Comments on: 4 Tech Tools For Higher Writing Income

By: @PM27

@PM27 — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:32:57 +0000

Great information and links! My recent post MIND MAP YOUR NOVEMBER!

By: Esta Seelbinder

Esta Seelbinder — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:20:58 +0000

Your posts make blogging appear so easy-I love your down to earth approach-it is especially useful to all of us rookies, or at least to us who are trying to further our blogging. Thanks for another great bit of info!

By: links

links — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:54:50 +0000

Awesome Post…

Saw this great post And just had to link back to it…

By: Carol Tice

Carol Tice — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:34:10 +0000

Doesn’t sound like something I’d use as none of my blog clients would accept those kind of links, but interesting to know about!

By: Wendy Burnett

Wendy Burnett — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:07:30 +0000

Carol –

I use a handy little program/plugin called Zemanta, which gives you context sensitive pictures, links, and articles as you write your blog post. It's available as a WordPress plugin, or an addon for FireFox, as well as several other platforms, and everything it provides is Creative Commons or open source. Many of the links are from wikipedia, and a lot of articles are things like Suite 101, but they do tend to be handy for additional research sources if you follow them and check out THEIR sources; and the photos come from Flickr, Wikipedia, and several other Creative Commons sources (AND you can add your own sources as well, including your blog, so it will suggest internal links to your own related posts.)

The one issue I've found with it is that the links it inserts are some sort of proprietary code, but if you don't want that "stuff" it's fairly simple to just follow the links provided, get the direct link info, and code it yourself so that you can retain copyright if you need to.

By: Carol Tice

Carol Tice — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:05:06 +0000

Hi Susan –

Thanks for leaving those instructions. I technically know how to do it…but it seems like sometimes when I do it it doesn’t work! Told you I’m not very technically gifted…

By: Susan Johnston

Susan Johnston — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 12:20:37 +0000

All of the skills you mention are important for writers to have. Adding video is actually pretty easy if you're embedding a YouTube video. Click on the "embed" link and you'll get a long string of code, which you can copy into your blogging program in HTML mode. (Note: most YouTube videos are intended to be viral, but a few will have the embed feature disabled, so I would skip those.) Other video programs work similarly.

Another skill that I've found useful is the ability to shoot my own photos using my digital camera and resize them using a free photo program like Picnik.com. Some of the website I write for have very specific sizing requirements, and it's pretty easy to fit those in Picnik once you get the hang of things. You can also resize images you've downloaded under the Creative Commons License.