I’ve been thinking about blogging platforms a lot lately. There’s many posts around at the moment about choosing the right one, but not all get into much depth.

There’s a good roundup on Mashable of the features between the two most popular self-hosted CMS’s. Movable Type 4 was released this week and everything I’ve seen so far looks great. Having setup this blog with WordPress though, I can’t recommend it enough.

Mashable: MovableType 4 vs. Wordpress 2.2

WordPress is an excellent blogging platform; I’d have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. However, there are a few plugins which will make life as a blogger easier, as well as a bit more fun.

As soon as you start getting popular, the amount of comment spam you get will start to go up. Akismet can help get through it - it checks comments against its own webservice to see if it’s likely to be spam or not. You can still retrieve comments, telling Akismet they’re not spam with a single click.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

If you’re a podcaster, podPress could be of real interest. I see many bloggers and podcasters using WordPress to detail what’s in their podcast, maintain a seperate feed and link to the MP3 file. Plenty of useful features and an inline player for folk who don’t want to download.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

I think Flickr is fantastic and post up any photo I take which is interesting. Whilst it’s easy to paste in the code to show a photo on a page, flickrRSS will display the most recent photos added to your flickr account in your sidebar by checking the RSS feed. Not essential, but it can add a lot of colour to the design. Since adding it here, I noticed the four photos shown for a while have had 170+ views, whilst the rest have had less than 10.

Download: http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/

One of the most interesting evolutions in online music for me is the rise of services last.fm and Pandora. Put simply, both sites take the music you like and find other tracks and artists you may also like, and play them to you as your own internet radio station.

Last.fm came about in 2002 as a social networking site, using AudioScrobbler to build a profile of your music taste. This is done either through the sites own streamed radio stations or by downloading a plugin for your media player. You sign up for a profile, download the plugin and start playing your music as usual. The details of each song played are sent back to last.fm who add it to your profile. After a while a picture builds up of your musical tastes and the social networking portion comes into its own.

You find yourself placed with neighbours who have similar tastes to you. You can play stations to discover music you might also like (neighbourhood radio), based on songs you loved on the last.fm player or launch a station based on similar artists to one you’ve selected. I’ve been using last.fm for over a year and really like the social portion. It’s a great and well focussed community, with the ability to add yourself as an attendee to an upcoming gig or chat with other fans of your favourite bands, as well as show off that you’ve listened to Tom Jones 155 times this week.

Recently I’ve found last.fm to be a little slow and decided to check out Pandora again. Pandora is sort of similar, but instead of recommendations uses the Music Genome Project - a musician listens to the track and analyses the elements to create the genome. When you visit Pandora and give an artist or track it’ll come back with the musical attributes and play similar tracks.

Part of the reason I stuck with last.fm for so long is that there seem to be a few more of my favourite artists there, and the forums which accompany them are mainly English, which is really nice as they’re mainly European artists. I tried them again and they’re still not there, but Oasis, Nerina Pallot and Foreigner came back with some great tracks. The selection seems more varied, and it’s not yet told me it can’t connect or that it’s run out of music.

A song going around in my head at the moment is Chocolate Cake by Crowded House. I stuck this in and for over an hour on two occasions haven’t skipped a single song - I’ve actually noted almost all of them as albums I’d like to find and hear more of.

So now if asked what my favourite music is, it can be summed up with a single released in 1991 that I don’t think even charted in the UK.

Pandora can also be played through a Squeezebox - a wireless device that plays internet stations and music on your PCs. If these devices come down in price like DAB sets and all sorts of Wi-Fi gear maybe they’ll even be on bedside tables and in showers. The future of radio is going to be fascinating, and it’ll be great if services like Pandora can step beyond the desktop and coexist in devices alongside a DAB tuner and MP3 player.

To-Do lists are incredibly useful. I have a few notepads full of them and have started to go online with my tasks and little jobs for the day, or the points of a task itself.

Ta-da List

Ta-da List is from 37 Signals - the creators of popular online tools Basecamp, Highrise and Backpack. Sign up is simple - you need to supply a username, real name, email and password. I’m not sure why these tools require a real name - perhaps it’s in case someone steals their neighbours milk, and a check can be made to see who had that as a to-do item. The privacy policy is thankfully quite short and very clear. Once you’ve signed up you get an URL to use to login to the list.

The welcome email is short and to the point. There’s a simple Frequently Asked Questions page and I can now login. The whole process feels very clean and tidy. On the field to confirm my email address I purposefully misspelt it and the resulting error was very clear.

Creating a list just requires a title, and then you can input items. Once an item is typed, hitting enter saves the item and gives a new box. Sometimes I find there is a little lag on this and you can’t bash out the items very quickly, although it’s not a real issue. Editing and deleting items is done on the same page - clicking the X deletes and you can save the list when you’re done. Reordering is very easy - just drag the items around. Ticking the box to the left of the item will move it off the list, to a smaller one of completed items. There’s no submit or save buttons when setting up your lists.

I really like Ta-da List and use it almost every day. The interface is very simple and easy to use and it’s perfect for those simple lists. There’s an RSS feed for updates to your lists and a nice touch is the dot next to each list - the larger it is the more items there are which need to be completed.

Recently I updated my LinkedIn profile and signed up to Facebook. I’ve never been that keen on social networking - perhaps due in part to the embarrassing lack of friends and professional contacts. ;-) However, I really like last.fm because it has a clear purpose, well defined areas, a good interface and a clean design. Connections can be made on the rarest of tracks that you post a journal entry on, for example.

This weekend I noticed a few articles / posts about LinkedIn and the possibility of opening their platform to developers. This would be quite cool - several nice apps have been added to Facebook that I now use. However, some have been commenting on what Facebook can do to attract some of LinkedIn’s market. It’s an interesting discussion at the moment. Nick O’Neill points out that you can control which friends view what on Facebook now, and if this was extended to specify business and leisure relationships it could negate the need for profiles on social and professional networks.

Nick also describes how on LinkedIn there is currently an absence of distractions in user’s profiles, and opening up for applications could result in something similar to what Nicholas Deleon describes today on CrunchGear.

Facebook was started for college and university students (although now anyone can join), and LinkedIn for professionals. I really like both networks and now I have up-to-date profiles on both will continue with them. LinkedIn has my positions, competencies and other professional information, and I really like that it informs me my profile is only 25% complete, with guidance on how to improve this. Another simple but useful feature is the ability to download a profile as a PDF. Facebook has my favourite music, events, groups and so on. All the information I see when I log in relates to personal updates from friends, and the groups I belong to have great members, focussed topics and no spam.

For the foreseeable future, I definitely see my relationships and profiles remaining separate. Both are great social networks that I enjoy using. If you’re on either, you’ll find me on the links in the right hand menu.

Update: The second paragraph got a little confused and has been corrected.