Blogsite News | MyST Blogsite®

Cenzic Launches New Blogsite Almost Instantly

Fri, 09 May 2008 19:51:00 -0400

Just a few days ago Cenzic had only a website and a business blog vision - now they have a corporate blogsite.

Cenzic, the innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions launched their MyST Blogsite yesterday (blog.cenzic.com).

Aside from a very polished and clean design, this site has already begun to set the tone for high quality content.

Erin Swanson, Senior Director for Product and Strategic Marketing (and Blogsite expert), has created corporate blogsites before at two previous employers (Solid Core and Enviance); and it shows - she really has a clear understanding of marketing advertorials and how to create compelling content.

In just a few days effort, MyST was able to transform her vision into a thriving business advertorial presence that covers web vulnerability, security news, and web application security insights. If these subjects interest you, be sure to subscribe to their news feed.

MyST Blogsite Optimizes Microsoft Word Content for Online Publication

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:32:13 -0400

Using Microsoft Word to author blogsite content has many advantages. Our newest enhancement automatically adjusts styles and markup for compatibility with your blogsite's format.

Microsoft Word is an extremely popular—and extremely capable—word processor. For many people, Word is their preferred content authoring tool. Thus, it is common practice for bloggers to compose new blog posts in Word and then simply paste the content into their blogsite. Composing content in Word offers many advantages, e.g., powerful spelling and grammar checking tools, built-in thesaurus, automatic backups while writing, off-line authoring, and so on. However, Word also has a dark side.

When you paste content into an HTML editor (such as the MyST Blogsite editor), Word includes a great deal of unwanted content formatting.

The problem is Word follows the philosophy that pasted content should look exactly like it did in the Word document. While this philosophy is great when you are pasting content between various office documents, it is inappropriate for a blogsite. In a blogsite, we want pasted content to look exactly like it was authored in (and for) the blogsite. A MyST Blogsite is carefully branded and includes specific typefaces, colors, spacing, and so on.

So, when pasting content from Word, it is important to optimize the pasted content, removing the unwanted Word-supplied formatting codes, leaving the blogsite free to present the content according to the blogsite's design. Doing so ensures the pasted content looks right at home in the blogsite. In addition, should the blogsite ever be re-skinned using different styles, the pasted content will automatically adapt to the new styling. But manually removing Word styling is tedious and time-consuming. That's why the MyST Blogsite editor includes a tool that optimizes pasted content.

Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word

The MyST Blogsite editor includes a new Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word toolbar. This toolbar lets you specify your preferences about when MyST Blogsite should automatically optimize Word content. First, the "Optimize Now" button lets you request immediate content optimization. This button works in either rich text editing or raw HTML editing modes.

Two checkbox options let you request automatic content optimization upon pasting new content and/or upon saving an item. In most cases, its good to leave both of these checked.

QA Assurance Reporting

MyST Blogsite automatically analyzes all public content weekly and produces a Public Content Quality report that identifies specific content quality issues in the publicly visible portions of your blogsite. This report now identifies occurrences of content containing unwanted Microsoft Word formatting that should be optimized for the blogsite. Such items are indicated by the following QA notice:

content contains non-optimized Microsoft Word formatting

Using the content optimizer toolbar makes addressing such QA issues very easy. Simply click the icon to edit the offending content, ensure that the "Auto optimize on Save" check box is checked (you're preferences will be remembered), then click Save. Optionally, you may click the "Optimize Now" button before clicking Save to review the optimized content before actually saving the change.

Smart Link Verification Tool Simplifies Posting; Improves Content Quality

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 13:12:44 -0500

New MyST Blogsite "Smart Link" automatically verifies link properties and suggests meaningful link title and synopsis text to enhance content quality and improve SEO effectiveness.

Everyone agrees that relevant, high-quality links improve the overall value of a blog post. But for a busy business person, it is easy to overlook nitty-gritty "blogging" details such as choosing the most effective title or synopsis text for a link property. In fact, while trying to be diligent about such things in my own blogging, it finally dawned on me that most of the time, the MyST Blogsite editor could automate those details for me. Not only would it save me time, it would often do a better job at it than I would do.

So, once again, necessity (or laziness) has become the mother of invention.

The MyST Blogsite editor now includes a "Smart Link Verify" tool that verifies a link URL and suggests meaningful title and synopsis text for that link. To make the workflow even easier, simply hitting ENTER after entering a link URL automatically invokes the Smart Link tool for that link. The short video here shows the tool in action adding the link properties to this post.

Since its earliest incarnation, MyST Blogsite has supported distinct link properties that allow authors to create an annotated bibliography of links related to each post. These properties are leveraged in a variety of ways by the MyST Blogsite platform, and offer many distinct and unique advantages over personal blogging tools that support only embedded hyperlinks. Now, with the new Smart Link feature, it has become even easier to take full advantage of link properties.