Here’s where MarsEdit comes in, offering a great tool to aid the creation and management of content. Posts can be written offline and stored locally in HTML or Rich Text and then uploaded to your blog once you’re finished – you can even add photos too! Interested? Read on after the break to see how MarsEdit can revolutionise your blogging routine.

Getting Started

Launching MarsEdit brings up the screen shown above (albeit without my added blogs) and one can add blogs to the interface with a simple click of the + button, followed by entering your blog details. For example, when adding my own personal Tumblr page, I simply entered the URL http://adamawilliams.com then added my username and password – that’s it.

MarsEdit then downloads all recent posts where they can be edited and managed within the application itself. Multiple accounts can be managed this way and I found the automatic settings to work flawlessly with multiple WordPress accounts and Tumblr.

The Benefits Of Offline Content Creation

You may be asking yourself if there’s any reason to move from your typical method of Internet browser and web client. One of the most compelling reasons I found to use MarsEdit was it’s ability to create a blog post completely offline. In the past, I would write out my posts in Plain Text, complete with HTML tags on a Word Processor such as Writeroom and then laboriously copy/paste into WordPress while fixing formatting errors and uploading photos along the way. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this method, but MarsEdit offers a much more seamless way of working offline.

Content is created just like in a Word Processor and one can add photos in the correct position too, ready for upload. Once you’ve finished and assuming you like the look of the post in the realtime preview within MarsEdit, you can choose to “Send To Blog” and either publish right away or save as a draft. This feature may not be such a big deal if you live in an urban environment with a stable Internet connection and coffee shop wifi should that go down, but for those of us who live in a rural area with poor Internet coverage, this feature alone makes MarsEdit more than worth the purchase price!

Beginner Friendly

I currently write for several blogs and have naturally picked up a little HTML along the way, but it can be somewhat confusing for novices to learn the various formatting rules, tags and codes associated with HTML. MarsEdit includes an excellent implementation of Rich Text editing and this will be a great boon to those who struggle with even basic code. It is also worth taking a moment to touch upon Red Sweater Software’s excellent online resources, such as their forum and FAQ. In addition, when contacting Red Sweater’s support due to an issue with WordPress on the server-side (and not a fault of the app), I fired off a question to support and was emailed back within the hour with a full response from the developer himself.

Other Features

Besides simple text editing, MarsEdit hosts several well thought out features, such as full screen editing, a Safari bookmarklet and “Edit With” buttons, in addition to a media upload interface. Clicking on the “Media” button within MarsEdit’s editing pane brings up the above screen and from there you can choose to select images residing within your Mac’s hard drive, Aperture library or Flickr account.

Conclusion

I find MarsEdit very useful and more than worth the $39.99 purchase price, however users who blog only infrequently may feel the price a little steep for what they need. A free 30-day trial is available from Red Sweater software here so one can at least give it a test-drive before purchase. If you like the idea of MarsEdit but would prefer a cheaper alternative, Blogo is billed as a similar application, with a 21-day free trial and a purchase price of $25 – though beware, the application does not currently support OS X Lion. Additionally, Ecto promises broadly similar functionality at the more affordable price of $19.99.

To purchase MarsEdit, visit this Mac App Store link or Red Sweater software’s own store.

The gap left by other blogging platforms is bridged by a site called “Papyrs” – a tool to easily create new webpages for any use you want.

Introduction

Papyrs is a wonderful web service that lets you create webpages. Using the site you can obtain a domain name as a subdomain of the site and start adding webpages to it. Your webpages are completely customizable. These customizations do not rely on your programming skills – you simply drag webpage elements into the position you want and edit them. Pictures, text boxes, etc. all can be easily added to your webpages. Additionally you can invite collaborators to work on your site and add elements to get user inputs. This facilitates group work and client interactions.

Usage

Your first step in using Papyrs is creating an account. In this step all you have to do is type in your email address, select a password, and type in your desired subdomain.

With your account setup and activated, you can log into your Papyrs interface. At first, you will see a welcome screen providing you with some sample pages for guidance and inspiration.

You can start adding your own pages using the “New Page” button in the top right of the screen.

When you create a new page you can type in a name for it, set its privacy level – either public or private – and optionally add collaborators as maintainers for the page.

When your page is created, you are taken to its URL. You might not be satisfied with the default design; to start modifying your webpage, click on the “Edit Page” option in the “Page” menu next to the New Page button.

You will be shown a guiding window that explains the element dragging feature.

You can close this window and start dragging various elements from the top row into your main page area. This “elements row” includes picture boxes, user inputs, discussion boxes, and a lot more. You can drag the element anywhere – to a blank space or on a previous element to make room for the new element.

Existing elements on the page can be modified anytime you want. Texts, for instance, can be changed; you can add special formatting, modify font style and size, and add hyperlinks to the text boxes added to your page.

In the right pane of the page, a gray area is reserved for special type of posts. To modify the type of posts or elements are shown here, simply click on the “Edit” link in the top right of this gray area.

A window will appear that lets you select the type of elements to show in this gray area. You will be able to select recent comments, favorite posts, recent changes, and recent form submissions to appear in this area.

To modify the colors on your page, you can simply access the Themes section under your account’s Settings options and set the webpage element colors according to your preferences.

If at any time you would like to invite members to your webpage, simply do so through the People tab under Settings.

All these options work together to give you a completely functional webpage that can be used for anything your desire.

Conclusion

As shown above, Papyrs has a lot to offer its users. Whether you want to run a small personal blog or a free company blog to interact with your clients in a simple way, Papyrs will serve your excellently. With color customization and collaboration features, Papyrs offers more than other blogging platforms offer for free. You should definitely check it out if you are thinking about starting a new blog.

Papyrs

Step 1: Set-Up Box.net

First, head over to Box.net and sign up for an account.

The free version of Box.net is sufficient for users who only intend to upload a limited number of small sized files. You get a total of 5GB worth of data and each file cannot be larger than 25MB.

Once you have signed up for an account you can start uploading documents and creating folders through your dashboard.

Step 2: Upload Documents

Before uploading documents I would recommend creating a new folder. Select “New” and “New Folder“.

Name your folder whatever you like, but ensure it is not private, otherwise outsiders won’t be able to access the files within it.

Open up the folder you wish to upload files into by selecting it.

To start uploading files select the little arrow next to “Upload” to launch the “Bulk Upload” tool. Alternatively, upload files one at a time by just selecting “Upload“.

The “Bulk Upload” tool requires you to drag and drop files and/or folders into the pop-up window.

Once the upload has completed, your folder dashboard will be populated with the new files.

Step 3: Embed Box.net Folder on your Blog

Once you have put all the files you want to share onto Box.net, it is time to create an embedded Box.net folder on your blog. It is possible to embed it on most websites or blogs, but since I use Blogger, I will demonstrate how I have embedded it on my personal blog.

To obtain the embed code, you will have to head back to the main Box.net dashboard.

Here, select the blue “Share” button that is on the same line as the folder you wish to display on your blog. This will pop open a new panel below the folder.

You can use the “secure link” to share the folder or email it to others, however I will show you how to embed it to your blog. To do this, click on the small blue star-shaped icon and select “Embed folder in your site“.

This will open a new popup window with options for your embed code.

You can customise the width and height of the Box.net embed folder as well as the view and sorting options. Once you have customised it to your satisfaction copy the embed code.

<embed src="http://www.box.net//static/flash/box_explorer.swf?widget_hash=6lpb2ld0fb&amp;v=0&amp;cl=0&amp;s=0" width="460" height="345" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">

Now head over to your blog and paste the code onto the page you wish to display the Box.net folder on. Remember, the code is HTML, so copy it to your HTML editor.

The Box.net embedded folder will now be visible on your blog allowing you to view and interact with all the files that you had previously uploaded.

This embedded folder is connected with the original folder on your Box.net account so every time you upload that folder all the contents of the embedded folder will also be updated.

You can create multiple folders in Box.net and upload different groups of files/folders for different websites.

That’s it. Now you have your Box.net folder in your website.

Fortunately, the recently released Posterous Android App makes creating, editing and managing your Posterous account much easier.

Basic Posts

Once you have launched the Posterous app, you have the option to create a new post or “Login” to your Posterous account.

If you do not already have an account, create a post by clicking on “Post” and input a title and text of your choice.

You can additionally add media content and attachments by clicking on the “+” icon.

You can also add tags to to your post by clicking on the “i” icon.

Finally, once you are satisfied with your post simply click on  “Send” from the main posts page to create your post.

This will immediately create a post with your content on a randomly generated Posterous website.

You now have the choice of saving this randomly generated Posterous blog by clicking on “Save Site“.

Alternatively, if you already have a Posterous account you can click on “Login” to login to your Posterous account.

Account Management

Once you have logged in to your Posterous account you will see all your Posterous blogs.

You can create a new Posterous blog (click on “New Site“). Here you will have to choose a unique URL for your new Posterous blog.

If you click on one of your Posterous blogs, you can see the full list of posts you have already made on that blog.

You can also see the date the post was made on, the number of views it has, and the number of comments made on that post. You can also create a new post by clicking on “Post“.

If you click on an individual post you have the option to view the post (“View Post“), autopost the content (“Autopost”), or delete the post entirely (“Delete Post”).

Autoposting requires you to navigate to www.posterous.com/autpost. From here you can choose the social media sites to which you would like to autopost your content to. Unfortunately, this is something that has not been fully integrated into the Android app and it still requires you to access the Posterous website.

Clicking on “View Post” shows you the complete post directly on your Android Phone.

Finally, if you wish to change the photo and video quality of the media you are uploading you can do so by navigating to the “Settings” menu from the main blog page.

Conclusion

If you are a frequent blogger on Posterous, the Posterous Android app is an invaluable tool. Before, it was almost impossible to manage your posts from your Android phone. Now with the app, it is incredibly easy to do so. Furthermore, Posterous is a simple blogging platform at heart and the app mirrors this simplicity with a stripped down user-interface without a multitude of unnecessary options.

Download

Posterous can be download and installed from the Android Market.

Website | AppBrain | Market

That’s why in the environment where you can’t really put a face to the name, trust is a very valuable currency. And that’s why the concept of word of mouth recommendation from friends that we know and trust is very powerful. Add some social networks to the mixture and the effect would be multiplied. That’s the idea behind TAF4Free.

Recommendation With Some Social Twist

TAF4Free (Tell A Friend For Free) is a web tool from SocialTwist which will allow you – as a web owner – to provide an easy way for your visitor to tell their friends about your site(s). TAF4Free allows your readers to contact people in their social networks as well as send emails to contacts in their address book.

But before you can use the tool, you need to sign up with SocialTwist. Signing up will allow you to change the configuration, view usage statistic, create and customize more widgets.

This sign up process also serves as the place where you can customize the aspects of your Tell A Friend campaign such as the size of TAF button, widget theme and the button usage. For example, I planned to use the TAF method for my WordPress blog, so I selected “Blog” from the drop down list.

Further customization appeared after I chose “Blog“. I selected “WordPress Engine Plugin“.

After finished with the setting up process, I clicked on the “Get Code” button. You can check or uncheck the first and third option boxes, but make sure that the second one is checked before you click the button.

Installing The WordPress Plugin

After I hit the “Get Code“, a download button appeared. I clicked this “Get It Now” button and the WordPress plugin was downloaded to my hard drive.

To install the plugin, go to the “Plugin – Install Plugins – Upload” menu from your WordPress admin area. Then click the “Choose File” button, locate the downloaded plugin, and click “Install now“.

The final step would be to activate the plugin. You can do this directly after installing it or later on from the plugin page.

Another Point Of View

So far we have seen the process from web owner point of view. Now let’s switch our perspective and see things from the visitor’s side. For example, you visit your friend’s blog and you want to share an article that you read to your other friends.

If the blog owner use TAF4Free, you will find the button at the end of the article. Hover your mouse over it and a list of available sharing methods will pop up. Click at the one that you want to use.

A pop up window will appear focusing to your choice of sharing method. Then you can continue with the sharing process. For example, if you choose “Facebook“, all you have to do is click on the “Share” button, fill in your login data, and the word is out.

Or if you choose “GMail“, you can fill in your user name and password before picking people up from your address book and sending them link to the article that you want to share.

TAF4Free makes it easy for visitors to switch between different sharing methods, so all they have left to do is finding worth sharing materials and share them.

Content Is Really The King

But everything goes back to the quality of your content. No matter how easy the sharing method is, nothing is going to work if you have no good quality content that people want to share.

If you give your reader top notch materials, the combination of your good content and TAF4Free will surely help you to spread the word about your website to the world. If one person recommends your web to some of his/her friends, and these friends do the same, you’ll have viral marketing working for you. Then you can stop worrying about getting readers to your site and focus on creating great materials.

What do you think about TAF4Free? Would you use it to help you spread the buzz about your site? Do you know other similar alternatives? Please share your thoughts using the comment below.

Image credit: See-ming Lee

Yola gives you your space on the web. There are both free and paid packages available. I am going to talk about the free version. Yola is really easy to set up and super easy to change if you don’t like the way your site looks.

If you are just starting out, building a site can be a bit intimidating. Yola adds some neat features to help make things go a bit smoother on your first attempt.

Choosing the type of site

One of the first steps you need to complete is choosing the kind of site it will be.

When you choose from the list of different possibilities, you will see the recommended pages change. Having these suggestions helps you remember what pages you will need. The pages are automatically added once you select the type of site.

20 questions

Okay, maybe not 20 questions, but you will be asked a few. These are to fill in parts of the site. About me, mission statement, contact information and other questions can be answered.

To help you, there are examples in a bubble to the right of the text box you are working on.If you don’t want to answer now, you can always do it later.

Style

After you fill in the information, it is time to pick the style of the site. The style is a template for the site. If you were making a WordPress site, this would be the same as a Theme. There are many choices, some are free. The more complex styles will cost you to use.

Widgets

To add things to your page, you have lots of widgets. There are different widgets for different pages. For example, you have multimedia, communication, maps and more on the About us page. If you go the Blog page, there is a whole new set of widgets to choose from. All of them are in the right sidebar.

To use a widget drag what you want where you want. The drag and drop method is easier than dealing with HTML or finding the right plugin.

Layout

The drag and drop rearranging extends to more than just the widget placement. You can rearrange most objects on the page by dragging them where you want them. For anyone who is not too techy, this is a great way to make a page the way you want it with little hassle.

Background

Changing the background is just as easy. Up toward the top of the page there is an option to change the background. Using this option, you can change the page you are on or all the pages on the site.

There are quite a few options out there for free hosted websites. Yola gives you a really great way to build a good looking site with very little technical knowledge.

How did you build your last website?

1. Find a domain and hosting provider

If you did not have your own domain, then you will need to find a domain provider. Find one that also has hosting plans (we recommend Hostgator), so you don’t have to look around for another service.

2. Setup the WordPress database

Create a new database for your WordPress. If you use a Macbook, then you can use this guide to install and test WordPress. If you need a more general guide, then check out the one the WordPress team put together. Some of the services actually have a way for you to press one button, and they will install WordPress for you. With the popularity of WordPress, many of them should be jumping on the bandwagon.

3. Export your blog out of Blogger

You always want to protect your blog, just in case something doesn’t go right. Therefore, I recommend exporting your Blogger blog, if something doesn’t go right. You do this by logging onto Blogger, and you go to your blog’s settings, you will see Basic tab. You will see the Export blog link.

When you click the link, you will be able to download your blog after pressing the Download Blog button.

4. Import your blog into your self-hosted WordPress

After exporting your Blogger blog, log into WordPress.  Click on Tools -> Import. All the blogging platforms that can be imported into WordPress are shown. Click on the Blogger link.

Press the Authorize button to start importing your posts, comments, and users from Blogger into WordPress.

You will be taken to a Google window where you have to press the Grant Access button

You will see all your Blogger blogs. Select the one you want to import, and press the Import button.

After your Blogger posts and comments are imported into WordPress, you will be able to import the authors by pressing the Set Authors button.

You can map your Blogger name to your WordPress one.  If there is a new author, then there is an add users link that will allow you to create a user in WordPress that you can map to the new Blogger one.

Have you imported your Blogger blog into a self-hosted WordPress? How did it go for you?

Create a Group Blog

When you log into Posterous, you want to click on the Manage link. Click the Create a new posterous… link to develop a new Posterous blog.

Enter the desired group’s Site Name and Address. After choosing one, click the Check for availability link to ensure that no one has chosen it. If it’s available, you will get a note saying that the “Cool, this site address is good to go.” Press the Create New Site button to finish setting it up.

Create a Group Profile

There are different tabs to set up your group blog. The first tab you want to check out is the Group Profile. After clicking it, you will see that this is where you will setup your group profile.

This will allow you to have a different name, photo, bio, and autoposting to social networking sites for your group than for you, individually.

Add all the social networking sites that you want to automatically post your Posterous blog posts to. A new feature that the Posterous team added after our first post is the ability to pick and choose which sites you want to automatically be sent to when you are creating a new post.

Add Contributors

Next, head over to the Contributors tab. In here, you will be able to invite the people you want to be able to post to the group blog. The great thing about this is that you are able to have your group blog double as an email list to anyone listed in this Contributors tab.

Press the Add contributors button. Posterous gives you the ability to import email address from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Windows Live.  Press the Add Contributors button. Your requests will be sent. The person will receive an email with a link that will allow them to add them to the group blog.

Customize Your Group Blog

Go to the Settings tab, you will be able to change the theme of your Posterous group blog by pressing Theme and customize my site button. If you want to add the Retweet button, then click the More Theme Options>> link, which will give the check box to add that. If you want to further customize your Posterous group blog, and you know CSS and HTML, you can do so, by clicking the write your own CSS/HTML link.

When you press the button, you are able to modify the header color, text, and image. Also, you can add the retweet the button in this area as well. After you make all the modifications that you need to do, then press the Update button.

Start Posting

Since the last time we wrote about Posterous, they have added other ways to post other than email, bookmarklet, or web.

You are now able to post via your mobile phone or their new service Post.Ly. Post.Ly provides a way for you to post all types of things (e.g. images, videos, etc.) to Twitter. Additionally, because it’s Posterous, you can also have it post to your group blog.

New Features Added To Aid Groups

A new feature on this tab is the ability to integrate Feedburner with Posterous. All you have to do is add the link to the feedburner feed that you set up.

If this group blog is going to be for a family, or a group who wants to keep their posts private, then you can modify the privacy by password protecting your site.

Posterous has also added instructions on how to integrate Posterous with Google Buzz.

Have you created a group blog using Posterous? Tell us about it.

First things first, you have to signup for a free account to start using the service. After that, you will land on a page with a default toolbar which looks like following:

Let’s see how you can create a customized toolbar using Conduit.

Adding a Logo To Your Toolbar

I’ll be adding the MakeTechEasier logo to our toolbar. Lets see how to do it.

1. Go to the “My Toolbar” section and click the “Your Logo” link placed just under the Basic Components section. It will take you to a setup page from where you can add the logo.

2. You can add text to the logo or select from many predefined text styles. You can also upload a picture from your hard-drive.

3. When you are done with the logo, scroll down and add a link to the logo. This will open a URL of your choice when you click the logo. Add the alternate text for the logo so that when you hover over the logo, you will see a small hint. As this toolbar is for MTE readers, I will be choosing the destination URL as the blog’s home URL.

4. Press “Save” at the bottom to save all the changes that you have just made.

NOTE : Under the Basic components section, there are many more links that can be added to a toolbar. As they are not that useful to common users, I’m ignoring them.

Adding a Feed Reader to your toolbar

Go to the “My Toolbar” section and click the RSS reader under the “Popular Components” section. It will take you to a setup page to add RSS sources to your toolbar.

On step 1, select any RSS icon of your choice. Then skip the 2nd step and press the “Add an RSS Feed” button in step 3.

You will see a page to add RSS feeds. Define the feed URL and press save. You can add multiple feeds, one at a time.

Press “Save” to add the RSS widget to the toolbar.

Adding a News Ticker to your Toolbar

Most people are really addicted to news alerts, which they read from different blogs or websites. This toolbar can be optimized to give you news alerts on any number of topics that you select.

1. Go to the “My Toolbar” section and click the “News Ticker” under the “Basic components” section. It will take you to a setup page where you can add the news sources to your toolbar.

2. In the setup page, you can select from some predefined news sources which are available under step 1.

3. And if you like to import your own sources manually, you need to add the RSS URLs from that blog /website. Similarly, you can also update multiple feeds one at a time.

4. You can also define the length and breadth or other behaviors of the ticker using the sliders in step 3. After you have finished defining the element, press “Save” to complete the setup.

Add Email Notifier to Your Toolbar

This feature can be found under the “Popular section” and can be added very easily. Go to the page and save the settings. You can add the email addresses after you install the toolbar on your browser.

Adding a Chat Room And Twitter Widget

If you want a dedicated chatroom for your friends, Conduit toolbar offers you one. Conduit also lets you add a simple Twitter reader so that you can read Twitter updates directly from the toolbar. All you have to do is add the Twitter profiles you wish to follow.

Under “Social And Messages” section you can find these two most used utilities.

The search field in the toolbar is set to Google by default, you can define it by configuring the search widget. Among other tools that are mostly used, radio player, TV and games can also be installed in the toolbar.

Toolbar Components For Web Masters

The toolbar has endless possibilities and it is really useful for oneself to promote his/her blog or website. For experienced developers, you can even add XML links, custom defined HTML components and Java scripts with the Conduits API. The best part is that you get paid for every installation. Isn’t that like hitting two birds with one stone ?

Make Tech Easier Toolbar

I have prepared one such toolbar for all MTE readers, which can be downloaded from MTE Toolbar Page.

In conclusion, regardless whether you are a blog owner or just a casual web surfer, Conduit toolbar is an useful tool that can be used by anyone to improve their productivity.

Although most blog services and blogging content management systems allow users to post directly on their websites, there are many advantages to using client software on a local computer, such as the ability to work offline. In past years, KDE had no full-featured blogging client.

Then, along came Kblogger, which was originally a panel applet and began to slowly morph into a full client. Another project called Bilbo finally emerged as a true full-featured client and working in conjunction with the Kblogger developers, managed to develop a blogging client that is now included in KDE releases.  Due to trademark issues, they changed the name to Blogilo, and will release it with KDE 4.4.

Blogilo featurs a WYSIWIG editor and support for Blogger 1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType, WordPress, and Google GData APIs. With it, users can create, modify, schedule, and delete posts. The right column is called the “toolbox” and includes tabs containing the most recent blog posts from a user’s blog, post categories, options such as whether to enable comments, and local entries not uploaded to the blog.

Because the main editing window is WYSIWYG, the toolbar includes typical word precessing-like features: bold, italics, font size and color, and spell check. Users can also add images directly from their computers (uploaded with the blog’s API) or from the the Web.

Despite the outstanding features, Blogilo does have its limitations. I could not find a way to use the graphical interface to set some styles, such as floating an image to the left or right. Its alignment tool seems to work on text, but those users who insist on following XHTML standards will find that Blogilo is a little loose in this area.  Fortunately, it also includes an HTML editor if users need to add styles rather than using the client’s own formatting tools.

Getting Started

Setup is very easy with Blogilo. Simply click “Blog” in the menu, followed by “Add Blog…” This will open a dialog asking you for four things: A title for the blog, your blog’s URL, your username, and your password.  If you click “Auto-configure” Blogilo will magically seek out your blog, login, fetch the latest posts and categories, and have you ready to start posting. You can also manually specify the settings and then click OK.

Typing a post is a pretty natural experience and normally goes without a hitch. If you need to stop in the middle of a post, you can click the “Save Locally” button or save a draft on the server by clicking submit and checking “save entry as draft”. Once you are finished, you can preview your post within Blogilo and view it using your blog’s own CSS styles.

Since Blogilo is a native KDE app, you can manipulate widgets like the Toolbox, moving it to the left side or even detaching it, forming its own separate window. It also supports KDE’s auto spell check to correct your spelling as you type. Furthermore, it allows you to open or create multiple posts, which are all conveniently tabbed and easily accessible.

Overall, I have found the blogging client very reliable and feature-rich. I have corresponded with the developers on more than one occasion and found them to be easily approachable and willing to quickly fix any of the early bugs. With this official KDE release, Blogilo seems more than ready to take on any new tasks that come its way, even if that includes changing its name a second time.

So what is it exactly?

According to Google:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.

Using a Wave

The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com

On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.

Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.

This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.

Extensions

Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.

Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.

The results were unanimous.

There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.

As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.

Conclusion

There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.

I am not a lover of Microsoft (especially Windows), but if there is any application from MS that I love, it has to be Windows Live Writer.

Other than its user-friendliness and great integration with the various blog platforms, the thing that attracts me most is its ability to extend its functions with plugins (that seems to be the trend nowadays). With plenty of useful plugins available at the Windows Live Gallery, I have no doubt that this is the most powerful blog editor around. The ten plugins below are my favorite and in my opinion, a ‘must-have‘ for all WLW lovers.

1. word count plugin — This feature is included in the technical preview of the latest version of WLW, but as of the current version, you have to use this ‘Word Count‘ plugin to count the number of words in your post.

2. Insert video plugin — Inserting video into your blog is now make easier with this plugin. Simply paste the video link and the plugin will automatically convert it to a presentable format.

3. code snippet plugin — This is a useful one for techies, geeks or  web developers who frequently have to place code snippet on their blogs. While there are several other ‘insert source code‘ plugins, I find this to be the best.

4. Flickr4Writer plugin — Tired of searching high and low in Flickr for the picture to place in your blog? Flickr4Writer will definitely make your life much easier. Simply input the tag and it will fetch you all the images from Flickr with that tag. All you have to do is to select the images and insert into your post.

5. Insert Wikipedia link plugin — Highlight some text, click the link and you can turn it into a Wikipedia link. A simple plugin, but definitely an useful one.

6. SnagIt Capture plugin — Do a screen capture of your system and insert it into your post.

7. Website capture plugin — As its name implies, this plugin do a screen capture of a website (specify by you) and insert it into your post.

8. Insert Quick link plugin — Instead of having to click on the Insert Link in Live Writer, you can now bring up those options just by pasting a link into Writer with this plugin.

9. Amazon Book lookup plugin — Search for a book in Amazon within WLW and insert the image and affiliate link into the post. You can save the trouble of going to and fro Amazon and WLW.

10.Template plugin — A simple plugin that allows you to create template of links, scripts, text, or snippets that you can reuse it again and again.

Other plugin that should have make the list:

Blog This For Firefox — This plugin adds a button to Firefox which starts a new blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. It allows you to blog quickly when you find something of interest on the web. (Reason for exclusion: This plugin is not compatible with Firefox 3)