The Zoundry Blog

Beta Release Version 0.9.223

2008-03-16T18:03:00.001-04:00

Our second public beta build release (version 0.9.223) is now available for download. This build has most of the defects that were submitted during the last beta period fixed as well as the following enhancements and features:

Translation Tool - a new UI to help in translating Raven to other languages. If you would like to contribute, please let us know - directly from the Raven.
No More Technorati Tags - well, unless you want it. You now have the option of selecting Technorati or other tag sites. Read more.
Blog This - command line options to allow external programs launch Raven. Read more.
Editor Font - you can now chang the working font name and size of the Designer editor. Read more.
Trackback - you can now send trackbacks. Enter the trackback URLs in the blog post settings user interface.
File Attachment Upload - upload non-image files by simply dragging and dropping them into the designer. Read more.
Bug/defect fixes.

Announcing Zoundry Raven Beta

2008-02-11T03:13:00.001-05:00

I'm happy to announce the beta release of our next generation blog editor, called Zoundry Raven. It's a big milestone for us. We've taken the great suggestions on how to improve Zoundry Blog Writer from our users around the world and incorporated them into Raven. You can download and try it out at http://www.zoundryraven.com/.

Many of our users have become more sophisticated bloggers over the last several years, and have asked us for a more sophisticated product that's still really easy to use. You'll see that Raven includes new features that simplify publishing across multiple blogs and services. There's also a new indexer that allows you to browse your posts by title, links, images, or tags.

Our goal is to make Raven the best blogging editor around and we'll continue to need your input to make that happen. I want to thank all of our users for their support and feedback. And please continue to give us your suggestions either through email or at our forum.

Technorati : Raven

Announcing the Zoundry 2.0 Development Blog

2007-03-08T00:39:00.000-05:00

We've been busy working on our next product. Codenamed Raven, it will have a lot of new features, a new UI, and will be much more extensible. We want to make it easy for third-party developers to add new functionality through plug-ins. We've started a new blog, the Zoundry 2.0 Development Blog, where we will post regular updates on our progress. Feel free to post specific feedback there or you can always email us.

Technorati : zoundry Del.icio.us : zoundry Ice Rocket : zoundry

Developer Release for Blogger Beta

2006-10-21T15:40:00.001-04:00

We're looking for testers to try out our first release for Blogger Beta. You can read the release notes and download it at our forums. Please post feedback at the forum thread.

Technorati : zoundry Del.icio.us : zoundry

Hello Chinese Zoundry Users

2006-10-21T15:25:00.000-04:00

I am happy to announce that we have an official Chinese language site for Zoundry at cn.zoundry.com. I want to thank Walter Wu, a blogger in Tianjin, China and the developer of the nklog blogging service, for generously volunteering to translate our web site into Chinese.

The Chinese language version of the Blog Writer is also available for download there. I want to thank again flimsy, the Chinese blogger who translated our product.

Many of our users are coming from China, so we're happy to provide more Chinese support through the volunteer efforts of our many friends. Unfortunately we haven't expanded our Zoundry Service into China yet, but you do not need a service account in order to use our Blog Writer.

We hope to expand our affiliate service into China some day. Let me know if you know of any affiliate marketing e-commerce companies in China who would be interested in partnering with us.

Technorati : blog desktop clients, blog editor, blogging, china, multiblogging, zoundry Del.icio.us : blog desktop clients, blog editor, blogging, china, multiblogging, zoundry

We're Still Looking for Translators

2006-06-13T23:53:00.000-04:00

As I wrote earlier, the Blog Writer v1.0 beta supports localization so we're looking for volunteers to help us translate the UI messages, captions, and strings. You can find instructions here in our user guide.

I am happy to announce that we have our first translation file - in Chinese. For more information, see this thread at our support forum.

Thanks for your help!

Technorati : zoundry
Del.icio.us : zoundry
Ice Rocket : zoundry

Demise of Lite

2006-04-28T17:19:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed that we have discontinued our Lite version of the Blog Writer. If you already have Lite, you can continue to use it but we will no longer support or update it.

We made this decision for a couple of reasons:

1. We designed Lite to be a slimmed down version of our editor for users who didn't care about inserting product links. However, we couldn't find many features to remove so it ended being very similar to the full Blog Writer. It wasn't a big surprise that demand has been low, with Lite making up less than 20% of our total downloads.

2. As we were developing version 1.0 and looking at our feature roadmap, we couldn't think of many features that we would include in the full version and not in Lite.

We might create multiple versions again in the future, but until then, we'll offer just one version of our Blog Writer. For those of you who don't want to insert product links, it's easy enough not to use that feature. But we hope you will try it out! If you're not interested in earning money for yourself, we encourage you to create product links for one of our charities or the Zoundry donation jar.

Let us know if you have suggestions for future versions of the Blog Writer targeted to specific use cases. We always appreciate the feedback!

Technorati : zoundry
Del.icio.us : zoundry
Ice Rocket : zoundry

New Developer Release Available

2006-04-06T13:27:00.000-04:00

It's been quiet here over the past several months because we've been working hard on our 1.0 release of the Zoundry Blog Writer. I am happy to announce that a developer release of 1.0 is now available at our forum.

We've been listening to all the great feedback from our users and added a number of requested features, bug fixes, and a lot of work under the hood.

Here are the major new features (more information available at our forum):

Spell Check. Yes, finally! This is our first version, with more advanced spell checking in the works. It has a simple dialog-based UI that you can run or set to operate automatically before posting.

XHTML Editor. For our more technically advanced users, we now allow you to edit the XHTML code. Features include HTML tidy, auto completion, and validation.

Extended Entries. Now you can split your posts in MovableType and WordPress with an introductory section with a link to the rest of the post using the  marker.

Localization. We have externalized all our user interface messages, captions, and strings to support language translation and localized versions. We do not have any official translations yet but we are working with volunteers to help us with translations. If you are interested in helping, please contact us at contactATzoundryDOTcom.

I invite you to try this version and let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for improvement. We hope to launch 1.0 very soon!

Technorati : blog editor, xhtml, xhtml editor, xhtml validator

New Support for MSN Spaces

2005-12-14T12:14:00.000-05:00

We have been working with MSN Spaces for the past two months in a closed beta to support their implementation of the MetaWeblog API. Many thanks to Dare and the MSN Spaces team. We were especially happy that they they paid attention to time zone issues and unicode support because we have a lot of international users.

They just announced that their API is now widely available so we have updated our Blog Writer (Build 145) for official support of MSN Spaces.

Here's how you set up the Blog Writer to post to your MSN Space:

First, you need to turn on email publishing for your MSN Space. Sign in to your MSN Space and go to Settings>Email Publishing. On that page, enter a secret word where prompted.

Now download and install Build 145 of the Blog Writer. Go to Blog Account Settings (under the Tools menu) and click on the New Account button to start the wizard.

Enter the following for Blog Account information:

Account name: Whatever name you want to display in the sidebar for your MSN Space
Account type: MSNSpaces
Account username: the name of your MSN Space, typically found at the end of your MSN Space URL, e.g. http://spaces.msn.com/members/<your name here>
Account password: the secret word you entered on the email publishing page.

Notes:
1. MSN Spaces does not allow fileupload so you need to set up a separate FTP server in the media repository to host your images.
2. MSN Spaces allows only one category per post. Click on the Refresh Online button in the category dialog to see your list of categories for the first time.
3. You cannot set a future date and time for your post - it will default to the current date and time.

Let us know if you have any questions by writing to our support email.

Technorati : MSNSpaces, Zoundry, blog client
Del.icio.us : MSNSpaces, Zoundry, blog client
Ice Rocket : MSNSpaces, Zoundry, blog client

New Zoundry Deals Blog

2005-12-02T13:13:00.000-05:00

We have started the Zoundry Deals Blog to post special affiliate offers we get from our merchants. Share these limited time offers with your readers to pass along the savings! Our merchants are being extra aggressive during the holiday shopping season so check the blog regularly or subscribe to the feed.

Technorati : Zoundry, shopping
Del.icio.us : Zoundry, shopping
Ice Rocket : Zoundry, shopping

Zoundry Helps You Share Holiday Gift Suggestions

2005-11-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

The holiday shopping season is in full swing and I want to encourage everyone to share interesting holiday gift ideas. As I wrote earlier, you can use our new toolbar to post gift suggestions to your delicious or Yahoo! My Web 2.0 page. Use the delicious tag "gifts" so we'll be able to browse your suggestions too.

This is a great way for your friends and family to help each other with gift ideas. It's always hard for me to think of good toys for my nieces - I'm pretty out of touch in that scene. But I'm all over electronics and gadgets. So it's nice that I can contribute gift ideas in electronics and my friends and family can tell me about the hot new toys.

Zoundry enables all gift recommenders to get rewarded for their suggestions when shoppers buy through their links. You can keep your referral fees to help stretch your gift budget, donate them to one of Zoundry's supported charities directly, or donate to a local charity in your community later.

We're all local experts in some way or another, so let's help each other find the perfect gift for everyone on our shopping list.

Technorati : Yahoo, Zoundry, delicious, gifts, shopping
Del.icio.us : Yahoo, Zoundry, delicious, gifts, shopping
Ice Rocket : Yahoo, Zoundry, delicious, gifts, shopping

What I Learned from Web 1.0

2005-10-19T23:56:00.000-04:00

I want to thank Ken Yarmosh at Technosight who invited me to join in his second Blogoposium on "Lessons Learned from Web 1.0." I learned many lessons but here's the one I felt was most important:

It's hard to change user behavior.

I was at a software company that tried to do this and failed. We identified a big problem (an obsolete hierarchical desktop metaphor) and came up with an ingenious solution (organize all your electronic information into a time-ordered stream, like a supercharged email inbox.) I still think the concept is great, but let's leave that for another conversation.

We were an early pioneer in desktop search and got arrows in our backs. Our problem was that we tried to change user behavior in two ways. (Yes, in hindsight this seems like a really, really bad idea. But to be fair there was a lot of experimenting going on, much like today.)

First, we asked users to abandon files and folders. Most people we talked to knew that the filing system was broken and they were routinely losing documents and messages, but it didn't mean that they were ready to move onto something else. It took several years before people were ready to consider search as a UI metaphor for the PC. And it's still not clear that the Google Desktop will reach critical mass.

And speaking of search.... our second mistake was to ask users to view search results sorted by time instead of relevance. Of course now blog search is based mostly on time, but even back then users were already conditioned to expect results in relevance order.

We were trying to push time order as being more useful than poor relevance, citing the power of chronological recall and narrative storytelling. But user behavior in search was already set and we couldn't change it. In the end, we had a small (but passionate!) group of users that couldn't measure up to the expectations of our investors.

So the lesson learned was that most of the successful companies of Web 1.0 solved focused problems with incremental improvements that didn't upset user behavior. We're now applying those lessons at Zoundry. We're focused on solving a small but meaningful problem (affiliate marketing is too complex for nontechie writers) with a simple product based on UI standards (word processing + search) plus a healthy dose of anticipating user needs. And we're improving our products rapidly with user feedback - like all good Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies.

Technorati : Zoundry, blogoposium2, search
Del.icio.us : Zoundry, blogoposium2, search
Ice Rocket : Zoundry, blogoposium2, search

Reflections on Web 2.0

2005-10-13T21:46:00.000-04:00

Before the Web 2.0 conference becomes a distant memory, I wanted to share why I am cautiously optimistic. I saw a lot of great software, especially around Ajax, and interesting new participatory content models. I liked the energy and experimentation, reminding me of the mid-90's. And I liked how Zoundry fit within the Web 2.0 themes of participation and community.

Here are two observations I took away from the conference:

1. Web 2.0 innovation is happening everywhere. This was nice to see since we're based in Connecticut. There are Flickr and Sxip in Vancouver. Look at Morfik in Australia. I met a co-founder of 20six, the largest blogging platform in Europe, and many other people from around the world.

This makes me want to expand our service internationally even sooner. We already have many users of our Blog Writer around the world and it pains me to tell them that our service is limited to the U.S. right now when they request account invitations. It's a matter of resources and we're looking at raising venture capital to help us grow faster.

2. Web 2.0 companies have real revenue models (mostly.) It's not just about users and eyeballs anymore. Google AdSense proved that you can monetize user-generated content and has given revenue models to Web 2.0 companies (until they can get bought by one of the portals.) Advertisers large and small love the pay-for-performance model of today's ads and are moving more of their advertising budgets online.

Affiliate marketing pioneered the concept of pay-for-performance, which is why it is still so popular today. Safa Rashtchy at PiperJaffray (who moderated the great teen panel at the conference) wrote in a Silk Road Weekly report the following 3 key points:

- Affiliate marketing remains the highest ROI channel.
- Paid search, contextual advertising, and affiliate marketing are not mutually exclusive.
- The affiliate marketing segment will grow approximately 30% in 2005.

We are extending affiliate marketing and making it more relevant to bloggers and other non-traditional publishers in the Web 2.0. I like the value we are creating by simplifying a proven marketing model and making it more accessible to more people. I want to thank again all of our users who have been helping us in this mission.

Technorati : Web 2.0, Zoundry, affiliate marketing
Del.icio.us : Web 2.0, Zoundry, affiliate marketing
Ice Rocket : Web 2.0, Zoundry, affiliate marketing

Example of Delicious as Next-Gen Blogging

2005-10-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

Fred Wilson recently wrote about a friend's delicious page feeling like a blog. I agree that delicious can work as a blog for people who don't have time to write much. With delicious, you're limited to a link plus a couple of lines of commentary for each "post." Result: short and sweet blogging.

As I wrote earlier, you can use our toolbars and delicious to share product recommendations if you don't otherwise have time (or the inclination) to write a blog. As an example, I have started a Gift Ideas delicious page/blog where I will be collecting gift ideas for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

It's pretty easy. I use our toolbar in Firefox. When I find an interesting product at Amazon, Buy.com, eBags or any of our other merchants, I press the Recommend This button and our service creates a Zoundry affiliate link for the product. I write my commentary, add my tags, and then save the link to my delicious page.

You can see how I use tags to organize my posts - by product category, recipient category, intended use, and price range. When my list gets longer, I'll probably create some bundles. Our service also tags each product with a unique URN code that allows you to view all other recommendations by Zoundry users within delicious for the same product.

(BTW, if you like my gift ideas, I ask that you buy the products through the bookmarked links and I will donate all commissions to the Children's Defense Fund.)

I encourage all of you to create similar delicious pages using our toolbar and ask your friends and family to do their shopping through your pages. Consider sharing or donating your commissions. Experiment with tagging and let me know what system works best for you. (Update: I forgot to mention that delicious allows you to create an RSS feed to your page so ask your friends to subscribe too.)

You'll need an account with our service in order to earn commissions and you can download our free toolbars here.

Technorati : Web2.0, Zoundry, shopping
Del.icio.us : Web2.0, Zoundry, shopping
Ice Rocket : Web2.0, Zoundry, shopping

Highlights from the Web 2.0 Conference

2005-10-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

It's Friday afternoon and the Web 2.0 conference is winding down. Lots of great info and I have much to digest. But here's a quick collection of my personal highlights from the last three days:

Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel stating that user-generated content will be a priority going forward.
The debut of robust Ajax apps - in particular, Zimbra, a new email/calendar app.
Yahoo's new Mindset search engine where you can express your search intent using a slider. Moving the slider between shopping and research changes the sort order of the search results in real-time.
Surprise appearance by Google's Sergey Brin. Best comment - when asked whether Google hurts small companies when they roll out a new product, he replied that the same small companies probably get calls from the major portals soon after.
The teen panel where a group of five teens gave some of the best one-liners of the entire conference. Best line: "Burritos and gasoline" when one teen was asked how he would spend $100. Key statements: Google used for school/homework/shopping research, MySpace is all over high school but becomes passe in college when Facebook takes over.
The table next to me at dinner playing a Web 2.0 buzzword drinking game.

I'll write a more thoughtful analysis of the conference within the context of our business later.

Technorati : Web 2.0, Yahoo Mindset, Zimbra, Zoundry
Del.icio.us : Web 2.0, Yahoo Mindset, Zimbra, Zoundry
Ice Rocket : Web 2.0, Yahoo Mindset, Zimbra, Zoundry

Zoundry Toolbar and Web 2.0

2005-10-06T12:57:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a quick break to write more about our new Toolbar product and how it relates to what I've been hearing at the conference.

One of the key drivers of the Web 2.0 is the growth of user-generated content and its evolution from static pages to reusable chunks that can be widely accessed and shared. Blog posts are a great example - you can access them via RSS or HTML and you can share them via tags and social bookmarking sites.

After we introduced our Zoundry Blog Writer to make blogging easier, we got interest from people who wanted to join our service but not start a blog. They wanted to share product recommendations with friends and family, but didn't have the time or inclination to write a blog. They wanted an even easier way to create content and get it on the Web.

And thus the idea for our toolbar was born. Now you can sign up with the Zoundry service and use our browser toolbar to save, annotate, tag, and share information on products sold by merchants in our system. There's no need to publish - you can simply share a product link (encoded with your Zoundry ID) with friends via email or save the link to a group bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Yahoo! My Web 2.0. (In fact, I'm writing this post during a Yahoo presentation on their My Web 2.0 service.) When a friend or anyone else sees your bookmark at del.icio.us or Yahoo! My Web 2.0 and buys the product based on your recommendation, you earn a commission.

It's clear that Yahoo is looking at ways to grow and monetize user-generated content in My Web 2.0 and Yahoo! 360. I think most users feel it's only fair that they should get a piece of revenue that comes from their content. Our model helps people do that using affiliate links in blogs, web sites, email, IM, and bookmarks. We'll continue to work hard to expand that list and make it easier for people to make money from their digital word of mouth referrals.

Technorati : Web 2.0, Yahoo, Zoundry, toolbar
Del.icio.us : Web 2.0, Yahoo, Zoundry, toolbar
Ice Rocket : Web 2.0, Yahoo, Zoundry, toolbar

Using Blog Writer with LiveJournal.com

2005-10-06T08:30:00.000-04:00

Posting to LiveJournal.com (LJ) from Blog Writer is supported starting version 0.9.133. LiveJournal uses a different API than most other platforms (MovableType and Metaweblog being the common XML-RPC apis). Although LJ also supports the older Blogger API (v1) and the Atom API, we decided to integrate some of LJ's features by using the xml-rpc API.

Account Setup:
During account set up, choose the following settings:

Account Type: LiveJournal
Account username: your LJ username
Account password: your LJ password
API Endpoint URL: http://www.livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc

For the file upload mechanism, you can select "Blog's file upload feature" if you have paid LiveJournal account. If you use a free LJ account, then your options to upload pictures would to use FTP (or drag and drop images from your online site such as Flikr).

Scrapbook Support:
If you have a paid LiveJournal account, you can upload images to your Scrapbook (fotobilder). Blog Writer uploads images to a gallery named Blog Writer Media in your Scrapbook (all images uploaded to this gallery are public). To upload images to your Scrapbook, make sure you choose "Blog's file upload feature" for the file upload mechanism during the account set up.

Basic LJ Features in Blog Writer:
Since Blog Writer is generic posting tool, only a few of the LiveJournal features have been integrated to the existing UI.

All posts made from Blog Writer are public entries in LJ, except for drafts (see below).
Posts made as drafts will be private entries in LiveJournal. Similarly, when downloading recent posts, private entries in LJ will be shown as drafts in Blog Writer.
LiveJournal does not support categories. The categories dialog in Blog Writer is used to display LJ moods (currently you can select only one LJ mood).
LJ Friends and related features are currently not supported in Blog Writer.
Tagwords - there is a new tagspace for LiveJournal in Blog Writer UI. When downloading recent posts from LJ, the tags found in each of the LJ entries are associated with this tagspace. When posting to LJ, Blog Writer assigns all your tagwords (including other tagspaces such as Technorati) to your LJ entry tagwords field.

Tagspace for LiveJournal

Same tagspace is available in the Post Entry dialog. Inline tagging (i.e. adding a tag to a word or phrase within your post is not supported).

Technorati : Blog Writer, LiveJournal, Scrapbook, Zoundry, fotobilder
Del.icio.us : LiveJournal, Scrapbook, Zoundry, fotobilder

New Release and New Toolbar

2005-10-05T13:48:00.000-04:00

I'm at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, but I wanted to take a quick break and make two product announcements.

First, we just finished our latest update to the Blog Writer and it's now available for download on our web site. As I mentioned earlier, it works fully with LiveJournal, including image upload to the LiveJournal scrapbook. Many thanks to our LiveJournal testers!

We're also running a sneak preview of our newest product, the Zoundry Toolbar. It's designed both as a companion to our Blog Writer and as a standalone way for Zoundry users to share product recommendations without a blog. Click here to learn more and be among the first to download our free toolbars for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and the Mozilla Suite.

More on our new products later, with reports from this cool conference.

Technorati : LiveJournal, Zoundry, toolbar
Del.icio.us : LiveJournal, Zoundry, toolbar
Ice Rocket : LiveJournal, Zoundry, toolbar

LiveJournal Testers Wanted

2005-09-19T11:42:00.000-04:00

We have just added initial support for LiveJournal. We're looking for LiveJournal users to test our latest developer's release that can be downloaded here at our forums.

We are using LiveJournal's API so our Blog Writer supports LiveJournal-specific features, such as moods, LiveJournal tags, and private documents. Let us know what you think and report bugs via the Send Feedback feature under the Help menu in the Blog Writer.

Technorati : LiveJournal, Zoundry
Del.icio.us : LiveJournal, Zoundry
Ice Rocket : LiveJournal, Zoundry

Custom tags + My Delicious = Blogger Categories

2005-09-17T13:18:00.000-04:00

Stewart Pollock (parkbench) recent post on using Zoundry illustrates an approach to creating a categories for his Blogger.com based blog using Delicious.

... Blogger does not make categories available but before this update to Zoundry Blog Writer I found a suggestion to use del.icio.us tags to create categories.
Any reader can see the current tags I have for this blog at http://del.icio.us/parkbench, and can then search within the tagged blog entries using the del.icio.us index of blog entries.

If you notice in his blog, he has categorized links at the bottom of his post labeled 'File under' pointing to his Delicious tagspace.

Currently Steve creates this manually by choosing the CustomTagSpace context menu option. Zoundry Blog Writer has a capability for one to add their own tagspaces, but we had not enabled (it became a todo item). Starting with build 126 (released Sept 6), we have enabled this capability, though we still do not have a UI. If you are comfortable in modifying a xml configuration file, then you can add custom tags to the menu system.

Instructions on how to add you own tags can be found here at our forums.

Technorati : Blog Writer, Blogger Categories, Custom Tags, Zoundry, folksonomy
Del.icio.us : Blog Software, Blog Writer, Zoundry, folksonomy

Google Blog Search

2005-09-14T23:20:00.000-04:00

Google launched its new blog search engine today. I first read about it this morning at John Battelle's blog and the AP's story hit the wire this evening. Already there are a ton of posts on this hot topic (see it in action - search on "google blog search" at Google Blog Search.)

I want to make a couple of points:

1. Google's blog search engine indexes XML feeds instead of the blog's HTML, so make sure you have a feed at your blog. Anil Dash at Six Apart informs us that Six Apart offers an automatic feed of all public posts to LiveJournal and TypePad, so you're covered if your blog is at either of those services.

2. This really bodes well for our users who are writing product reviews and embedding affiliate links. Google's regular search engine included blog posts but now you have a better chance of getting more visibility at this specialized search engine.

I've played around a little with the new blog search engine and while I don't understand what goes into Google's relevance algorithm, I was happy to find some of our users' product reviews at or near the top of search results.

I also saw that our (very early stage) Zoundry Reviews Portal made it to the top of a few product searches. We haven't really done much with it yet, but our goal with the portal is to collect digests of product reviews from our users and create a product review search engine. Consumers will be able to conduct product research (especially out on the long tail) at our portal and then click through to read the full review at our user's blog and purchase through our user's affiliate link.

If Google's blog search engine does a great job indexing our users' blogs, then maybe we won't need to expand our portal. But then again, we have a few search optimization tricks up our sleeve that may give Google a run for their money. More on that later...

Technorati : Google, Zoundry, blog, search
Del.icio.us : Google, Zoundry, blog, search
Ice Rocket : Google, Zoundry, blog, search

Earn Money for Katrina Relief

2005-09-08T21:30:00.000-04:00

We want to do our part in supporting Katrina relief efforts. Last week we switched our Red Cross donation program from tsunami relief to hurricane relief. If you enter zoundry-1003 in the Zoundry ID field in your Blog Writer, all commissions you earn from product links created with this ID will go to the American Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief fund. Zoundry will also donate its fee so 100% of your commissions will go to this fund.

Make sure to tell people on your blog that your product links are going to hurricane relief. As a reminder, you can also direct your commissions to other charities. For more information, go to our Charities page.

Technorati : Katrina, Red Cross
Del.icio.us : Katrina, Red Cross
Ice Rocket : Katrina, Red Cross

Sneak Preview of New Beta Release

2005-09-01T15:24:00.000-04:00

Psst ... we have quietly posted our next beta version of the Zoundry Blog Writer (Build 123) on our web site. You can be one of the first to download and try it out before we make a public announcement later this month.

This new release includes all the features listed earlier in my developer release posts, plus the following new features requested by users in the last few weeks:

Tag chooser - the Blog Writer now indexes all tags you have used and makes them available in a convenient checklist for your future posts.
IceRocket ping - you can now ping this blog search engine when you publish a new post.
Podcast-friendly - you can now drag and drop or insert mp3 files into your posts. The Blog Writer will automatically add the podcast enclosure to your mp3 links so your feeds will be ready for podcasting.

I want to thank everyone who helped test the developer releases. Your feedback is invaluable and we couldn't have done this without you.

Stay tuned - we will have more exciting news to share on the Zoundry service and new products shortly.

Technorati : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, IceRocket, Zoundry, podcast
Del.icio.us : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, IceRocket, Zoundry, podcast
Ice Rocket : Blog Editor, Blog Tool, Zoundry, podcast

New Developer's Release Supports More Blog Platforms

2005-08-16T16:41:00.000-04:00

We've just added initial support for more blog platforms using XML-RPC APIs, including the following:

Movable Type (use "Six Apart Movable Type API" - this is an alternative to our earlier Atom API support)
Wordpress 1.5 and 1.5.1.3 (use Wordpress API)
Nucleus 3.2.1 (use generic Movable Type API)
Drupal 4.5 (use generic Movable Type API)
Blog Harbor (use generic Movable Type API, endpoint https://blogware.com/xmlrpc.cgi)

We'd appreciate your help in additional testing on these platforms. You can download the new build here from our forum. As before, please review all the release notes before installing.

Technorati : drupal, movable type, nucleus, wordpress, xml-rpc, zoundry
Del.icio.us : drupal, movable type, nucleus, wordpress, xml-rpc, zoundry

New Password Needed for Movable Type 3.2

2005-08-11T16:31:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick note for users of the new beta Movable Type 3.2. You will need to create a new "API password" in your MT profile and use that as the account password in the Blog Writer. See this post at Six Apart's Betablog for MT 3.2 for more information.

Technorati : movable type, zoundry
Del.icio.us : movable type, zoundry