverage in one
place. From the weblog back end, he can quickly check the statistics on
weblog traffic. Since opening in mid-November, the weblog has had over 27,000 pages views. He's got a link to his online reservation system,
Open Table and full-text search of the site.

As Steve learned more about weblogs for business, he concluded that
there was no reason not to do his web site as a weblog.

Now we're pushing him to do cooking podcasts of his (and our) favorite
recipes….

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Here is a recap of my first experience using RocketPost - a new full featured blog posting tool.

The Setup Wizard asks you to name the blog as you set it up. Why
doesn't it just retrieve the name when you give it the blog host
address and account info?

After asking you for the name of the blog, then it asks whether
you have a blog on the Internet. BlogHarbor is a choice but Blogware is
not. So for Blogware users who are not BlogHarbor customers, it is
confusing when it asks for a BlogHarbor user name and password which is
actually the Blogware user name and password.

It retrieved the entire list of all my Blogware blogs but then
only allowed me to choose one from the list to set up. I have a ton of Blogware blogs
that I maintain and just want to be able to set up all of them at once.

I chose my
internal company blog (the first one in the list) even though I had
entered Mohr Blog (my personal blog) at the first prompt, just to see
what would happen.

It asked me if I wanted to retrieve old posts so I told it to retrieve my last five posts. No posts were retrieved.

I tried the “Set up blogs” option from the Tools menu and
changed the name of the blog in RocketPost to match the name of the blog on Blogware. Still
not able to retrieve posts.

I set up my internal company blog. Still not able to retrieve posts for that either.

RocketPost has a far more robust editor than any other blogging client I have used.

1. It counts words as you type.
2. It allows you to attach a date and timme to your post so you can
   post to the past or the future. With BlogJet I have to post as a draft
   and then go into the Blogware interface to adjust the date before
   publishing.
3. It has a strikeout formatting button - useful for corrections
4. It allows you to insert Web Service tags such as Google or Google Images

5. blogblog

   Glen Mohr

   The
   photo editor seems great but we'll see what it looks like when it
   posts. I set the picture here with as left justified and gave it
   margins of 10. For some reason the word “blog” was added on either side
   of the picture. Then I edited the picture and set the margins to zero.
   The words “blogblog” then moved to the top of the picture. Not sure
   where they came from. But just being able to edit a photo on the fly is
   fantastic.

6. Another nice feature is the “continue reading break” except I'm not
   sure where the text goes that you type after the break. I would expect
   it to put everything above the break into the excerpt field and the
   full post into the body field.

Editor is very easy to use. I added a drop cap to this paragraph.

Here is a left pull quote that I did with one paste and click:Just being able to edit a photo on the fly is fantastic

I'm not sure how the spell check works becuase I wasn't able to get it to find any of my misspellings.

I'm going to try a file attachment as well becuase I've always had
trouble getting attachments and photos to come through to Blogware when
posting with BlogJet. glenmohr.JPG (4 Kb)
Ok

, that's a problem. When I insert a file attachment and then hit
return to go to the next line and continue typing, for some reason the
first couple characters of what I type following the file attachment
are added to the link to the file attachment - see “Ok” above.

I'm going to try the file attachment again: glenmohr.JPG (4 KB)

This time I hit two line breaks after the attachment link and that seemed to work.

Now I'll post.

As you can see, neither the photo nor the attached file came through.

Everything below the “continue reading” break did not make it onto the blog. I'm not sure where it went so I took out the break.

I just went back into the RocketPost editor, to add this.You can
easily tell if a post in the editor has been published becuase the
permalink shows up.

The feature that immediately caught my attention with RocketPost is
the abilty to post to multiple blogs at the same time. I haven't seen
this in any other blogging client and would be very useful. I tried to post this article to my internal company
blog and my personal blog at the same time but could not find any menu
choice to do that.

When I checked the RocketPost window that displays all my blogs, I
discovered that the old posts, only three instead of the five I had
requested, had been retrieved. Perhaps it just took a while. No option
there either to post to multiple blogs simultaneously.

The online help told me to add the URL for my blog to the images
settings to ensure that pictures get uploaded. When I went to do this,
I discovered it was already set correctly, so no help there.

I also can't find an option to switch blogs while I am editing a
post. I frequently start writing a post and realize I'm set to publish
to the wrong blog. With BlogJet I can just go to “manage blogs” and
change blogs without haveing to start over.

I called up an old post copied the text, started a new post for a different blog and pasted in the contents. Then I modified it and tried to post. RocketPost did not like this. It would not post and kept giving me an “internal error” message. Also it started using about 96% of my CPU's capacity until I shut it down.

So, RocketPost has a lot of nice features but is not yet working right for Blogware.

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Pingware is our subscription blogging service.  It is good for
professionals who want to maintain their own blogs, as well as for
blogs for retail businesses, publishers, and non-profits.

Pingware is built on Blogware, a best-in-class blogging package from
Tucows.  

Pricing:  We sell Pingware
subscriptions on an annual basis.  Our blogs are priced based on
storage and bandwidth.  Here are the prices for our blogs:
Mini:  $24.00 per year.  100 MB of storage/100 MB of bandwidth.
Starter:  $49.00 per year.  1 GB of storage/2 GB of bandwidth
Basic:  $89.00 per year.  2 GB of storage/5 GB of bandwidth
Plus:  $149.00 per year.  2 GB of storage/10 GB of bandwidth

Please take a look at this table comparing the basic Blogware features with other free and paid services.

We chose Blogware as our underlying platform for Pingware because it has many advantages for our target audiences:

1. Custom Components. 
Rather than waiting for an off-shore development team to come up with
new features, we can build our customers new components and features
that meet their needs Recently we built is a slide show that sits in
the sidebar on the blog.  We have used this for photos in our blog
for Sudan:  The Land and the People. 
But it can also be used for rotating text in the form of testimonials,
books reviews, new product offerings, and menu specials.

2.  Complex Notifications: 
Blog readers need multiple methods for getting new information from a
blog.  Pingware allows readers to define their own methods. 
They can get posts via email or via RSS.  They can subscribe only
to certain categories.  This type of flexibility is very important
for building and maintaing a loyal audience for your blog.

3.  Search.  Pingware
incorporates a full-text search of the blog’s content.  This is an
extremely important feature that is not built into Typepad or Moveable
Type.

4.  Photos. This is hands
down the best feature of Pingware’s software. You can zip a file of
photos, upload them, and in seconds you have a perfectly organized
photo album, complete with scaled-down thumbnails that link to larger
photos of a size you can specify. On top of that, each album has a
built-in link to a slideshow feature.

5.  Podcasting.  Pingware fully supports podcasting and videoblogging.

6.  Privacy. What
separates Pingware from the rest of the blogging platform pack is how
easily it allows you to assign permissions and security to part or all
of the elements in your weblog. For example, you can secure categories
so only a select group of blog users can access them. This is useful
for using one blog for both internal and external purposes.

7.  Custom Design. We’ve
created blogs using both Pingware and Movable Type, and we find
Pingware to be more malleable. Creating a custom component, changing
CSS, or switching back and forth from a two-column layout to a
three-column layout is much easier with Pingware.

8.  Storage and bandwidth.
Most blogging platforms boast unlimited (even free) blogs - but not
unlimited storage or bandwidth. Most professional bloggers will quickly
exceed the limits of the free packages. To buy extra storage on free
blogging services such as LiveJournal would cost you upwards of $100.00 a year just for 1 GB of storage (not including bandwidth).

With our new mini package, you can get started for as little as $24.00
per year.  Our intro package is a bargain for 100MB
storage/bandwith, the next upgrade package is a steal: 1G storage and
1G bandwidth for $49.00 per year.

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(Adapted from Blogware's manual on the Publisher Control Panel).

You can find traffic statistics about your blog from your Dashboard in
your Adminstration Panel.

To see your blog's statistics data:


1. Click Dashboard tab.
2. Click Site Stats
3. General Summary of your weblog's traffic stats will
appear.

What do all the numbers
mean?


Statistics
summary
- Lists how many computers have accessed your blog, and
how many page views it has received.

Hourly
statistics
- Tells you what hours of the day your visitors read your
blog.

Most
popular articles statistics - Shows which
articles are getting read by the most people.

Most
commented article statistics - Lists articles
that have the most comments.

Most
popular category statistics
- This shows your most-read categories.

Browser
statistics
- This is a comprehensive listing of the browsers and
aggregators your readers
are using to view your blog, listed in order of decreasing
popularity.

Referer
statistics
- Lists which web pages are linking to your blog.

Transfer
usage
- Shows how much of your transfer-usage allotment is
being consumed by other web pages linking to your blog.

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1. Link to your weblog.
2. Login with your username and password.
3. Link to the Administration Dashboard from under “Help for
Publishers” in the left column of your weblog. (You may need to
re-enter your login and password for security purposes).
4. Once in your Dashboard, scroll down to the bottom where it says, “Recent Comments.”
5. If you see comments you want to delete, simply click on the comment, check the box to the left of it, and click Delete.
 

Please note that by disabling the anonymous comments on your weblog,
visitors must now create a reader account (or login if they already
have an account) in order to post comments to your weblog.

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What is a
favicon?
It's a mini-logo that appears on the left side of the URL address above
your weblog or website.

Here's how to add one to your
weblog:

1. Choose an image, preferably 300×300 pixels, that is easily
recognizable. Detailed photos or drawings are generally difficult to
identify when they are reduced in size to about 16×16 pixels.
2. Visit http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/.
3. Upload the image where it says 'Source Image' and click 'Generate
Favicon.ico'
4. You will then see a preview of the image. If it is not to your
liking, simply start over until you are happy with it.
5. Next, download the favicon by clicking 'Download Favicon' and save
it to your desktop.
6. Double-click on the file to unzip it.
7. Login to your weblog.
8. Upload the favicon.ico file using your file manager.
9. Link back to your weblog. You should see the favicon appear in the
URL bar in minutes.

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1. Login to your weblog or administration dashboard
2. Click Favorites
3. Click RSS Headline Components
4. Copy and paste the RSS feed address from the desired website in the 'URL' field.
5. Enter a title for the component that describes the feed (this will be visible on your weblog).
6. Click Add Feed.
7.
Once the feed appears in the list, choose the desired number of
headlines to show on your weblog from the drop-down menu and click Save
Changes.
8. Next, add the component to your layout by linking to Look&Feel, then drag and drop the component to your layout.
9. Click Save to update your weblog layout.

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“I think that the larger money is eventually to made in blog services.
For example, my friend Kathleen Gilroy continues to develop and enrich
her Pingware offering to include Ping Enterprise which integrates blogs, wikis, RSS, and related capabilities.”

- Bill Ives

Full article.

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The Otter Group builds high performance learning and information
networks for workgroups and organizations. These networks increase
knowledge worker productivity by delivering the right data,
information, and knowledge to the right people, at the right time, in
the right format.

We start by analyzing the information and learning needs of your
employees and/or customers.  Based on this analysis we then design
and build your network by matching needs with the newest information
and learning management tools.  We then work with your IT
department to integrate new technology seamlessly into your existing
systems.  We also train your knowledge workers to use the new
tools and systems. The result: improved processes, increased
productivity, and better business results.

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PingPronto is a weblog service for small businesses.  It is
designed to enable businesses to rapidly configure and deploy weblogs
for internal, as well as for marketing purposes.  With PingPronto,
businesses can chose from a menu of set-up services that include:

Our clients include:

Sutter Health Medical Advisory Panel, Sacramento, CA

ATA Cycle, Cambridge, MA

Massachusetts Software Council

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