Ed Dale, in The 30 Day Challenge, has recommended that we use Flock for this year's challenge and WordPressDirect to host our actual blogs.  Both are great tools but the real beauty is how well these can be married to make blogging easier than ever before.

Having to log into your web site each time you want to blog something can be a real pain in the butt!  But, using Flock, you can avoid all that hassle and blog DIRECTLY from your browser!  Oftentimes, I will just select some text on a page, right-click it and then select "Blog This!".  When Flock's blog-editor window opens, it's already quoted the text I want to blog and it's already linked back to the main site for me!

Imagine how easy that could make adding content to your 30DC blogs?  You just need to add a few comments (2-5 paragraphs) under the quoted text and you're done!  Also, Flock's blog editor has much better image-editing capabilities than WordPressDirect.  Instead of doing weird things like typing in %IMAGE% where you want one to appear, you can simply upload your images to your Facebook/Flickr/Picasa account using Flock's built-in image-uploader and then link to them inside the blog-editor in the same way you might do in a Microsoft Word document.

WAY better than using WordPressDirect's upload form ;)  (PS:  I love WPD, I just don't like their blog editor!)

NB: Probably the best reason to blog with Flock is that you don't have to bother with HTML code, you can just select text, and choose to link it, bold it and so on.  It's much easier and faster than doing the HTML yourself which, of course, means you can make more blogs and make more money using the 30DC methods :)

So, without further ado, here's how you do it...

Step 1: Click

Step 2: Click

Step 3: Click

Step 4: Tell Flock Where Your Blog is Hosted

In this step, you want to select "I host my blog, or the service I use is not listed".  Then just type in your WordPressDirect.com address.  This might be your own domain or a subdomain provided by WordPressDirect.com themselves.  Example:



Then click

Now just wait a bit...

...while Flock figures out what kind of blog you have.  It does this automatically for all WordPress blogs.  For other blogs, you may have to do a bit more work but you won't have to worry about that if you're following Ed's lessons.

Step 5: Type in Your Login Details

In most cases, your username will be "admin" and your password will be the same one you used when you created your WordPressDirect.com account.  But, if you can't remember what that was, fear not!  Simply login to your WordPressDirect.com account and...

Click:


On the screen that comes up next, you'll see your login details.  Take them from there and just copy and paste those details into Flock!

Your username and password here:



Should end up here:


Click and you're done!

All in all, this should take you about ONE MINUTE!  If you don't know your WordPressDirect login details, it might take you TWO ;)

Once you've done this, you can simply click each time you want to blog something and start typing! No waiting for your blog to load, no logging in first, nothing :)

And, remember, you can select any text on any web page and then right-click and choose "Blog This" to blog it!  Sweet! :D

Enjoy!  Blogging with Flock is MUCH easier than any other blogging software I've ever used before!<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: blogging, 30 day challenge, thirty day challenge, wordpressdirect.com, easy blogging

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Alberts' panels make use of copper, indium, gallium, sulphur and selenium. The result is a revolutionary thin panel, approximately five microns thick (a human hair is 20 microns thick), that can be sold at a dramatically lower cost.

SA leads the way in new solar technology - South Africa - The Good News
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Tags: electricity, solar power, south africa

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Among the cars' features are the roof mounted heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, LED panels indicating the train's destination and the locality of the next station, as well as hand-woven moquette upholstered seats for added comfort while the Gautrain cruises at up to 160km/h.

First Gautrain vehicle unveiled - South Africa - The Good News

I know a lot of people are sceptical about this but I think that's only because this train is bigger than their imaginations and beliefs for SA.  We've done big things before and there's no reason (at all) why we won't succeed again.  I'm looking forward to this and future growth for our country.<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: gautrain, south africa, sa good news

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I got really bored with GMail's vanilla signatures so I went on a hunt for something a bit more interesting and eventually came across a site that shows you how to use a Firefox addon called Better GMail 2  to enter a raw HTML signature for each of your email addresses.  I produced the above sig using this code...



Pretty neat!
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Tags: gmail, html signature

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You have a website and can't figure out why it's not showing up at the top of Google's search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.Certainly, achieving visibility in Google's search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google's Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to "optimize" your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.

Google's Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website - USATODAY.com

Neat -- good advise from "the master".<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: google, getting indexed

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Also known as "RSS chicklets", RSS buttons help visitors to your blog quickly and easily add your RSS feed to their reader.  I've just added a bunch to my blog using a free rss button tool provided by TopRankBlog.  Highly recommend it!
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Tags: rss, rss buttons, toprankblog

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I've been using Flock for a little over a month now and it really makes blogging an absolute breeze!  The extra good news is that Ed and the team will be using Flock in this year's 30 Day Challenge.



Now if you're not familiar with the 30DC (for short), it's a 1-month event that basically takes you from zero to $1.  In other words, Ed and his team will, for free, show you how to make $1 online, using nothing that costs any money at all.

And the theory is that if you can do it for $1, you can do it for $100.  If you can do it for $100, you can do it for $1,000, and so on :D

I took part in last year's challenge and learned a LOT.  I'm a bit of an online marketer and I certainly know how to make money but these guys are MILES and MILES ahead of me so if you've got the bandwidth available to watch lots of videos and the time available to do some work each day for the next 30 days, I HIGHLY recommend you get started with The 30 Day Challenge here.<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: 30day challenge, flock, making money online

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We could have a battery-operated car in SA really soon!  Cool!  Weird.  But cool!<!-- technorati tags begin -->

Tags: fossil-fuel, fuel crisis

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I recently moved from Windows XP back to Linux after about 2 years on 'doze. As anyone who has upgraded their PC/laptop/OS will tell you, the idea is to move everything across while losing as little as possible along the way. I found something that works quite well for Bookmarks.

First off, sure you can export your old bookmarks into an HTML file and then import them again but that sounds an awful lot like work so give this a shot instead.

Go to www.Foxmarks.com and install that add-on for Firefox. (This, of course, presupposes that you use an intelligent browser, NOT internet-exploder :D)

Once you've installed Foxmarks, and Firefox (or Flock, in my case!) has restarted, follow the on-screen prompts and wait for Foxmarks to sync-up. The end result being your bookmarks saved on the net somewhere AND on your browser without you having to change your browsing MO, if you will.

Boot into Linux, your new laptop, whatever, install Foxmarks on THAT machine, and voila! Instant bookmarks.

My end-goal (as far as computers go) is to be able to set up on ANY computer, ANY where in the world and I'm getting there. Feels pretty good considering it normally takes me a week to move from one machine to the next and, this last time, it took me just over a day :D
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Tags: firefox, flock, linux, windows, bookmarks, foxmarks

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400 Mbps ADSL

New bonded DSL rings (BDR) technology developed by Genesis Technical Systems (GTS) of Calgary, Canada, was recently demonstrated at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin. According to GTS this proof of concept technology promises bandwidth of up to 400Mbps second at a much lower cost than fibre.

This is totally awesome! No idea how long before it reaches South Africa (could be YEARS) but then that's a good excuse to emigrate to Canada, isn't it? ;)