For too long bloggers and end users have been pigeon-holed into using the software available rather than doing it your own way and making the software package work for you.

Asian Extreme is a new website providing film reviews and news in the niche Asian extreme horror movie genre and by using custom taxonomies, the website allows visitors to search for reviews based on the publication year, director, language, publisher and the classification (rating).

Although this functionality could be used with tags, it doesn’t give the same level of results and quality and almost a level of tidiness and correctness about the data. They’re a way of intelligently creating an organizational system for data. Some examples include:

Finding actors (taxonomy) that have played in specific movies (content).

Listing musicians (taxonomy) that have performed on various albums (content).

Locating restaurants (content) that serve specific types of food (taxonomy).

Getting recipes (content) that use certain ingredients (taxonomy).

Searching for jobs (content) in different fields (taxonomy).

Scanning for books (content) written by your favourite author (taxonomy).

Grouping content in this way simply isn’t possible with standard tags and categories. To truly understand the benefits of taxonomies, you have to open your mind to possibilities beyond a controlled and restricting blog and blogging software.

The example above shows how these taxonomies can be used, there is also a number of custom fields included too and these will be covered in a later post.

Do you use custom taxonomies or custom post types on your blog?

FIREFTP

“Personally I prefer to use a stand-alone FTP client, but I am sure there are many people out there who would love to be able to upload and download files from their servers directly from Firefox. The solution is man add-on called FireFTP

Another benefit of this add-on is the possibility to use an FTP client on computers where you don’t have enough privileges to install new software (e.g., in your work, school and so on). The interface looks like any other FTP client out there:

It also comes with a lot of advanced features, including: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SFTP, SSL encryption, search/filtering, integrity checks, remote editing, drag & drop, and file hashing. Worth a look.”

I am delighted to see FireFTP get some kudos from such a valuable blogging resource as daily blog tips that I thought I would too post my views and build this into a nice collection of posts aimed at helping new bloggers find the best free tools and services available to help them become the blogger they want to be.

Next up:

FIREBUG

As I own a domain name with unlimited email addresses I can continually use a unique address to sign up as a new customer to receive the 10% discount.

Even if the address and card details as the same, Burton don’t seem to mind, well of course I’ve just spent £81 with them. And £270 the time before that and so on…

enjoy

There are a number of ways to embed a video into your blog.

Embed code.

by visiting sites like youtube to find your videos, it is possible to click the embed link and choose the size and style and copy the code into your blog editor.
this is probably the easiest way to do it and probably the safest as the code is created by the hosts i.e. youtube.

Embed by URL

In wordpress from version 2.9 the embed feature has made it extremely easy to embed video content, you just have to type in the URL of the video
for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idoftheclip

Fancy embed by URL

I use a fancybox plugin on this blog, similar to lightbox which allows a link to a video to be a layered page which has the video content in a embed code style manor as mentioned previously.

It is must easier to explain this by using an example. so click on the link below to see what I mean!

The Cellar Room Limited [opens in TCR video player]

I have been using this merchant for some time now and they are probably the best out there!

This can be said of any industry or even on a personal blog level. People come to your site because they want to read what you have to say and possibly contribute to the conversation. Those who are ‘comment whores’ could do better with their sites by joining into their comment streams and giving feedback to their visitors. It is a way to bounce ideas.

Blogging does take guts… for some… a lot, especially when you are putting your experience on the line. You blog and hope people understand what you are talking about. You may even want people to agree with your blog. However, that is not exactly the point, it is to get people active and learn from each other.

Blogging is a learning tool on both a personal and business level. Businesses learn what their customers like and how to make their product better. The blog is a great extension to make businesses less ‘robotic’ and ‘automated’, and fill it with life. Businesses can blog on how their product is better and ask their customers or others in the field to give feedback. blog is a business tool, like telephone, fax, and email.

Blogs keep your personal site or your business up-to-date and fresh in the search engines. Yes, when you blog, the search engines will notice and eat up that new content and document it. It is okay to blog about your business. It is not an ego trip as you have to be confident in your product. Why even bother to advertise or plug yourself into the social media world if you cannot be confident about what you can deliver to people?

No matter how small it is… do not be afraid to share it. Blog about your passion in life, even if it is your job. People who are in a similar field will read and spread the word about what you have to say, or even blog on their own site about their own experience – meaning that you influenced them in some way.

With tools today for bloggers, you can become more connected with colleagues and potential clients more than ever. People from small towns can connect with the world!

Why should you blog? Why not is a better question.

What are you passionate about? Are you blogging about it? Do you have a business and have a blog with it?