Azbloggerscoalition - blogservices

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Shouldn't we be able to customize our FavIcons for each and every Feed if we wished so?

My point is exactly that: I can, but the program just won't stick to it, unfortunately.

Doing it is too easy:
• Just get a more apropriate icon (*.ico) for one specific feed that you like
from the source of your choice;
(download from the web or just grab one from the cache of your browser)
• Copy the file to FeedDemon's FavIcon folder;
• Copy the name of the old file being used by FeedDemon and then erase this file;
• Rename the new file to the match that one used by FeedDemon;
• Voila! Your Feed just got prettier!    (and much easier to spot on a flash)

The reason for doing so is that too many of us are visual criatures; it is far more easy to look at an icon and recognize it along with its contents associated than having to read each and every name of the feeds to distinguish one from the other. This is especially true when you have many channels in a folder that come from a similar source (xxx.blogspot.com or xxx.feedburner.com or xxx.wordpress.com or xxx.google.com, etc).

The only problem is that the program keep erasing and changing the icons every time it syncs with NewsGator Online...

Is this the expected behaviour and will never change or is there any hope for me - and maybe some other folks that think like me?

My workaround for that was to create a .zip file in the directory with the icons and extract and overwite the files it everytime I want my icons back. But it is a pain having to do this everytime...

This question appeared on the CBS Website:

I have a question for any RSS gurus out there: Is there a way to set up my RSS feed so that it does not get published immediately?

The answer is yes, you can use FutureRSS a PHP script to schedule the RSS feed. You can prepublish content weeks or even months in advance, knowing that the content will automatically be displayed at the appropriate time.

(read complete question)

As I've mentioned earlier, I'm practically new to blogging and that it took a while for me to publish this blog. One of the reasons for the delay (among them, my obsessive-compulsive attention to every detail and what I call an "editor complex") is that I had to shop around a bit for the blogging platform best suited to my writing needs and purposes—in short, which blogging tool or service should I use?

  Good Ol' Blogger

I already have a stone-age Blogger account that I neglected for lack of a compelling reason to maintain a blog back then (that's why there's only one post ever since—hey, I know you're laughing!). Blogger's user interface is simple and straightforward (their tagline being, "Push-button publishing"). I was able to set up and post to two separate blogs in one sitting. (Literally in one sitting: I was at my workstation on Christmas Eve waiting for the calls to arrive, an atypical 8 calls within an entire 8-hour shift that normally would bring in a deluge of more than 45 calls. This was not directory assistance, by the way.)

Blogger added a lot of functionalities after Google bought it in 2003. Newer template choices, customizable designs, and yes, for online advertising aficionados—easy integration of Google AdSense into your blog. And now there's a Blogger Help YouTube Channel (Google now also owns YouTube) targeted at "visual learners," according to Blogger Buzz. But these are features I have yet to explore (the built-in revenue-making AdSense option is pretty neat, I must say!)...so let's set aside Blogger for a moment, folks.

  Er—Friendster?

Since I have a Friendster account, I've also experimented with its blog offering, but only briefly. While Friendster is a great pioneer in social networking, helping the mass of humanity to connect and reconnect, blogs apparently is not its strongest suit. It may be enough for casual bloggers who want to chronicle events in their lives, to upload photos and to basically express themselves. For someone who wants to do some serious, professional blogging, however, it leaves much to be desired. (My Friendster-expert friends would point me to hundreds of templates available for Friendster—but that's not what I need.) I also find the dashboard a.k.a. control panel interface unnecessarily complicated (Friendster IMHO needs to streamline its user interface—ever heard of "user-friendly"?). Nope, sorry Friendster, you're off my list.

Other Choices...

Then I heard the buzz about WordPress and I decided to check it out. Along the way, I also paid a quick, superficial visit to some sites that offer blogging services, such as LiveJournal and TypePad (I'll review them later). There are many blogging tools out there, free or paid, online or offline, take your pick. Just type in "blog tool" or the like on your search bar and you'll find these sites a-plenty. This ProBlogger article (and the ProBlogger site itself) that I stumbled upon helped me narrow down my choices to basically, WordPress and well, Blogger.

  Which brings us to WordPress(.com)

I find that many bloggers swear by WordPress. And true enough, the buzz is more than deserved. I was elated to discover in it empowering features you won't find in many other blog services: plenty of professional-looking themes, customizable widgets and plugins, tagging and categorization of posts, multimedia embedding, options to make your entire blog or specific pages private, comment tracking, multiple authors, Google Analytics-powered site stats (very important to me), and more.

You can also create and manage as many blogs as you want. And if you host your own blog—there's that option, too—there's even greater control and flexibility to let you turn your blog into virtually anything, short of making it churn out content on its own. WordPress takes a while to learn, though. (It took me a month, I think. WordPress is a course in itself! There are even books on the subject!)

But once you get used to the peculiar interface and terminology, you'll have plenty of tools to build your blog with. The key words are "professional," "empowering" and "control." Sure, there are kinks here and there (bugs). And I find, to my frustration, that I can't use javascript on posts and that very little HTML code is allowed. But overall, WordPress is a powerful blogging tool. FreelanceSwitch.com hails it as "(t)he best damn blogging tool around." PCMag also rates it approvingly.

  I therefore conclude...

As you may have guessed now, WordPress is ideal for more advanced users—which I aspire to be because that's part of my job. My verdict is, if you want a blog real easy and fast, without having to slog through nerdy documentation, try Blogger or even Friendster Blogs (bleh). But WordPress is definitely worth a try.

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The Food Standards Agency website uses a free news feed so it is now even easier to stay updated. The UK Food Standards Agency is equivalent to the FDA in the US.

With little money or manpower, a barely literate 89-year-old Malaysian grandmother running for parliament in Malaysias general election has turned to cyberspace to reach out to her voters with a Facebook profile and her own blog.

complete article