Blogging Pilot's Pilog

I am sure that we can all agree that there is really no absolute alternative to Adobe Photoshop, but sometimes we just don’t need a million tools to simply edit a picture for a blog post. Agreed that Adobe Photoshop can edit a picture at the pixel-level, but do we really need that for editing pictures for blogging purposes? Sometimes, simple and one click edit is better, and let’s spend more time on the content than the aesthetics of a Blog.

Keeping all this in mind, Pilotology.com brings you the Top 10 Picture Editing tools, and they are all Freeware and / or Open Source!

Windows Live Photo Gallery

With Windows Live Photo Gallery, it’s a snap to get your photos and videos from your camera to your PC. Find your favorite photos and share them with friends and family. Make your great photos look even better, and create impressive panoramic photos too.

Editing features include adjusting exposure, color, or detail by hand, or use auto adjust. You can even create mesmerizing panoramas—Photo Gallery stitches several photos together in just one click. Browsing feature by date, caption and tagging people are some of the cool feature you would like to check out.

IrfanView

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7. Simple for the newbie, but powerful for the professional. Many supported file formats, Multi language support, Thumbnail/preview option, Paint option – to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc., Toolbar skins option, Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD) and lot more features.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET, originally intended to be an alternative to Microsoft Paint, but soon with its highlighting features it ruled and became one of the best tool to crop images, rotate, adjust colors, resize, make collages and many more. All feature and user interface element are designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. You’d love it’s special effects that offers everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing. Also included is a unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Picasa

Picasa is free photo editing software by Google that makes your pictures look great, make sharing pictures with family and friends a breeze, and editing a piece of cake. Together, Picasa & Picasa Web Albums make it easy for you to organize and edit your digital photos, then create online albums to share with friends, family & the world. Some of the exciting features include, edit to perfection, get organized, be creative, add places, and simple sharing. The feature I love the most is that the Web Album allows you to post your photos online.

FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image converter, editor and browser. It does carry amazing array of features, which includes image viewing, comparison, cropping, managing, red-eye removal, renaming, add texts, watermarks, emailing, border effects, color adjustments and many more.

Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.

Apple iPhoto

iPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organize your photos so you can find them fast, edit them so they look their best, and share them with your friends and family. Further iPhoto gives you more ways to keep track of your photos by organizing them according to who’s in your pictures, where you took them, and when you took them. Places to go, event to remember and experiment with effects are some of the cool features you must have a look.

iPhoto introduces Faces: a new feature that automatically detects and even recognizes faces in your photos. iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and face recognition to match faces that look like the same person.

XnView

XnView is a fast multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. It can read more than 400 file formats, e.g. GIF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, TARGA, multipage TIFF, camera RAW, JPEG 2000, MPEG, AVI, Quicktime. EXIF & IPTC metadata are also supported. The image viewer has an Explorer-like browser that allows quick and simple browsing of directory contents. XnView supports red eye correction, crops and transforms JPEG images losslessly, generates HTML pages and contact sheets, and provides batch conversion and batch renaming. Slide shows with transitions effects, screen capturing, WIA & TWAIN support (scanner & digital cameras), image comparison, file operations.

PicaJet Photo Organizer

PicaJet Photo Organizer automatically manages 1000’s of digital photos in seconds. Photo indexing is faster than in other competitive products. PicaJet allows you to selectively index folders or files at any time, review and edit photos as desired, without pigeonholing you into an awkward interface structure. You can create highly complex category structures or simple ones. It is up to you and depends entirely on your needs and not on any program limits.

GIMP

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a nice distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, expandable, and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.

Abobe Photoshop Elements

Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in unique print creations and web experiences, and easily manage and protect all your photos and video clips. Exciting features of this software would include, Recompose photos to any size — without distortion, Easily manage everything from one convenient place, Quickly find your best photos, and many more.

Tags: photo, picture effects, pictures

Bloggers blog for different reasons, and we all have our own various niche ideas that we blog about. And some of us are still fumbling with the ideas, and not sure of what to blog about. No worries, just don’t give up and it will all come to you in due course of time. It always has. And even if you do not have any particular topic that you want to write about consistently, then do it like I do here. I blog about just about any topic under the sky. Why? Because it is fun.

And then, one day, some of us want to start earning some revenue from our blogs as well. You see, some want to make a living out of blogging, and the others may just simply want to make a little extra money online to pay for all the bells and whistles that support their blogging as a hobby. Nothing wrong with either approach. And if you are like me, you probably will end up with various blogs, about various things, and topics, and niches, and each one of your blog will have a different motivation behind it.

Making Money Online from Blogging

In my case making money online is not the objective of my blogging habit, or hobby if you will, but somehow I have a feeling that it is going to end up being that way. Anything wrong with this? No, not really.

Making money online from blogging is always nice, and it is very popular nowadays anyways. The general advice that I have mostly come across for making money from a blog is to clutter it with ads, ruin the user experience by putting the ads within the content and making the ads look like the content itself.

Another approach to making money with a blog is to collect e-mail addresses from your readers and spam them with as many affiliate products as possible in hope that they will buy something before they get enough and unsubscribe.

The rat-Race of page views

In my case, I have not chosen either of the two approaches mentioned above. To be honest with you, I have tried, and I still do for the sake of knowledge and staying up to date with the industry, just about every new monetization product or technique. I don’t like monetizing my blogs with banner ads and I do not think you should spam your subscribers.

Earning money from ads on your blog is a complicated strategy. You have to publish new material consistently, attract lots of links and readers in hope that after some time you have enough page views to attract advertisers and sell ads spots.

It is a never ending process. Every day you are starting from ground zero. You can never quit producing new content as you can never afford your page views drop as that will mean less money from advertisements.

Monetizing by selling your own product

The better option to monetize your blog is to invest your time in creating something (your own product) that will provide enduring value and bring you continuous passive income, and make your readers happy at the same time. Create the content once, put it in a permanent form and sell it over and over again. Putting your work into a permanent form is very important as it will allow you not to keep recreating your value over and over again.

Your product will provide value even when you are not physically present and it will allow you to take a break from posting new content once in a while. It will basically let you stop trading your hours for dollars. The typical Rat Race.

I am working on something of this nature. And as I ma developing, and eventually launch this new product, I will be posting my step by step journey here on this blog. You should subscribe via RSS or email so you can learn from my experiences, and maybe duplicate the process for yourself on your blog.

Tags: blog, blogging, making money, monetization, monetizing, online, WordPress

Ok Guys. Today I’ll go over the steps necessary to ensure that your hard work out into writing all those great posts does not just sit on the server and collect dust, and there are other readers of your fabulous content besides you, me, and some other friends. We know for a fact that content is king! Well, it is in fact king, but only if it has any subjects (readers). Without audience, there is no star my friend!

So, let us get going here and move through the following few basic and easy to follow steps to make sure that your blog is not only SEO’d but also SEF (Search Engine Friendly).

1. Correct your Permalinks: The WordPress default permalink is ?p=<postid> , but we need to change it to /%category%/%postname%/.  For this, go to Settings –> Permalinks and select the Custom Structure and enter one of the above options. I personally prefer the one with the category and post-name both.
2. Redirection Plug-in: Now go ahead and install the Redirection Plug-in from your Plugins –> Install New. Once activated, go to Tools –> Redirection –> Options, and check mark the –monitor new posts and Update.
3. SEO Slugs Plug-in: Stop words in your URL slugs are not good for better SEO and rankings. Install the SEO Slug plug-in, and simply activate it. This is prevent the stop words from your Slugs.
4. Optimize your Images: I have read so many articles and posts all over the internet regarding whether image optimization has any significant impact on SEO and search rankings or not. People have different opinion, but I am very convinced, that it sure does. And why wouldn’t it? You think all those YouTube, Flickr and the rest just show up on the results with coincidence? I prefer to write my own image descriptions and meta tags or ALT description etc, so I can optimize the image information to maximum based on my interest keywords. However, if you are just too busy for that, you can install the SEO Friendly Images plug-in and let it do it for you automatically.
5. Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs not only help your site visitor with an easier way to navigate, but also assist the search engines to index your site better. It just is a great tool to have on any site. You can install this Breadcrumb plug-in and activate it.
6. Cache: Install and activate the WP-Cache plug-in. This greatly helps with speeding up your site and with SEO as well. Even though I prefer WP-Super-Cache plug-in, but that is simply too complicated to set up for a new user. Once you start getting a large number of visitors, and your WordPress Blog gets too big, then  you can start looking into installing and configuring that.
7. Sidebar Widgets: Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you’re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you’re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit. The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren’t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren’t helping you at all. Get rid of them.
8. Comment and Follow the Commenter: Go visit some other blogs, hopefully related to your topics, and read their posts, and leave an honest and relevant feedback. There is a new trend going on nowadays where the comment fields are being changed by the blogger from nofollow to follow to encourage the commenter. Don’t think on these terms at all. Simply go and leave comments anyways. And when someone leaves a comment on your post, go visit their blog and return the favor. We all appreciate a sincere comment.

Ok. This concludes our Basic WordPress Optimization exercise. There is still a lot more to do. I will write another post in a day or 2 with the advanced optimization tips. But if you follow all of the above, you should be much better anyways.

And once again, if you like what you read, please leave me a nice little comment.

Tags: plug-in, SEO, WordPress

I have decided to write regularly about some of the WordPress plug-ins I use at my Pilotology.com blog here. You have a few hundred available to you from your Dashboard side panel; and you can try them all. However, I have spent hundreds of hours, and I still do, to narrow down the best ones for the job, and also evaluate the new ones as they roll out every day. So, I figured, might as well start sharing my reviews and recommendations on them with my fellow Pilotology blog users.

Here are the 2 that I use the most each day; on this blog and all the others that I have. Both these are for sharing the content of your blog. These plug-ins give your readers an easy and quick access to share your post with their friends etc via social media channels in a matter of seconds. Remember, time is short, so these have to quick and efficient.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button:

If you look at the bottom of this post, you will see this plug-in in action. Here I have a picture for you as well. Now hover your cursor over the plug-in and you will see all the sharing options that would be available to your reader to share. If you click on the button, you will see a whole bunch of other social media sharing options open up as well. Your readers can use this to share with their friends and community if desired.

Digg Digg:

The second one is Digg Digg. You can see this one in action at the top right corner of this post as well. This plug-in gives your readers the option to Tweet, or Digg (and a few others) your post in a second, really. I am only using the Tweet option here on this site, but you can use other options available as per your needs/wishes.

Activation and Settings:

Log-in to your Pilotology blog account, and from the left sidebar, you can click on Plug-ins and install these 2 plug-ins. After the install, you need to activate them, and then from your left sidebar again, under Settings you can click on the links to these to configure them. Try out different settings and see what looks and works the best for your site design, functionality and needs. Let me know if you have any questions, or if you need any help with these or any other blog related issues.

Tags: blog, blogging, plug-in, WordPress, wordpress themes

I have not been able to write anything in the last few days. Just suffering from the writer’s block syndrome I guess. Plus some personal family issues have been very distracting as well. However, I have been doing a whole lot of reading though. I have visited hundreds of blogs from all over the world, and learned a whole lot of new things. I have played around with 254 plugins for WordPress and WordPress MU. I like some, and the others were either just simply duplicate work, or of absolute no practical use. Will write more about the plugins in a different post sometime.

During my self exploration in the world of blogging, I read a whole bunch of blogs from pilots, and other aviation related authors. And I came across 9 things we can do, and from now onwards, I shall start implementing in my blogs, to give our posts, and our blogs, a more personal touch. Here is the list of those 9 things we can do:

1. Use your real name.
2. Share images of yourself from time to time in the posts and on key pages.
3. Share videos where people can see your face and hear your voice.
4. Include details of what’s happening in your life and family (usually in passing and by way of illustrating something).
5. Try to use personal language – blog in the first person.
6. Write in a style that is similar to the way you would speak to a person face to face.
7. Tell stories about your experiences as they relate to your topic.
8. Use personal examples where you can illustrate what you are saying.
9. Consider live streaming question and answer sessions via video.

And now I am realizing that I am so much behind, and there is a lot to be done. I better get cracking now, and quit procrastinating right this moment.

PS: one piece of advice – when it comes to being personal, I suggest bloggers think a little ahead about what they will and won’t reveal about themselves, their family and their lives. Having some boundaries in place for personal safety can be a worthwhile thing – this doesn’t mean you’re not being personal, just that you’re being smart and exhibiting some personal safety.

Hope this helps you all blogging pilots.

Tags: blog, blogging, pilog, pilot, plugins, WordPress, Writing