There are plugins to download for these areas:

• Comment management
• Post related
• Admin related
• Security
• Developer
• Twitter
• Feed related
• Tweaking plugins
• User related
• Spam management
• Social bookmarking
• Google Map related
• Mutli-language translation
• WP Mobile Edition – PDA friendly interface for your blog

The quality is so good that I downloaded almost all of them. See for yourself then…

So you have been writing for your blogs and this probably what you need to do:

1. connect to Internet
2. launch your browser
3. log-in to your blogging account or admin
4. work on your draft blog post
5. publish the post
6. re-edit the post
7. re-publish
8. goto #6 until you’re satisfied.

In some systems, you may also find that the following is not possible to be done, or at least very difficult to do:

• paste images
• insert table
• manipulate images such as resizing, add border, shadow etc
• insert video
• enter links easily
• have the article scheduled to be posted at a later time

Fret not, if you’ve been praying for such a tool, the prayer is quite likely answered now. It comes in the form of an application called MS Live Writer.

Here are some features I believe could help us bloggers to be more productive.

• work on draft pages offline
• insert images easily
• painless table insertion and editing
• lots of plug-ins available
• schedule posting
• manage several blog accounts at one place
• able to work on a number of posts simultaneously
• if you’re keen, you can edit the codes too
• editing is much more efficient as there’s little time lost to uploading-edit-uploading cycles.
• interface is also more friendly than most blog platforms
• publish posts directly from the editor without logging into your blog account
• suitable for many web platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint and many others.

I am keeping this one to the last. Imagine something goes down while you are writing a blog post, say the browser crashes or power goes down and you’re already on the last sentence just before you hit "publish" button. If you are aware, there are still blogging platforms out there that don’t have auto-save feature. Having a tool that auto-save your article every few minutes is definitely a must-have.

Now, go give it a try, download windows live writer for free.

If you want to add more bells and whistles, get the plug-ins here.

I hope that Live Writer will make your editing and posting a lot more enjoyable.

Free hosting and no advertizing?

I have seen a lot of other things were given free of charge in the past but webhosting. So I went ahead to check out and subsequently signup myself an account out of curiosity.

Registration was straight forward except I felt a bit weird having to click on “order now” tab when all I wanted was just a free account.

You have to enter the domain name that you want host with 000WebHost or you may choose a free domain they provide. The snag is that this domain will have “.890m.com” TLD in it which you may not like.

Next enter your name, address, password and tick on T&C and you’re good to go.

After the usual email confirmation ritual, my account was created within minutes. You are then assigned with account id, cPanel id and FTP and passwords. I am still quite skeptical at that moment to say the least.

I was doing some navigation around and looked for DNS info and took a note of it.

I then moved on to NameCheap my domain registrar to assign new host to the domain I choose to host at 000WebHost.

You can still access cPanel and FTP using IP-based url for now without having to wait for your new DNS to propagate. It was said that it may take about 48 hrs to complete.

To my surprise, when I checked back less than 24 hrs later the domain has already gone live. This was what on the screen:

The cPanel looks and feels just like the one on any other hosts that I am familiar with. However I noticed there was no options for addon domains or parked domains.

Well, if you have many domains that need to be hosted then creating one cPanel for each will do. If you don’t mind the hassle.

I am still looking around for where they offer upgrades or something. Just wonder how they are making money out of this

Here are some of the features offered for free:

250 MB of Disk Space
100 GB Bandwidth
Full Domain Hosting
cPanel Powered Hosting
Host unlimited domains
Over 500 website templates
Free POP3 Email Box
Full Webmail access
FTP and Web based File Manager access
PHP, MySQL, Perl, CGI, Ruby.

I am going to hook up a monitoring system to record the site uptime and down. I’ll share that with you as soon as I got a good facts to present. For this purpose, FreeWebMonitoring.com will alert you via email as soon as a site goes down, as will UptimeAlert.com and both are free services.

Verdict:

Pros:
If a 250 MB Space, 100 GB Bandwidth, $0.00/mo, no advertising webhosting is all you need, 000WebHost may be the one.

Cons:
And before you go get it, perhaps it’s a good idea to search for what other people have said about 000WebHost. As it is free, you may have issues with uptime (or downtime), speed, support etc. Speed will become critical as more people hop on to this free service in the future and 000WebHost do not increase their bandwidth.

And, go for paid services if you can afford it as you are guaranteed good support and reliability. Most people I know of using free hosting just for testing purposes. Also you can also look at other free services and see what fit you best here at:

http://www.free-webhosts.com/webhosting-01.php

Enjoy.

Reach-a-Mail is a USB based portable email client. From now on, your e-mail will always be with you no matter where you are.

All you need is a USB drive to receive and send e-mail from any computer without the need to install any software. You save a lot of time thanks to Reach-a-Mail, as well as keep your e-mail correspondence private leaving nothing in a computer.

You will be impressed by the easiness and simplicity of user’s interface.

Version 3.2 features MS Outlook synchronization.

You can download your free copy from Download.com.

Installation is just a simple one-time install to your USB drive. The interface is very similar to MS Outlook, Outlook Express etc. Email accounts and address book can be imported from Outlook Express.

In use, you have the option to download just email headers or complete mails. I prefer to see the headers first and then select those I want to see the actual messages. This is two-step process though but it may save you a little time and your flash drive space.

Like to have a try? Download your free copy from Download.com now.

Search Engine Myths Exposed

Any marketer would concur with this statement – rank well in Google and your profits are pretty much set.

But the real challenge is how to get to the top spots since everyone is aiming to be there hence it becomes extremely competitive.

With that comes a lot of teachings on how to win the Google game. Everyone claims to know how Google works and how to take advantage of it. As a result there is so much bogus information out there, often coming from the “gurus” themselves.

There’s one guy who is very committed to set the record straight. Jonathan Leger who is known for his principles not to preach anything without hard facts and figures to backup all his statements.

Recently he has released a new f ree report that completely obliterates the following myths about Google (and then goes on to show you what DOES work):

• Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All
• Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content
• Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank
• Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank
• Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings
• Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content
  ..and..
• MYTH #7: THE BIGGEST MYTH: Ranking In Google Is Hard!

As if that was not enough, he’ll pay you for referring other people to this powerful f ree report? And that he’ll pay you for anyone THEY refer as well (even while it’s in pre-launch)? Find out more about that when you download the report from:

Search Engine Myths Exposed

Enjoy your discovery.

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging platform around. If you’re not yet a Wordpress user, please check out this article BlogBloke.com and make up your mind after.

For those WP users out there, you may find it hard to get good looking themes for your sites. The ones on Wordpress.org look too boring (to me at least) as they all look rather similar to each other except subtle color and layout changes here and there. You have to look beyond that if you were to break away from “bloggy” looking themes.

I came across some resources that point you to numerous good looking WP themes plus lots of other amazing stuff to spruce up your website here at:

Another one that has as good a collection is this:

Customizing the themes may not be everyone’s cup of tea but most theme owners do provide simple tutorial for you to work along. Also comments from users as well as forum threads in some cases will help too. Whatever, it’s worth your while is all I can say

Enjoy!