WordPress.com versus Blogger.com. 2

Taking a look at WordPress.com

In this post I am taking a look at WordPress.com. I tend to think of WordPress. com as far more ‘conservative’ both in its choice of themes for the user and also its user interface or dashboard. So for me personally its where I place my more ‘techy type’ blog rather than my more personal daily diary blog. Let’s take a look at WordPress.com shall we?

WordPress.com versus Blogger.com. 1.

Taking a look at Blogger.

This is my second set of ‘comparison’ posts and this time I intend to compare two free blogging sites, both of them used by myself, one for this blog and the other for a more personal diary type blog. To begin the comparison in this post I am going to run through the features available to the user on Blogger.

Blogging with Windows Live Writer. 10.

Adding Some Plug-ins. Cool Emotion, Bullets and Horizontal Line.

In this post, I intend to cover some more Live Writer plug-ins that many of you might find useful. These are the Cool Emotion plug-in, the Bullets plug-in and the Horizontal Line plug in. These three plug-ins do not have their own sidebar menu as the Polaroid Picture plug in and therefore do not warrant as much explanation.

1. To add them, Click on the Add a plug-in from the bottom of the Insert list in the Sidebar menu. You will need to search for them by inputting their names into the search box on Windows Live Gallery. Once they are installed on your computer, they will appear in the Insert list in Windows Live Writer. Firstly, we’ll take a look at the Cool Emotion plug in.

2. Click on Cool Emotion from the list. The Cool Emotion window will then open.  You have a total of 13 separate pages of different emoticons to add to the text of your blog. Emoticons are useful to give your readers that extra insight about how you feel personally regarding the content inside your blog post or just to add a bit of fun!

3. You can add as many emoticons at a time as you wish. Simply click the ones you wish to add to your text and then  click on Insert. To access the other pages, click on the number box at the top and choose another page number. Try them all out! They’re so cool!

    

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4. Next well try the Horizontal Line plug in which is really simple to use and all you need to do if you wish to insert a horizontal line into your text is simply make sure your cursor is at the position where you wish the line to appear, and then click on Horizontal Line from the Insert list. (See above and below.)

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5. The last one well take a look at is the Bullets plug in. What on earth are bullets? Well, if you wish to list some points inside a post for example, you could use either numbers to do so or bullets. You would normally use numbers if you were doing a blog post about something where you needed the reader to know which step was before the next one. (like in many of my how-to’s)  However, if your content was not necessarily sequential or ‘step by step’ for the reader to follow but simply a list of points that can be read in any order, then bullets are normally used.  Normally bullets are usually simple black ‘dots’. The Bullets plug in allows you to ‘spice up’ your points that you wish to make inside your blog post so that they look more attractive as I will illustrate below.

     Here is my very first point.
     And here is my second point.

6. You can specify how many bullets you wish to use from the Bullets window, choose which bullet to use, how much space you wish to place between the bullet and  your text and also add your own customised bullets in the Custom Bullets tab.

  These star one’s look pretty cool.
  Don’t they?
  Or don’t you like them? They are found in the Custom Bullets tab.

• Here so that you can compare is the usual ‘bullet’ which is simply a black dot. So to sum up the bullets plug in allows you to use some more attractive bullets to your points made inside your blog post.

In my next post, we’ll take a look at the other kind of plug-in for writer. The one’s that are not visible in the Insert list, but instead are invoked only when you publish a post and/or are included as a ‘button’ in your post for your readers to make use of so that they can ‘spread the word’ about your blog. 

TG

Clubhouse Tags: clubhouse, how-to, live writer, plug-ins, cool emotion, horizontal line, bullets, insert

Sorry About all the Theme Changes!

My heartfelt apologies to everyone who bothers to read this blog!  You must be absolutely fed up with all these frequent theme changes I keep making on here.  Mind you, you can also blame the new WordPress Theme Team for coming up with some spanking new themes as well.  I do have to try them out to see if they fit my needs every time a new one is introduced. It’s in my nature I’m afraid to try new things out.

I will be sticking with this one for the foreseeable future I promise because it allows you to have a much wider writing area which I prefer. However, its not perfect as a glance to your immediate right will testify! Note the tiny miniscule text for all the Sidebar Widgets! I do  hope that all of you have either 20/20 vision or a good magnifying glass handy!

In my next post, I intend to do one of my comparisons and this time it will appropriately be about WordPress.com versus Blogger. Both of these blogging sites are free to use, but both offer some very different features to their users and approach customization in entirely different ways, so watch out for that won’t you? In the meantime, keep on blogging!

TG

Talking about the new Microsoft Fix it Centre.

PC users who begin to experience problems with their computer and need an easy to use method of fixing those problems might be interested in trying out the new Fix it Centre from Microsoft. Not only is this application very extensive but its also a breeze to use even for a newbie to computing. I’ve been trying it out to see how well it all works and I am so pleased with the results that I thought I would do this how-to post for other users.

WordPress.com launches the Theme Team!

Wow! things are really looking up of late for WordPress.com users. WordPress.com have often been criticised by users of the free blogging site for their lack of choice where the themes on offer to users were concerned, but it now seems that they have taken note of those criticisms and have now launched a new Theme Team.

There have already been one or two new themes launched recently to much praise and acclaim by those who make use of the blogging site  with many requests for more themes to be launched, so perhaps those frequent pleas have  prompted this latest move.

Using the LifeCam Cinema with Windows Live.

I recently purchased the LifeCam Cinema Webcam from Microsoft, and I thought that I would do a post about how well it all works with the Windows Live Essentials Suite of programs. I was quite surprised at how small this Webcam is considering its features. To look at it  resembles a tiny version of an ‘outside’ camera and uses the ‘bendy’ clip so that you can ‘mould’ it around the top of  your monitor or laptop. Once you have done this its quite stable. It comes complete with a CD containing the software and of course a USB cable to connect it to your computer. Set up is very straight forward.