How to create a Free Professional Blog with BlinkWeb?

Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the blogging platforms for the new bloggers, we often restrain our reviews by the big players in this marketing niche only (like Blogger, for example). However, there are many small players, who may offer quite impressive set of features and capabilities.

Today, we are going to present of the sites, which can easily compete with big boys – BlinkWeb.  It’s one of those websites that surprisingly offers you their services for free without any loopholes and hassles. The site was founded in June 2008 by Brad and Matthew Callen, the company is based in Indiana, USA.

BlinkWeb offers you to create professionally looking website or blog with simplicity and speed of the drag and drop functionality. You can easily create all the major website types such as a blogs, a content style websites, or a sales letter style websites. The blogging platform was developed with novice users in mind. However, those with moderate experience, basically anyone who doesn’t know the least bit about html and other coding stuff, can still very easily make use of this platform. Blinkweb comes equipped with many high quality website templates that users can select from, making the new blog unique in the blogosphere.

To get started with the service is pretty simple: you just need to sign up for a new account on BlinkWeb. It is easy as well. Simply enter your chosen username, password and your email address on the homepage of the site in the signup box. It’s free to sign up and use BlinkWeb, depending on where you want to host your site you may have to pay a fee.

The Blinkweb page builder is completely free. After the user creates their website, they are presented with 3 main options which include; get a subdomain for your website, get a domain name for your website, or download your website in .zip format. Users will be able to get a subdomain completely free, which is then hosted by our servers. Users can also choose to get a domain from Blinkweb. Domain names are completely free as well. Should the user choose to get a domain name, Blinkweb will host their website for $1.00 the first month and then $14.95 for each month thereafter. Users can have unlimited domains with Blinkweb. Each additional domain is only an extra $1.30/month. Finally, if users prefer to host their websites with their current webhost, rather than through Blinkweb, they can choose the 3rd option, which is to download their website in .zip format. Doing so costs only a very small fee. Blinkweb also offers an extensive line of training tools and guides to earning money strictly from an online business. These tools come in the form of videos, workbooks, and audio CDs.

It incorporates the following features:

• It has a very user friendly interface, even a novice can get a hang of it in no time.
• You can download website to your own computer
• It very conveniently lets you build websites by simply dragging and dropping components
• You can also add few add-on and plug-in like AdSense, contact forms, guestbooks and maps according to your requirement.
• The basic services comes for free but if you are looking for trying out and applying more advanced features then you will be charged accordingly.

Access Website Homepage: http://business.blinkweb.com/

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Rotating Post Widget for Blogger Blog

In blogger best intentions is keeping the visitor as long as possible, keeping him busy with all the wonderful content you have. But, in many cases, due to the time-related blog building logics, your visitor is leaving the site, without even knowing how much interesting stuff he failed to read beside.

Many different widgets are trying to fill the gap, and random post widget for Blogger is one of them. If you have a blog with more than 20 posts than this gadget is just the thing you might be interesting in.

 

Main features:

1. Shows one post title at a time.

2. Links to the post.

3. Shows post excerpt also.

4. Every 5 seconds shows a new post.

5. Cycles through all the posts in the blog.

6. Starts a new cycle at the end of the list.

7. Once loaded continues cycling even when not connected to the Internet.

8. Uses official Google AJAX technology.

9. Can be used on other blogging platforms (not tested).

10. Hovering with mouse cursor over the post title halts the rotation till mouse moves off the gadget.

 

Drawback:

Posts are not random, the sequence is quite defined - from the newer to the older posts.

Code:

Get code from the developer’s post http://www.blogdoctor.me/2009/01/random-rotating-post-gadget-with.html. If you need to modify the widget as per your particular needs, review the questions and answers below the post. I removed the author’s name and date, for example, decreased dimensions and fonts in half, and placed it in the side column. You can review the Random Post widget modified in the right sidebar.

 

Note that there are three areas you need to put particular data from your blog to make it work. Change "MYBLOG" to actual blog sub-domain and "BLOG_TITLE" to actual title of your blog. Then paste the modified code in the Html gadget and save the gadget. Get your AJAX API key and put it in above code instead of 'PUT_AJAX_KEY_HERE'.

Installation:

1. Login at Blogger.com.
2. Click Layouts link on Dashboard.
3. Click Add Gadget link in sidebar on Page Elements subtab of Layout tab.
4. In popup window scroll down and click Html/Javascript gadget.
5. In Contents window copy the code below and paste after modifying it.

6. Move the new widget blog to the desirable location on your template.

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Smart Blogger Assistant for Simple Blog Publishing

Developer Description:
Smart Blogger allows centralized management of your all diaries and blogs regardless of its Internet location. The software has a single universal interface for reading and sending messages to all blogs; it makes text formatting possible. With this application, you can monitor your friends' diaries checking their blogs for new postings. You can also look through commentaries to your postings as well as other peoples, place comments in blogs, and leave answers to threads.

The software supports three web-blogs:
- LiveJournal
- Blogger
- WordPress

Disadvantages:
This post has been made in Smart Blogger. I already see several disadvantages of using this free software for blogs publishing:

1. No possibility of the text alignment options.
2. Very basic text formatting: color and bold/itallic/under only.
3. No spell checking option.
4. No advanced features as horizontal lines or tables generation.
5. Small publishing field, not very convenient for big posts.

Advantages:
1. Nice and pleasant interface.
2. Easy to use.
3. Portable software exists, so you do not need to install the software on your PC

Developers WebSite: http://www.smartpctools.com/smart_blogger/index1.html

Assessment: The software is good for the light operations, small notes in your Journal, but is lacking functionality for serious blogging.

Software carries rating 3 of 5 in the RateItAll List of 29 free software titles:
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24825-blog-publishing-freeware.aspx

If you have personal experience using this software, you are welcome to leave your feedback in the rating widget below:

Blog Publishing Freeware on RateItAll

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Free Blogging Communities on Danga Platform

After the publication, comparing Blogger and WordPost free blogging platforms ( http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2008/02/blogger-vs-wordpress-review-for-newbie_07.html), I got several questions on the alternative solutions to start free blogs. In this post, I will briefly review blogging opportunities with communities, based on the Danga platform.

Danga Interactive was a Brad Fitzpatrick’s company that started in 1999 a famous community LiveJournal and developed a related operating software. In January 2005, blogging company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive Company from Fitzpatrick, and in December 2007 sold it to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. The Life Journal in Russian is the most popular blogging community in the Russian-speaking countries at the moment. Overall, there are more than 14 millions of members using this platform, and more than 3 millions in USA. As a LiveJournal member, you can write blogs, add friends, start and join communities, and chat with other members. You can create custom layouts for your pages, as LiveJournal allows to paste in custom CSS files, changing overall blog layout. Another nice feature is ability to embed your journal into your own website. This blog service also accepts posts from email enabled mobile phones and from instant messaging services. You can upload video and images as well. With all the mentioned nice features, there are some not so nice disadvantages, as relatively high amount of advertising on the page and lack of the proper guidance from the new members.

The software running LiveJournal is open source and primarily written in Perl. Because of this, several other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software. Among them:

§ DeadJournal - LiveJournal clone with very relaxed terms and usage conditions. Here you can find some journals that would not be hosted in any other communities.

§ GreatestJournal - community with about 2 million members, offering free voice posts, 1GB of photo hosting, and space for up to 2,000 user icons.

§ InsaneJournal - offers free accounts with heavy advertising, strongly encouraging its member to upgrade for paid accounts.

§ JorunalFen.net - Blogging host directed towards various fans communities restricting its membership for users 18 and older. A free account creation is turned off by default, however new users can still obtain a free blogging account.

§ Blurty - one more host for online journals and communities for people over 18. There are some limitations for a free accounts holders, like amount of characters in the journal name, or total amount of entries.

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