Moonlit Minds

Shadows

Well, it has been some time since my last post here. Amazing thing is that having a blog makes you fell obliged to write something from time to time. Funny…
Anyway, it is OK – it motivates me, at least, to “share” what has happened lately here – at my end of the “net-space”. And it has happened a lot!

For the first, Santa is coming early this year – with a lot of “goodies” in his bag:

• Acer Aspire One
• Nokia 5310
• New hard disk (500 GB)…

Wow! I simply cannot wait to unwrap my new Blue Communication System!
Next – there is a lot going on in the WordPress world. Many theme creators are going Open Source which gives us, simple users, opportunity to try out some excellent themes, new version of Wordpess (2.7) is closer and closer, many interesting articles were published. My personal choice of last week WordPress-connected links worthy underlining:

• Blog Design That Works
• Hybrid WordPress Theme Framework
• Elevate Themes :: Free Premium WordPress Themes ::

Why am I pointing out those articles? Simply because in my humble opinion, the authors are doing a lot for WordPress and WordPress themes and they deserve much more publicity than they actually have – watch their sites – their design will be the future of blogging (hopefully!).

Now few words about Twitter. I am relatively new user of the service (and according to latest statistics – I should not be using it – too old… ). Well, I find it actually useful and funny. Again only in my modest opinion, it is something in between IM (Instant Messenger) and blog. Perfect tool to find out trends and – “make a buzz”. Remember though that it is relatively easy to make something “trendy”, make an excitement around new things – much more difficult is to keep interest of the public. This craves a real effort and… a real value. If you would like to learn a bit more of “wise tweeting” try following this blog:

• Twitip

Really good tips out there!

Talking about value, not so long time ago I started to use Zemanta service on the blog. Zemanta is a service which adds semantic value to your “writings” (suggests pictures, links, tags and so on). I am pretty satisfied with the service but today I “stumbled upon” Tagaroo (based on Calais powered by Thomson Reuters). It is not the first time I consider the service – it just seems pretty similar to Zemanta. And here I have a kind request – if you are reading this blog and you are/were using those services – can you, please, explain to me:

• The difference between Zemanta and Tagaroo?
• Could they be used side by side?
• And if not – what is an advantage of using one over the other?

As you probably noticed my questions are shy trial to invite you to leave a comments here. Why? Hm, because the real value of social web, in my belief, is in creating the space for dialogue, sharing points of view, knowledge.

It seems I wrote slightly too much… Anyway – I hope you enjoyed my Weekly and… hope to meet you soon again.

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I am trying to put my favourite audio and video podcasts:

ChangeSurfer Radio
PopTech
TEDtalks

in one widget at SpringWidget - consider it small gift from me – I hope I will manage and you will enjoy it!

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• The Almighty Widget
• Useful widgets for blogs.

I just found another splendid site with very good WordPress tutorials – The WordPress Magazine.
Tutorials are well written, step-by-step and in understandable (even for “newbie”!) language. I recommend especially “Make a theme series”:

• Part 1 – The Loop
• Part 2 – A splash of colour
• Part 3 – Finding your style

I hope you will enjoy those articles as I did.

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Top 3 Mozilla Firefox 4 Features For Next Generation Browsing Experience

I personally like them all – Prism, Weaver and Geode. Although my favorite is Prism (Firefox as new desktop environment – with all those fantastic web applications!). Read more about the future of “crowd favorite” browser clicking the link above

Very nice feature of coming soon new version of WordPress – ability to customize post editing screen. Watch the video below grabbed from Mark on WordPress where you can watch the bigger version of the screen-cast.

I find it really useful but I wonder will such nice changes also come to the editor itself? (I mean here better “on-screen” HTML and visual editor – well, I have to admit that I am using “It’s All Text” extension for Firefox now, configured to launch gvim…).

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