I just found another plugin for MS Outlook today. This one is call FBLook and it lets me update my facebook status live right from outlook. So now I can just update my status to say “taking my diet supplements“.. without opening another browser. Awesome right? I know!

All you need to do is just..

1. Download the file from the FBLook site
2. Close your outlook application if you have it opened, install the file
3. Reopened outlook and you will already see the toolbar at the top
4. Follow some simple instruction and update away!

PS: More blogging tutorial from me…

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Cheerio…

I’ve recently decided to pop out my main email account to my Microsoft Outlook and after several hours of popping out. I can safely say, all my emails are now intact and safe and sound in my hard drive.

So there I was tweaking and customizing with rules (making sure that emails containing keywords such as slimming pills that work are highlighted) and what not on my outlook, when it suddenly occurred to me if there would be a plugin or an add-on out there for me to access twitter in outlook. So once again, I did my fingers go the walking and I found one fantastic plugin. It’s called Twinbox and it’s awesome. All you need to do is …

1. Download the file

2. Install the file but not before making sure your outlook application is closed off first

3. Reopened Microsoft Outlook and you will see a toolbar right on top as shown. You can easily customize this toolbar too.

4. Once you add all your twitter accounts, you will see a directory just like shown on the picture as well.

5. That’s it!

Enjoy!

FYI: This plugin would not work with Outlook Express.

PS: More blogging tutorial from me…

PSS: Find this tip useful and want to buy me coffee?

Cheerio…

As I mentioned in the post at my blog Life’s Pages, I just had a tortured three hours when I decided to upgrade to WordPress 3.0. If I had been one of those people that break out when stressed, I would probably need the best acne treatment right about now.

The thing was I actually upgraded three of my other blogs first before upgrading this blog. The three upgrades went smoothly without a hitch, so my confidence level was an all time high. Then when upgrading this blog, I had an installation error and my whole blog disappeared. So if you were trying to access my blog and got a blank page instead, now you know the reason why.  I immediately went to the WordPress forum for help. It seemed I was not alone. There were others in the same boat and everyone it seems was waiting for a solution. Someone suggested that it may have been because of a plugin that was not compatible with the new version and advised that I renamed my plugin directory via ftp. I tried that but was not successful. Naturally I panicked as I don’t know when the “guru” would login and start answering questions. I did more digging and found a suggestion to reinstall the upgrade manually. I did and I was successful! Thank goodness!

So, I would like to share with you what I did to restore my blog.

1. Download wordpress 3.0
2. Uncompressed the files
3. Rename my plugins directory to plugin01
4. Copy the files to the right directory, overwriting the existing files
5. Rename my plugin01 to plugins

From this experience, my advise to you will be, make sure you disable your active plugins before upgrading. This is because some plugins are incompatible with the new version and this might cause problem. In my case though, I don’t think its the plugin as I found the files that was causing the error was in wp-includes.

Let me know if you have any questions.

PS: More blogging tutorial from me…

PSS: Find this tip useful and want to buy me coffee?

Cheerio…

I have been asked numerous times by clients who wished to know how to revamp/add/delete their labels or categories for their blog post in blogger blog. So I thought, where better than to just put it here at LadyJava’s Lounge so that you, my readers, might benefit too.

Firstly, think of label as a filing system. A generic filing system. So you would label this post for instance as Blogger Tutorial and/or Blogging but you would NOT label it as Remove Labels or Add labels.. See the difference? Labels make it easier for visitors to navigate around your blog so unless your blog is all about the different kinds of flowers (Jasmine, Rose, Lilies), a label call FLOWERS would suffice.

Also please remember, labels are being controlled by the post, so you can’t delete the labels but once a no post bears that label, that label would disappear from your list. So essentially, you are amending your blog post label and not vice versa.

Here goes..

1. Go to your blogger dashboard and click on “EDIT POST”
2. On the left side of the table, you will see labels and the number of post that has that label on it. On the right side you will see post with the labels being displayed in green next to it
3. Go through all your labels and decide what you want to do and how you want to categorized your post. If you see a label with just one post, decide if you need that label or can you class it under an existing label.
4. Now click on any label.
5. On the right hand side now, all post relating to the label would be displayed.
6. Click in the square right next to all the post you want to change. I would suggest at this time to click one first.
7. Now, do you noticed the dropdown menu just on top of the table? Click on the arrow and scroll down inside this box, you will see..
   

   The Dropdown Menu

   • “Apply Label” in bold. This is all the labels that is available at your blog. So if you want to add an existing label to the post, just click the relevant label and it would be added to the post.

   • Scroll down further. Just before “Remove Label” you will see “New label” – this is what you click if you want to add a totally new label to the post
   • Right after that, you will see “Remove Label“. This is the label that is currently being used for that particular post and if you want to remove any labels from that post, just choose whichever label it is and click it
8. Please remember all change are immediate the moment you click on a label. There is no prompt asking if you are sure of your action. Having said that, do not worry, you will not NEVER lose any post in your blog this way. The post would just be under a different label.

I hope this  helps and let me know if you find the tutorial useful

PS: More blogging tutorial from me…

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Cheerio…

… when you are using JSKit (Echo) Patched template version (not the widget version they have now) and your blogger comment dashboard is showing 0 comments?  I am having a bit of joint pain today but I wanted to write this post before I really got to rest my wrist..

My blogger dashboard for this blog used to show me 0 comments on some post even though I know for a fact that there were comments there before. So when I actually moved to wordpress yesterday, I was ready to see 0 comments on my blog but… lo and behold there were comments on those post even though blogger dashboard was showing 0..

See the difference here? The same post is showing 0 comment on blogger on 15 March but showing 11 comments on wordpress dashboard yesterday.

Post with 0 Comments

Post showing 11 Comments

Anyway I was surfing at Evan’s mom blog today and she highlighted a known problem with blogger about missing comments, so I thought it might be a glitch somewhere.  So here’s a way to check if your  comments are really missing or is it just not displaying comments on your dashboard.

First thing first, login into you JSKit dashboard and under commenting option, scroll down and check that your blog is set to synchronized  with blogger. If it is.. then good, you can proceed, if not.. then you probably REALLY don’t have comments at your blogger..:(

Ok.. so now if your comments are synchronized…

• Go to your blogger layout>>edit html
• MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR BLOG and save it safely by “Download Full Template”.  *** DO NOT MISS THIS STEP ***
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see

Revert Widget

• When you click this link, you will remove the JS from your template but you will also remove most customized widget that is included in your template
• Now check that post that is showing 0 comments on your dashboard and see if there are any comments displaying on the blog post instead. If it’s there.. then you are save to revert back to your blogger commenting system..
• PLEASE NOTE THAT SOME TEMPLATE GOES HAYWIRE WHEN YOU DO IT ESPECIALLY IF YOUR TEMPLATE IS VERY HEAVILY CUSTOMISED
• If this happens, upload the backup template and all will be restore again together with your JSKit commenting system.

So the choice is up to you now..if your template does not go haywire after the removal widget process and if comments are there, then you switch back to blogger commenting system if you want to..

If your template goes  haywire.. then you can take note of which widget is causing the craziness and add that up to the template again.

Good luck!

Cheerio…

I’m seriously torn between three commenting system, JS-Kit, Disqus and Intense Debate.

I was a great JS-Kit fan and had it installed on all my blogs and raved about their services can customer service, but recently though, certain problems have arisen giving me cause to look at other blog commenting options namely Disqus and Intense Debate.

These are the problems so far that I’ve encountered from JS-Kit:

• The synchronizing with blogger comments are not consistent. Sometimes it does sync and sometimes it doesn’t, leaving my blogger dashboard with zero comments on some posts.
  • The synchronizing option of JSKit was the one drawing factor of JSKit for me. The fact that I won’t lose any comment in case I decide to switch back to my Blogger commenting system made me very confident of the program, hence the switch for all my blogs.

• Recently with their “improved” follow option, blog owners are not getting notified of comments at their own blog even after changing the notification option on the JS dashboard.
  • This is definitely cause for worry as no notification means we won’t know if there are comments made on the blog. No notification means no response.. which, in my book is BAD

So like I said, I am looking for alternative and testing both Disqus and Intense Debate commenting system on some of my blogs.

To me, Disqus is good because it syncs up with blogger commenting system but bad it doesn’t support smileys and no CommentLuv. On the other hand although Intense Debate has smileys and Commentluv, it does not synch up with blogger.

Another plus point for Disqus is that although all three commenting systems offer exporting of comments, only Disqus lets you import those exported comments into their system. So for instance, although I might not have comments synch up with blogger for most of my post using JS, I can export the comments from JS and import it into Disqus and still have it appear on my post.

I was, however, not able to use Disqus here on this blog because it is too heavily customised and Disqus was not able to patch it for me.

You see the dilemma?

Currently I am testing Disqus on LJ Life’s Pages. LadyJava Creations, Online Money Chat and Blogger Cats while on Shopping Galore, I have Intense Debate installed. I still have JS-Kit on LadyJava’s Lounge, Being Woman and My Food Paradise.

I am monitoring them all closely and would update you with my decision soon.

Cheerio…

I was researching best weight loss pills for who else but yours truly when I received an email from Bill about having emoticons on his blogs and about how he was not able to get his top commenter widget working on his blog.

I did a tutorial a while back on how to get emoticons/smileys on your blogspot blog but he was not able to get it installed on his blog. Just to remind everyone you need to have firefox running on your pc. This script has nothing to do with blogger but rather an addon to firefox browser. However, upon checking Bill’s blog, I noticed that my smileys were indeed missing from his”compose post” menu. Then I saw that Bill was using the “updated editor” as oppose to the old editor. I switched the editor back to the old one and I can now see my smileys again .

Here’s how to change back to the old editor.

1. Go to Settings>>Basic
2. Scroll down till you see the Global settings. Make sure the “Old Editor” is selected and Save

* * *

Bill’s next issue was how to get his Monthly Top Commenter widget working on his JS-Kit enabled blog. Now the reason why I chose JS-Kit is because of it’s synchronizing feature with blogger commenting system which basically means, whatever comments you made on JS-Kit, that comment is copied to blogger comments. This also means in the event you decide that you want to revert back to blogger commenting system, you can do so easily and STILL retain ALL your comments

Now to make sure that synchronizing feature works for you, make sure, in your blogger commenting system, you DO NOT limit comments to Registered Users only. This is because the JSKit commenting system will over-ride whatever settings you have stated and still lets non-registered users comments. Now when that happens, it would register that user as the blog owner so although you see the different commenters in JSKit, in actual fact, the comments that is being copied over to blogger commenting system will show YOU as the commenter HENCE, the Top Commenter Widget (which has filtered your name out) would NEVER EVER show up as it only has you as the commenter! So once I changed the option “Only Registered Users” to “Anyone” can comment, Bill now has a working Monthly Top Commenter Widget!

Cheerio…