From My Armchair: 4 August 2012

At the BookShelf

I am into my last days of annual leave, so it is doubtful I’ll be able to read anywhere near as much as I have this last week. I’ll probably have the Kindle out at lunch for a bit, so I’ll still be getting some reading in even while I’m at work. The Kindle has certainly made it a lot easier to have good reading material available no matter where I am. Loving the Kindle.

 

Social Networks, Web Applications & Other Tools

Not a lot has happened with the social networks in the book/reading niche over this last week, except that I have been updating Goodreads on a regular basis as to what I am reading, progress and cataloguing the books as I go.

I did do a quick addition to Quotista, which has a lot of potential but doesn’t appear to be being developed any further, which is…

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Blogging with Tumblr

It’s no secret that I use wordpress.com a lot for Blogging. I have close to 10 Blogs/sites hosted at wordpress.com. These days there are a large number of Blogging platforms to choose from – many of which provide a very easy and simple user experience. My platform of choice remains wordpress.com, though coming in at a very close second is tumblr. I do have a tumblr Blog which is called ‘Daily Dribble,’ which is a Blog that captures posts that I don’t post elsewhere. I love to Blog and often find myself thinking that I’d like to post that website/article/thing somewhere, but it doesn’t quite fit into what I’m doing on any particular Blog that I have set up – this is where my tumblr Blog fits. It captures this overflow if you like.

There are many things to like about tumblr, apart from the fact that is very simple to use. You don’t need to be a HTML expert to use it, though you can use HTML for your posts should you choose to do so. Since I like a certain formatting appearance I choose HTML mode for my posts and it really is quite simple to do (if you know a little HTML of course). If you don’t know HTML tumblr remains very easy to use and is one of the very simple Blogging platforms out there for people just getting started in Blogging or for those with more experience.

I also use the Chrome browser from Google and the little Chrome Extension I have for posting URLs straight into tumblr (with the post) is a fantastic way to add content to my Blog. You can also set up your tumblr Blog to post straight  to your Twitter account or to Facebook, which is all very convenient.

There is so much more to having a tumblr account – all worth checking out at:

http://www.tumblr.com/

My tumblr Blog is at:

http://particularkev.tumblr.com/

Plinky

For today’s ‘daily’ I’m going to post about a new service from ‘Automattic,’ the guys behind WordPress.com. They have a new service called ‘Plinky.’

Basically, what this new service is all about is giving its members prompts for Blog posts. The service will ask you a question, which you then answer. This then becomes your Blog post, which can be added to your usual Blogging platform, such as WordPress (which is what I do). It can be shared direct from the site or embedded via a code that Plinky provides. I have been copying and pasting this code into my web editor in order to format the text as I would like it to appear in my Blog.

I think this is a great little service to help those just starting out in Blogs, as it will provide you with the basis for a daily post. It will also help those who struggle to come up with content for their Blogs.

Me? I just use it to supplement what I already post – to give my Blog a little more personal appeal.

Visit Plinky at:

http://www.plinky.com/