Cool Blog Tools – Almost
So during my time of frustration this morning, while I have been trying to figure out if I can get a restore from tape for the pictures that were accidentally removed, I have been easily distracted. I thought I would throw up a couple of notes in regards to a couple of things that I have found this morning that look like they would be very nice to use with the blog.
First, I have noticed that a lot of folks have signatures at the bottom of their blog entries these days. I like it, as one of the things I am always harping on is the lack of personal touch that occurs here in the electronic blog/journal kind of world. By including a very realistic signature in the blog, it does seem to make it seem a bit more like an old journal and certainly does give it a personal touch. Further, if you have a blog with multiple authors it really makes sense to include the signature.
Coming to the rescue and doing the inclusion of your signature almost automatically (especially once setup) is a plugin called LiveSig. I looked it over and the fundamentals seemed straight forward. Each user could have a signature that would be included, it could be set to include the signature automatically in each post and so on. It did seem to lack just a little bit in granularity, in that I don’t see an easy option to click include or exclude a signature on an individual post. There was also some thing in the FAQ’s that indicated it had issues with some themes if the images were not correctly implemented, causing some breakage if you did not make manual modifications. Not a problem with the two themes I tested it with, unless you had it set for a signature but had the file blank, which then caused the whole posting to disappear.
*** I may have spoken to soon, it appears LiveSig occasionally mucks up other things as well. After posting this, with LiveSig enabled all of my paragraphing marks also disappeared. For now, I have turned it off and am looking for either and update or a more developed tool to accomplish the same. ***
The LiveSig plugin is designed to work with a website called MyLiveSignature. The website has a couple of options from generating an almost real signature using a variety of flowing scripts and such or to even scan in a real signature and generate it. From there you can generate some HTML code that pulls the signature into its place when you place the code into the LiveSig plugin. All sounds good so far, however, all the options I tried lead to an icky white glow around the actual signature when on a dark background and I suspect this would occur on all but a white background. This made the signature unreadable.
The good thing is, LiveSig does not require it be used with MyLivesignature. As a matter of fact, a few lines of HTML code and your own image and you can do anything you want to for your signature, even multiple images. I generated for testing, a quick signature and sure enough, no white glow around the letters. I have included my example on the left and the one generated from MyLifeSignature on the right for comparison below. Note, that in a short time I am going to scan my own written marks (it will look like a stylized X by the way), but this will work for the short-term.
The other thing I have discovered popping in several sidebars on blogs and it makes a lot of sense is a listing of books. This is being done with a tool LibraryThing, from LibraryThing.com. It really makes sense for someone like me who reads a lot and has a pretty decent library on topics of interest. I have seen such before on Facebook and MySpace, but those required each one to be entered manually and was kind a pain and was going to be a LOT of work to do it any place else as well. This one is generic and with a few clicks fairly portable and configurable enough to work in most any place.
One minor and one major drawback I see though. The minor drawback first – it would be nice to list what I am currently reading – and that should not be limited to just one, but at least ten or twenty. The major drawback though, is if I were going to do this I would like to backend the lovely pictures to my Amazon affiliate account. And while these folks are using Amazon, it appears they link it to their own affiliate account. I am going to have to investigate some more on that one to be sure, but as of now the jury is still out on this particular piece of technology.
