We covered Regator here at Orangeinks a couple of weeks back. The private beta blog aggregator of quality content received a lot of positive response from different blogs and early adopters. Along with those positive remarks are also requests to view their favorite blogs and upload their own OPML files in Regator. In preparation to their launching, they decided to give way to the request of the users while still keeping their goal in tact.

I received an email from Scott Lockhart, Cofounder of Regator, and he is happy to announce the additional features.

Regator users can now upload OPML files and add individual blogs to view on their personalized My Regator page, along with their favorite Regator blogs. In keeping with the site’s quality-over-quantity approach, these blogs are visible only to the user who added them. They are automatically nominated for inclusion in Regator’s main database, but are added and categorized for all users to see only if our editors determine that they have frequently updated, relevant, original, well-written content.

Sharing features are also added to the service. You can now share posts via Facebook, Twitter and email. Other sites will also be included in the near future. Regator also promised to provide users with their own unique URL to quickly share posts with friends.

Regator’s move certainly adds functionality to their service. Not only that they can stick to their goal of bringing quality content from the blogosphere, users can now really use Regator as their main blog feed reader.

Regator is set to launch publicly on August 6. If you can’t wait till the launch date to check out the service, here are 50 invites for Orangeinks readers. Just head over to their site and enter the invitation code: “ orangeinks .”

List of Features:
• Share posts with friends via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail (NEW!)
• Import OPML files or add individual blogs to view on your personalized My Regator page (NEW!)
• Browse Regator’s channel hierarchy to find quality content that interests them
• Save, organize, discuss, and rate posts
• Listen to audio and create playlists
• Watch videos without leaving the site
• Create custom RSS feeds
• Find out what the blogosphere is buzzing about with Regator’s What’s Hot List
• Create Keywords and have posts on those topics delivered straight to their personalized My Regator page
• Save and manage their Favorite Blogs and Favorite Channels
• View the highest rated, most commented on, or newest posts from all of Regator’s blogs-or within the topic of their choice
• Search the blogosphere for first-rate posts on any topic

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Here’s another extension that you might find of great use, especially those who take a lot of screen shots. The add-on is called FireShot . It’s a screen shot editor which you can run along with your Firefox browser. You can use it to take quick screenshots of web pages and edit them right away. You don’t have to open Photoshop or other editing tools to crop and edit your screenshots. Just right click on the page and select capture and edit. The editor will pop out and you can make take advantage of the tools which lets you quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations.

Click Image for Larger Version

Another feature of Fireshot that I find useful is that it can take a screenshot of the entire webpage. This is very useful if you have a limited screen size and need a larger screen shot scale.

The plugin is free to download. The pro version will give you some upgrades but nothing that big if you’re not a heavy user. You will get the pro features for the first 30 days and will automatically switch to simple mode after that, which is still very useful.

Note: FireShot is also available for Internet Explorer users.

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The design is very basic as well as the playable search result. It only displays the song title and the artist. There is no play button. If you want to play a song, just click the search result you want to play and the music will start right away. If you are listening to a song/music, you’ll have to control the volume from your speakers or desktop. You won’t find any album cover or extra information about the songs. I think this is why MixTurtle loads so fast. It actually disabled a lot of flash features in order to give way to what is most important in a search engine which is getting fast and relevant results. It also downloads the music from several sources for faster streaming.

There is no registration needed in order to listen to music from MixTurtle. You only need to do this if you want to create a MixTurtle playlist which is very easy to accomplish. From your search result just click the + sign to add the song to your playlist, save it and you can listen to it again whenever you wish.

I don’t quite know yet how many music files are indexed by MixTurtle. I didn’t get the chance to test fully but it did get results from the songs that I searched. You can try it out for yourself to fully test the service and let us know what you think.

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I don’t really see Fumpr to be of much use for hosting images that are posted on blogs and websites. You will have to remember the URL of your image in case you want to get back to it and use it again for another post. If by any chance that you did not get to save the URL or embed code, you’ll have to upload another one. The lack of registration also takes away management options for your hosted images.

This is very useful for quickly sharing temporary images online. Temporary meaning the ones that you do not really want to keep around like a screen shot of an error message that you are trying to fix. You can get instant embed code and forum codes. Fumpr is very useful in forum conversations to quickly post an image online. If you want to quickly share an image from your harddrive, just go to Fumpr, upload and share. That’s it, no more logging in to your Flickr and uploading a photo or image to share it. This is also a great alternative if you want to share images or screen shots which you do not wish to include in your photo collection in Photobucket or Flickr account.

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By default, Samfind aggregates search results from the three most popular search engines out there. This includes Yahoo, Google and MSN respectively. You normally have to type an extra keyword in order to get a search result for a particular topic or niche. With SamFind, you can customize which of the topics you want to appear in the results of your searches. If you want immediate results for pets and animals simply add it to your list of topics and a buttons from niche search engines will appear in your customized search page. You can also place widgets in your custom search page.

I just noticed a few things when I tested the service. The search results do not appear on the same page for some topics. A popup window will open which will bring you to the service offering the niche search service. Google search results do appear on the SamFind page but still pops out another window. There are also no ads in the service. They said that they are kind of anti-ads and don’t want their users to use a service full of ads.

The search engine looks nice and clean but the fonts and design could use a little more polishing. Their concept of displaying art in their pages instead of advertisements is a fresh idea when it comes to search engines. If you are already accustomed to using iGoogle as your home search page and still want to use Samfind, you can easily insert it in your iGoogle page and still benefit from the customized search results.

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There is a web service called WikiSlice , a web app made by Webaroo which allows you to download a chunk of WikiPedia for you to browse offline. WikiSlice is a WikiPedia search engine which you can use to search a topic you want to download. Once you found what you are looking for, WikiSlice will let you download all the Wiki content related to that topic including subtopics. A list of related Wiki slices is also available for you to browse and download if you choose to do so.

You can browse the content through a desktop application called Webaroo. WikiSlice will detect if you do not have Webaroo installed in your computer. You can immediately download the software when you decided to download a Wikipedia topic.

Since Webaroo has a mobile version, I’m not sure if it will support the sliced Wikipedia content. It would be great if you can read the Wiki Slice in you mobile phones or iPhone. Remember the guy who downloaded all WikiPedia content in his iPhone? He uses the iPhone’s Safari browser to browse WikiPedia locally in his iPhone. It would be great if we can also do this using Webaroo mobile.

Anyway, this is a great tool if you want to read a WikiPedia topic when you are mobile and offline. You can take the content with you while on the road and do not have internet access. It’s also a great way for excluding a topic from all the other content in Wikipedia for research purposes.

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There is a new Company called Slinkset which lets you do the same plus a bit more. In Slinkset, you can place Widgets, Ads, and basically anything you can place in an HTML file on the sidebar. You can also customize the sidebar dimensions to fit your desired size for whatever you’re going to put in it. You can also place a custom domain name. Just create a subdomain from your original domain (news.yourdomain.com), add a CNAME record to your DNS provider and alias it to slinkset.com. The process is similar to aliasing a domain name in blogspot (blogger). This will allow you to brand your social news site and basically monetize it the way you want to, unlike in Mixx which only gives you one Adsense unit with shared revenues.

You can also auto-publish blogposts in your Slinkset account. Just subscribe to RSS feeds in your Slinkset account and each time a post is published, it will automatically be added to your created voting site. This means that you can turn any Slinkset account into a personal Reddit style RSS reader. When it comes to customization, you can only place a logo and edit the color schemes in your Slinkset site. The site is however still new and maybe we can see some improvements when it comes to customizing your page and adding widgets. A Blogger style in adding a CSS themes and drag and drop widgets would be cool.

The service is basically easy to use and no special coding is required. If you want to create your own social voting site under your own domain/subdomain, Slinkset is a great place to start.

Check out the sample I made . You can subscribe and make submissions too if you like.

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This is the continuation of the post for Blog Editor Alternatives. Here is the second part.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is a very cool Firefox Extension that really brings blogging to a whole new level. It enables users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

This is a great Firefox Add-on for bloggers. You can easily make posts to your blog by clicking the SribeFire button on the bottom of your Firefox browser. It will allow easier blogging as you do not have to login to your blog’s dashboard to start writing and posting. You can also edit previous blog entries easily. You can modify time-stamps, add Technorati tags, place trackback URL’s and pings.

You can choose to open ScribeFire in split screen mode, in a new window or a new tab. The application also allows you to easily share pages to social networking sites such as Digg, Furl, Mahalo, reddit, Facebook and a few more.

ScribeFire allows you to:

• Categorize and tag your blog posts
• Upload images
• Set timestamps
• Save works-in-progress as notes
• Post an entry as a draft
• Share your posts on social websites
• Upload files via FTP

You can also make money with ScribeFire by registering to ScribeFire Ads. Although this service is still in private beta, it promises easy “point and click” functionality in placing banner ads to blogs and have access to a dashboard to track your site’s earnings with no minimum payouts. This means that you can cash in every month no matter how much you make with your ads. Neat!

If you are blogger who finds it hard using your current blog post editor or someone who wants to try out something new, ScribFire is a “must try” Firefox Add-on. It’s also great for managing multiple blog accounts especially multiple Blogspot (blogger) accounts.

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WriteToMyBlog

WriteToMyBlog is a free web based Blog client. It has an advanced word processor that allows you to Post Entries to your Blog remotely. The service is completely free with no membership required. It allows you to post entries to multiple blogs, view and edit recent Posts and it works with all major Blog platforms.

Some Features of WriteToMyBlog Include:

• Web based (online) Blog Client.
• Advanced word processor.
• No membership required. Completely free, no strings attached.
• Works with all major Blog programs and protocols.
• Can insert tables into your Posts.
• Can style and control text within your Posts.
• Can insert and wrap images into your Posts.
• Can insert layers and CSS within your Posts.
• Multi language Ajax spell checker.
• Include tags (Technorati) with your Posts.
• Can setup and Post to multiple Blog accounts.
• Can view, preview, edit (right from within WriteToMyBlog) and delete Posts.
• WriteToMyBlog does not view or store any of your posts or Blog account details; it simple acts as an interface gateway between you and your Blog program.

For Blogspot (Blogger) users: You can easily grant access to WriteToMyBlog in your Blogspot account to allow it to make posts for you. If you are using the classic Blogger version, you will have to enter your blogger username and password in order to use the service. Typepad and Wordpress.com users also needs to perform these tasks.

Hosted Wordpress users: You need to provide WriteToMyBlog with your username and password and a link to your account access URL. (e.g http://YOURBLOG/PATH/TO/xmlrpc.php). You can also use this procedure for Movable Type, DotClear, MetaWeblog API and Atom API.

I would suggest though that you do not give out your administrative password for hosted Wordpress and other blog platforms. Instead create another user with a limited access to your blog. Placing the administrative password will put your blog at risk. I am not questioning WritToMyBlog’s security but it is better to be safe than hacked.

(To be continued…)

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