Get The Wibiya Toolbar For Your Blog

I first heard about the Wibiya toolbar from Rahsheen in his post on Black Web 2.0 called How to Wibiyafy Your Blog.

I remembered seeing these toolbars at the foot of some blogs before but I had no idea how easy it is to install.

I found out more about the Wibiya toolbar in a post from Joella Molson of Blog With Wings in her post titled Ready to Review the Wibiya Toolbar Did You Play With It? Here's some of what Joella had to say about Wibiya in her review:

I found the toolbar to be very versatile and highly configurable by the user. It stays pinned at the bottom of the page where it is mostly out of the way and can optionally be closed by your readers. Users can instantly access applications that encourage users to stay longer, gives them various ways to promote your blog, provide you feedback as well as options to connect to and interact with you and your other visitors.

I agree with both bloggers that you should at least give it a try and here's a video I recorded Using the Wibiya Toolbar - Ms. Ileane Speaks Episode #014

As you can see in the video, I installed the toolbar on my Blogger blog using a widget. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog you can download the Wibiya plugin. If you don't want to install the plugin you can find an alternate set of instructions from Wibiya Community Powered Support on Get Satifaction


Joella points out one important option that will help with load times. From your Wibiya dashboard in your account be sure to go to Troubleshooting and check Activate Toolbar After Page Load.

Rahsheen's post covers using Wibiya Badges and you can follow the Wibiya Blog to stay up to date with new features and changes to the toolbar. I think it's a great addition to the blog. How about you, have you tried it or do you plan to try it in the future? I value your feedback.

UPDATE: Wibiya has introduced a great Buzz widget that you can add to your toolbar. This Buzz widget lets visitors see your latest Buzz, ReBuzz your Buzzes, follow you on Buzz and add the blog post they are viewing to Buzz!

Blogger Commenting System Is Not On Stable Ground

Historically Blogger, the free blogging software from Google, has received less than favorable reviews for their blog commenting system. IMO this is one area where Blogger pales in comparison to the blog comment software that comes preloaded on free blogs from WordPress.com.

The truth of the matter is, with the standard Blogger commenting system, comments are quite often  lost as if they are being sucked down into the black hole of cyberspace. Blog visitors can carefully craft a witty or helpful comment, select from a pre-filled list of methods for identification, hit enter and - puff their comments are lost and a second request for id verification is launched.

A word of advice to anyone that has decided to use Blogger for their blog. I recommend you install an advanced blog comment system like Intense Debate or Disqus before you publish your first post. I decided to install the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog a few days ago and I’m pleased with the outcome. I was so excited to install Intense Debate that as it turns out I rushed through the process without exploring all of configuration options.

Lucky for me I read several blogs during the course of a day and I came across this post Apply CommentLuv for Blogger Blogs from ICT Trends. As the post explains, what I didn't notice when I signed up for Intense Debate post is that you can install various plugins with your setup including the CommentLuv plugin.

If you are not familiar with CommentLuv, I recommend you read about the importance of adding it to your blog in this post from Kikolani's blog Reasons to Love CommentLuv Blogs.

This is one case in favor of choosing Blogger over WordPress.com for your free blogging software. But no matter what type of blogging software you take advantage of, you should sign up for a free account at CommentLuv so that your posts will be recognized when you leave comments on other blogs with the plugin installed.

Let me know what you think about Intense Debate and CommentLuv and rather you have it installed on your blog or not.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand I created how-to video instructions for installing the Intense Debate commenting system and CommentLuv plugin on Blogger in this post How-To Install CommentLuv on Blogger 

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Thanks For All Your Help!

Ahh! This is sweet music to my ears. This is a tweet that I received from my daughter's best friend the other day. She's a budding entrepreneur with a fabulous Online Boutique called Pretty Unused. She's more of a Twitter user than my daughter, and when she has a Twitter question she often comes to me. The other day she asked an excellent question about using Buzzom for feed management, and she was very appreciative of my responses. Here's a link to my how-to podcast videos about Buzzom.

This is a classic example of why blogging and social networking have become such a huge part of my life that they keep me up at night. I really love the experience I'm getting and it's rewarding to feel as though I'm helping others.

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Fix For Annoying Commenting System on Blogger

Did you ever try to leave a comment on a Blogspot blog and after you hit submit your comment vanished into cyber space? That used to happen on this blog. If it's any consolation to my readers I can say that it would even happen to me when I replied to your comments. I found it very annoying.

That should change after today, because I just installed the IntenseDebate commenting software to help improve audience participation and the increase the level of engagement here at Ms. Ileane's Blog.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Blogging Goal - Helping New Bloggers in 2010

I started blogging in July of 2009 and I’ve been encouraged by the positive feedback from my readers to continue blogging well into the next decade. In case you don’t know, I have a WordPress.com blog called Ms. Ileane Speaks where I offer tips for blogging, podcasting, Twitter promotions and talk about “anything else that comes to mind”.

Since I was new to blogging at the time, I had no idea what the difference was between the various free services like Blogger and WordPress.com, so I started this blog to discover the advantages of each platform and to keep track. The whole concept was actually a challenge from my long-time friend Kissie who remains committed to her Blogger appropriately named Ohhh....K! but gave in and created a blog on WordPress.com too called Say Whatever I Like. I'm very thankful that she encouraged me to start this project and we help each other every day.

As I began to consider my blogging goals for 2010 I thought about changing the focus of this blog or eliminating it altogether. In the end, I decided to continue this blog with the goal of helping other new bloggers, or newbies as they like to call us, to become familiar with the features of WordPress.com, Blogger and perhaps other free blogging platforms like Posterous. I’d also like to promote this blog more, with the hope that through the use of video tutorials and comparison articles, I can make the decision process that much easier for the next newbie to come along.

One tip that I would like to share now with the readers of this blog (newbie or not) is the benefits of joining the Blog Engage community of bloggers. Blog Engage a site exclusively dedicated to helping bloggers. Here’s the description from Brian, owner of Blog Engage:

Blog Engage allows you to submit your Blog Article(s) that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted by me or our visitors to the main page.

Take a look at the video I created 2 weeks after joining the Blog Engage community in November. This is by far the most popular video on my YouTube Channel.

Let me know what you think, or share your resolutions and blogging goals for 2010. If you are a new blogger who has questions, share them with me and if I don't know the answer, I'll help find it.

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