40Tech

Yesterday we compared Squarespace and WordPress, and I indicated that as slick as Squarespace was, 40Tech was going to remain on a self-hosted WordPress installation. Bloggers using a self-hosted instance of WordPress, though, need to make sure that their blogs are secure. That includes making sure that your blog isn’t already compromised. How do you do that? The easiest way to do that is to use external tools to scan your site. There are two that we use here at 40Tech, and recommend.

I first started using WordPress in 2005, several years before the birth of 40Tech. For the uninitiated, when you say “WordPress,” you actually can be referring to two different products. You might be referring to the WordPress blogging platform, that you can download and install on your own web host. That’s what we do here at 40Tech. WordPress can also refer to WordPress.com, a site where you can set up a blog that runs on the WordPress platform. Recently, I wondered if there were a better choice than WordPress, so I gave Squarespace a spin.

If you’re a geek, you may have heard of Markdown. What is it? Markdown is a format that you use to write text that can then be converted to valid HTML. The hallmark of Markdown is that it is easy to read and to write.

If you run a website, you’ve probably run into issues trying to figure out what your site looks like on various devices. If you want a quick way to figure it out, check out Screenfly, a site that lets you see how your site appears on different devices, including desktop, tablet, mobile, and even television. Within each of those categories, you can choose from a variety of devices. For example, if you choose tablet, you can pick between the iPad and four other tablets, including the Motorolla Xoom. Even the desktop selection allows you to choose between several screen resolutions.

One piece of software that Microsoft got right was Windows Live Writer. If you’re a blogger, and don’t want to dig around in HTML (and arguably even if you do), Windows Live Writer is the software that we recommend for your drafting needs. One flaw with Live Writer, though, is that it doesn’t offer a setting to change where your blog posts get saved on your machine. By default, your drafts and recent posts get saved to your user folder, in the \Documents\My Weblog Posts\ directory. What if you want to save your posts elsewhere? You can do this, with a registry hack.

Today, 40Tech is pleased to present a guest post by Karma.

You suave and debonaire 40Tech readers likely know all about microblogging. If you like the ease of sharing things through Facebook and Twitter but wish you could post longer entries with more formatting, Tumblr or Posterous might be what you need. Alternatively, if you want to start a blog but have been overwhelmed by Wordpress, Movable Type, or Blogger – Tumblr and Posterous are a dream come true. Posting to both sites allows all the standard features of a blog post: you can toggle between rich text and HTML, customize your theme, split your entries into multiple pages and alter the formatting. However, these sites are taking the lead over traditional blogging platforms because it is much easier to get up and running. They also have some features that leave those other blogging sites in the dust.

What a week for the cloud. On April 19, Sony took down the PlayStation Network in the face of hacker attacks that compromised the network. Two days later, large portions of Amazon Web Services crashed and burned, due to technical glitches. Amazon has since recovered, but the PlayStation Network is still offline. Much has been reported about the effect of the Amazon outage on major sites like Quora, reddit, and Foursquare. But many “ordinary” bloggers use Amazon services as well. How did it affect them? We spoke to a blogger whose sites were taken offline by the outage, and learned a few things.

Did you finish grade school or are you just another illiterate ghetto punk?

No, I’m not talking to you. That first sentence is a comment from one reader to another on a local news site. It’s an example of “internet muscles.” You know what I’m talking about – the attitude and language of some people, when they speak to someone online in a manner quite different from how they’d act if they met that person face to face.

The hardest part of making the switch from Windows to Mac is often on the software side of things. While there are many great OS X apps, sometimes it can be hard to find the perfect replacement for an app that you’ve used on Windows. Since I’m not dual booting or running virtualization on my MacBook Air, I ran into that issue when searching for a replacement for Windows Live Writer. Cast whatever stones you want at Microsoft for other reasons, but Live Writer is an excellent blogging app. My search for a replacement for Live Writer focused on three choices: Blogo, MarsEdit, and ecto.

Earlier this month, we took a look at 4 ways to backup your WordPress blog.  That post covered steps you could take to backup your site, including the use of WordPress plugins.  We’re always on the lookout for better ways to get things done, and when it comes to backing up a WordPress blog, we’ve found a gem.  Updraft is a dead simple plugin that will backup the contents of your site to the cloud (such as Amazon S3) or to an FTP server.  You can even have the backup emailed to you.