I remember a few months ago there were a few discussions on Twitter with some Nuffnang bloggers (including myself) about the Windows Live Writer. I’ve been using the Windows Live Writer application myself to write my blog posts and still recommend it as a primary tool to blog. If you are still using your browser to write your blog posts then you are missing a lot!

How Windows Live Writer increases your productivity as a blogger

1) Write your blog offline, then send the draft online for the final touches
Write what you want, save as often as you like. In fact, you are most likely to click that Save button on the Windows Live Writer because it would normally take you a while to save when you are writing a draft online.

After you are happy with your draft, upload the draft to your blog with all the included images (more on this later).

2) It grabs your blog’s real layout and CSS styles

When you write your blog posts in Windows Live Writer, you will see your post as if you are writing it live on your blog. You can see every formatting that your blog has: font colors, header styles, and others. This allows you to get the right look and feel without having to click that preview button while you write.
3) Instant Preview

Tired of waiting for your browser to load when you want to preview your post? Windows Live Writer lets you preview the post offline quickly (since it has saved your blog’s layout in your computer). You can switch between the Preview and Editing mode in an instant, anytime.

4) Easy image insertion
If you are a blogger who likes to include photos/images on your blog post, this software is a life saver. This is the most powerful feature that I love the most in Windows Live Writer. Simply drag and drop an image from your hard drive/file explorer and the image will be inserted into the blog post. Put as many images as you like and they will all be uploaded in one go automatically once you send the draft to your blog online.
Ever get tired of clicking that browse and upload button on your blog to upload a few images? No more :) Windows Live Writer makes the process simple and fun to upload photos in batch to your blog.

Now, imagine doing this post (our Singapore tour during the Nuffnang Blog Awards 2009) without Windows Live Writer! With that plenty amount of images formatted in a nice way + texts, it will take you minutes if not hours of work!

5) Image formatting and styling tools

In Windows Live Writer, you can also easily resize the images by dragging the resize slider rather than putting a value or percentage. You can change the image alignment, links, and even add a nice effect to it (shadow, reflection, etc) only with a few clicks. It even supports watermarking so you can always have a nice copyright text on every image/photo you have on your posts.

For example, below is an example of a photo I used for an iPad stand review with a shadow effect and watermarking using Windows Live Writer:

Best of all, you can set these settings as a default preset so they will be applied automatically as soon as you drag an image into the editor!

There are other things such as a word count, inserting a map, and others that you need to explore for yourself.

Windows Live Writer works on most popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger (plus a few others) and can be downloaded at Microsoft Windows Live Essentials. If you are already using Windows Live Writer as your primary blogging tool, feel free to share how it has improved your productivity in writing a blog post!

About the author:

Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Michael Aulia of Craving Tech. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Michael!

Photos are a really important part of blogging and blog reading for many of us. Unless you’re a photographer yourself, you face a regular challenge of finding interesting and relevant photos to jazz up your blog posts (or illustrate concepts or ideas you are trying to explain).

It’s quite common for many bloggers to source images from the Web, by just copying and pasting photos they like into their own blog posts. This is a gamble. Sometimes the photographer won’t notice, or will be happy for the exposure if you’re including their name in the photo credit, and a link back to their site. But you’re not guaranteed a good reaction – using photos without permission can get you in trouble and generate ill-will towards you and your blog. Because of the time and effort photographers put into their work, they can react very badly if you reproduce their photos without permission – even if you do put a photo credit or link to them. (This makes sense – bloggers hate it when they see their blog posts copied and pasted elsewhere without permission!)

If you love the work of a photographer or visual blogger, and especially if you use a lot of photography on your blog, it is worth thinking about how you can source photograph in a way that works harmoniously with photographers and gives them both acknowledgement and control of how their photography is used. Daydream Lily made a great post about this recently: Some downfalls on visual blogging.

In the past I have done a combination of asking for permission to feature an artist/photographer and other times I go ahead and post the image (more so this) and then link to the person’s flickr or website (linking to weheartit or ffffound is not correct crediting). General blogging etiquette has so far seen this to be perfectly fine. But I’ve decided that I could be doing more, so I’ve made some new rules for myself….

1. Name the file with the creator of the image, this way if the image is re-posted the name of the person will go with the file. Other large profile art blogs do this and I feel I should be doing it too.

2. Try to email people a bit more and ask for permission to blog about them or only blogging people who send a submission to me. Although I’ll have to find a balance on this, as emailing all the time could be pointless (if not very annoying) as well as slow down the spontaneity and pace of a blog.

My #1 tip for using people’s photos is to simply contact them and ask for permission. You’d be surprised how often you get a quick YES, and a thank you for asking. Daydream Lily makes the point that she often wants to use a photo at short notice – which can certainly be a challenge. If you have a blog post coming up on a particular topic or theme, try to put some thought and planning into the images you’ll need, so you have time to contact people for photo permissions if needed.

Why is using photos important for your blog?

There’s a great post over at Famous Bloggers about why you should use great photos to support your blog – Why stunning images are important for your blog and how to find them for free. Photos can help your blog by:

• grabbing attention
• making reading the page easier by giving people a rest from text
• sharing or illustrating the meaning of your post
• promoting SEO (because search engines also look at photo file names)

Using Creative Commons licensed photos

Creative Commons licences are an alternative to the traditional copyright, and are often used by photographers, musicians and other content creators who want to allow people to use, republish and sometimes even remix their work. You may have noticed that we’ve been using lots of great Creative Commons-licensed images for the Nuffnang blog lately!

There are six different Creative Commons licenses, so make sure you check to see which one the photographer has chosen – usually they require attribution (that you include their name as the photographer) – and they sometimes specify that you can only use their photo for non-commercial work. You can read about the different licenses on the Creative Commons Licences about page.

Finding Creative Commons licensed photos

The great news is that Flickr allows you to search their whole archive for Creative Commons licensed photos! Get started over at the Flickr Creative Commons page – you can even narrow your search by the type of license required (ie if you need to find a photo that’s authorised for use by a business).

Check out the Famous Bloggers post linked above for other ideas on where you can find great free photos.

Have you got any tips for sourcing great images for your blog? Please share them in comments!

Many thanks to Penny from Jeroxie (Addictive & Consuming) and Violet from Violet Le Beaux for volunteering to run the meetup – and to everyone who said they are keen to attend or help out. We hope to see as many of you as possible on the day! :)

Not in Melbourne? Remember, if you’d like to organise a meetup in your town – read our recent post “How to host a Nuffnang meetup“.

We will be carrying out migration to a better server.

Because of synchronization issues we will need to take down the existing servers temporarily.

We have scheduled a maintenance for Sunday, 11th July at 4am +11 GMT (3am +10 GMT) and the estimated downtime is 3 hours.

During this time, Nuffnang-related services will not be available and your ads may not show.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Thank you.

Ok, let’s roll with the links for this week!

8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers – Problogger

Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices – Jotsheet.  If you’ve decided to move from Blogger to a self-hosted blog on WordPress, this guide will show you how to keep all the incoming links to your blog working and intact – nice!

Recommended Hosting for WordPress 3.0 – Ei Sabai Nyo. If you’re self-hosting using WordPress, or considering it, you have the brand new WordPress 3.0 to use! This blog post runs you through the system requirements for using 3.0, and a couple of web hosting companies that offer easy installs of WordPress 3.0 to get you up and running fast.

That’s all for today. If you find a useful article, please share it with us & we’ll include it in our next link roundup!

So you wanna host a meetup?

The main thing we need to make a blogger meetup happen is a volunteer who’ll do the local arrangements (ie, find a good venue and then host the meetup on the day. Without a local host, we just can’t run a successful meetup. Here’s a list of the things you’ll need to do:

Find a venue

• Find a venue. Suggest a venue, day and time that you think will be convenient for people. You can use Twitter & your blog to ask other bloggers when & where might be convenient for them. It may be in the afternoon after school/work for most people. Confirm with Nuffnang that the venue, day and time work for us too.
• Confirm the venue. Once you’ve chosen a venue, you’ll need to speak to the manager of the venue to let them know the day and time you’re organising a group to attend, and see if you need to make a booking to hold a space for your group. If you’re not comfortable doing this, let us know and we can speak to the venue for you. Basically this is to make sure that there are no unexpected surprises like finding out the venue is booked out for a private function the day of your meetup!

Invite bloggers

• Once the details of the meetup are confirmed, you’ll need to spread the word to local bloggers – by blogging about it on your blog, emailing invitations to bloggers you know, and sharing the information on Facebook and Twitter. Don’t be afraid to ask people to help you spread the invitation far & wide – the whole point of meetups is to meet new people! Make sure you also send the invitation to us at Nuffnang so we can also post details on the Nuffnang blog, Twitter and Facebook page.

Collect RSVPs

• When you invite people, ask them to RSVP with their name and the name of their blog. This helps us know how many people are planning on coming along, and it means we have their blog address so we can link back to them when we write up the event. So, make sure you keep an RSVP list.
• If you can get 10 people along to your meetup, then Nuffnang can provide a small budget to buy some food & drinks on the day. So there’s an incentive to really promote the event and get a few people along. :)

On the day

• On the day of the meetup, you’d need to play host- which means you need to get there on time, or preferably a little early. This way when people start arriving you can keep an eye out for anyone who is looking for the Nuffnang meetup but doesn’t know anyone. It’s really helpful if you can supply a photo of yourself for us to post on the invitation, so people know who to look out for when they arrive at the meetup!
• When hosting, try to say hi to people when they arrive, and introduce them to other people if they don’t already know someone. If people come along who didn’t RSVP (maybe they’re a friend of someone who did), don’t forget to grab their name and blog address so we can link to them.
• If you have a camera, please take a few photos of the meetup for the blog! Remember to ask people first, and don’t push them if they don’t want their photo taken – we want everyone to feel comfortable and have fun. :)
• If you’ve managed to get 10 people to RSVP, you’ll have been given a budget to spend on food & drinks. You MUST keep your receipt from when you pay, so we can reimburse you for the costs! Without the receipt, we can’t pay you.

After the meetup

• There are two jobs we need you to do. One is email us with a list of the names and blog addresses of everyone who came to the meetup. This way we can link back to all the guests from the Nuffnang blog (and it helps us get to know the bloggers who come along to our meetups!)
• The other is create a short writeup about the meetup and send it in to us. We will include this on the Nuffnang blog or in our email newsletter to let other Nuffnangers know how your meetup went. Here’s an example of a writeup about a recent Nuffnang meetup: Sydney mum blogger meetup at Madame Fling Flongs.
• If we gave you a food & drink budget, make sure you mail or fax the receipt to us so we can reimburse you your costs!

Phew! Ok, that’s the rundown on meetups. Any questions? :)

If you want any help to organise a meetup, please get in touch with your friendly community manager, Sarah!

Photo credit: Geek Bear Friends by Izzyplante. Used under Creative Commons license.

We are bringing up additional hardware to spread the load among our servers.

Because of synchronization issues we will need to take down the existing servers temporarily.

We have scheduled a maintenance for Friday, 2nd July at 4am +11 GMT (3am +10 GMT) and the estimated downtime is 3 hours.

During this time, Nuffnang-related services will not be available and your ads may not show.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Thank you.

Kimberley won a $250 Red Balloon voucher, and we donated $250 on her behalf to Pet Rescue.

Kimberley chose an original (and delicious) way to raise awareness of homeless dogs – cupcakes! Check out her blog post for step by step instructions on how to create your own puppy cupcakes – super cute!

Congratulations Kimberley, and thanks again to everyone who entered and helped spread the word for this good cause! According to the PEDIGREE Adoption Drive website, the campaign has already found homes for 1,835 dogs. How awesome is that!

The Aria Bar & Lounge Chocolate High Tea at The Langham Hotel of course!

The Langham Hotel was kind enough to host 11 food and fashion bloggers at their beautifully decadent Chocolate High Tea last Saturday.  And, boy was it ever so beautiful and decadent! *posh English accent*

"Would you like a little more tea?"

Before we indulged ourselves with Head Pastry Chef Markus Bohm’s masterpiece, The Chocolate Bar, the man himself came out to have a chat to us about all the decadence we were going to enjoy that day!

As we approached the Chocolate Bar, we didn’t even know where to start! We could start sampling chocolate by where they were from (the Chef had explained some of the different countries and blends that go into their various chocolates) or maybe start with something light like the fresh strawberries and work our way up to the richness of the divine Lady Mogador Mousse Cake made with dark Venezuelan cocoa and then topped with a passionfruit glaze.

The other side of the amazing spread!

We confess, we were courted by the white chocolate strawberry mousse tart, seduced by the hazelnut chocolate eclairs that were dusted with gold and felt loved by the chocolate chip pudding and passionfruit souffle. And then, the scones and sandwiches were brought out, because well, what is High Tea without scones, jam and smoked salmon sandwiches?

It was a great Saturday morning where our food and fashion bloggers could come together and enjoy this beautiful spread, get to know each other a little more and even plan our next event!

Reviews Of The Event

We’ll link to the posts as we see them – please leave a comment if you’ve got a post about the High Tea you’d like us to link to!

Violet Le Beaux – “I couldn’t believe how many other bloggers turned up! Everyone was so lovely and it was great to put faces to a lot of blogs that I read. I hope we can stay in touch.”

Much Love – “I was quick to accept the invitation after reading the keyword: Chocolate! I was also excited because I’ve never been to any kind of blogger meet-up before.”

Mel Hot Or Not – “We were seated on cushy couches and leather seats and given a brief talk by Head Pastry Chef Markus Bohm about what to expect: a silver tiered stand with scones and finger sandwiches; a chocolate bar piled on beautifully patterned hatboxes and featuring desserts made from single plantation chocolates from around the world; and made-to-order souffles. I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Sarah Cooks – “Whilst the items offered as part of The Chocolate Bar are certainly decadent and indulgent, Chef Markus has exercised a lot of restraint in keeping the overall effect light. I walked out full and satisfied, but not weighed down and bloated. Gut gemacht!”

Jeroxie – “I had such a great time with fellow bloggers and to be spoilt with so many handcrafted chocolate delights. I need to thank Chef Markus and his team for making us feel at home. We are definitely all smiles when we left”

Living Footprints – “It was a lovely high tea, I enjoyed the company, and gooodnessssss…. I sure heck needed the step out of my cave.”

Thank you!

We’d like to send a big thank you to the staff of the ARIA bar at the Langham for hosting us for this delightful event and the decadent indulgence and of course, all the bloggers who came!

Big thanks to everyone who entered the competition to “Fit your perfect family day into the Honda Odyssey!” We’re happy to announce that Kathy from Play, Eat, Learn, Live was the winner!

Kathy’s won the loan of a Honda Odyssey for a day, and $500 to spoil her family. Here’s the perfect day she dreamed up:

If we had an Odyssey for a day, we would use it to pick up my elderly mother-in-law (who we now can’t fit in our standard station wagon, if all five of us are in it) and take her out to visit her 95-year-old sister in the outskirts of the city. We’d take both the old ladies out for a lovely Devonshire tea in the Dandenong Ranges, and return them home in comfort and style.

Then we’d drive to Geelong in the dusk, watching the sun set as we listen to soothing music, and eat fish & chips on the waterfront, watching the lights twinkling over the water. We’d continue on down the Great Ocean Road to Anglesea, staying the night at a friend’s house, before returning the next morning to visit the Queen Vic market and put the car through its grocery-toting paces.

Congratulations Kathy, and thanks again to everyone who entered!

If you missed out, don’t worry, we have another competition running at the moment, in support of the PEDIGREE Adoption Drive to help homeless dogs. You could win a $250 Red Balloon voucher, and $250 will be donated to Pet Rescue on behalf of the winner as well!