You know I use Qumana. You know I like Qumana. You know the folks at Qumana have been good to me. I tell them all kinds of things about how I use Qumana, and they listen to what I have to say. They don't take all my blabbering to heart. But I tell them what I think could be better, and when I have a point, they say, Oh Okay, and then it happens.
And it's not just me. They're relentless in following conversations from other Q users on how they write and publish online. I love the changes in 3.0 -- like how now we can play with fonts and font sizes, how BubbleShare works with Qumana, and have I said that Q has the best as-you-type spell checker in the biz?
By now everyone(?) knows that Qumana can post to all of your blogs, across various blogging platforms -- like Blogger and Wordpress and TypePad -- from a single, Qumana window. No more jumping from platform to platform to blog THEIR way--you do it YOUR way in Qumana -- Q does the work of posting it to the right blog in the proper blogging tool.
Like anything I use a lot, I find other things to do with the tool beyond the straight 'user experience' -- and yeah, i punk Qumana from time to time.
Fantastic HTML Editor for Gated Social Spaces - MySpace, BlogHer (drupal), and More
You may or may not know this, but if you send email or bulletins in MySpace, or if you blog there, you have to enter your writing using HTML. Ever notice those MySpace profiles that are ONE BIG PARAGRAPH and look like Hemingway puked vodka on the screen? Yep--those are the folks that don't know a paragraph tag could save us all a lot of trouble. Same folks that haven't learned the 'a href' secret of making a hypertext link. And I'm with them. WHY in 2006 should we have to enter our words into someone eles's service using HTML? Hey, give us a break. Typing in straight HTML is a drag. It zaps the flow.
I enter copy on my MySpace page using Qumana's "Source View." Let's say I'm writing an email in MySpace. I write my stuff in the WYSIWYG window of Qumana, format it there, and when I get it how I want, I click the source view tab and copy and paste it into the MySpace email. The formatting is perfect every time. I do the same thing with my BlogHer posts. For whatever reason, we have to enter HTML manually in our posts--I use Qumana to do it, same way I do for MySpace. Now, Qumana is compatible with Drupal, but something about the team blogging aspect of BlogHer has me confused on getting it post automatically to my BlogHer blog. It's nearly as easy to write and format in Qumana and copy the Source View into drupal anyway.
Tagging's SO EASY
I never tagged before I started using Qumana. I still don't quite understand it beyond technorati, never took time to learn about delicious--don't even know where the dots go in delicious--BUT when I first started using Qumana I noticed this TAG button. I pushed it. It said, enter tags separated by commas, so I started doing what they said. Bam --sticks tags RIGHT IN THERE, and you can enter multi-word tags, which I couldn't figure out how to do before. Something about a plus sign.
Then I got thinking, why should MySpace blogging lock users into a specific set of 15 or so tags? (That's what "categories" are in MySpace: they're tags on technorati.) SO maybe you want to tag something with "Dog Collar" over in MySpace, and you can't do that with the pre-fab tags/categories they give you -- tags like "romance and relationships" aaaah! To get around the pre-fab tags, all you do is open Qumana, click TAGS, enter your tags, click the Source View tab, and copy and paste the HTML for your tags into your MySpace blog.
NOW you have the best of both worlds--the gated community tags of MySpace AND your freeform personal tags from Qumana. Niceeee.
Ads with Posts Wherever You Go
Ads in MySpace? You can't do that! Yah well, it's my blog, and I don't know all the ins and outs, but I can put keyword ads in MySpace using Qumana in about 1.5 seconds. Just type your post in Qumana, insert a Q-Ad by clicking the Insert Ad button, the insert your tags, and finally copy the text in Qumana's Source View into your MySpace blog. Bingo--Your post is formatted, tagged, and even has an ad, all using one copy-and-paste from Qumana. NICE options to have.
So that's some of what I wanted to tell folks who have asked, what do you do with Qumana? I do some of what I'm supposed to do, and some of what I'm not. ;-)
Tags: qumana, blogging, web2.0, tech, MySpace, BlogHer, Tags, Folksonomies, Techorati, Dog Collar = Powered by Qumana
