I just installed the Add-to-Any plug-in for WordPress. If you want to be notified any time there’s a new post here, notice the Subscribe button on the right side of the page. Use it to subscribe by e-mail or RSS, using any service you can think of except carrier pigeon (that comes in a future version if I can stop my cat from chasing the pigeons). E-mail subscriptions are piped through FeedBlitz, and no, I will not spam you or provide your address to anyone who will.

Three months ago, Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing Windows Live Spaces, their free blogging and social networking service. Live Spaces simply didn’t have the functionality of its competitors, and Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to create yet another blogging platform.

Microsoft reports that since the end of November, they have helped Live Spaces users convert over half a million blogs to WordPress.com, the free service provided by Automattic, the company started by Matt Mullenweg, the original developer of the WordPress blogging and CMS software (which this blog uses).

Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a great photo-sharing service, with both a free version and an inexpensive paid version. To embed a slideshow of your photos in WordPress, simply paste the link of the slideshow itself into one of your posts. Here’s a sample:

WordPress (the most popular software used for blogs, including this one) is so “helpful”, it removes blank lines in your pages and posts — including ones you insert on purpose. If you insert a line break or a paragraph with nothing (or a non-breaking space) in it to force a blank line, WordPress will remove it the next time you edit the page or post.

To force a blank line, insert this bit o’ code in HTML view wherever you want a blank line:

<p><code><br/></code></p>

It’s like this: my last blog of software tips & shortcuts expired of not-so-benign neglect, and it was long past time to start blogging again. I recently finished some publishing projects and have others in the works, and need to support these projects with an interactive, online presence. So here we go.