As the title might imply, NovaLet is a blogging service that is very simple, without all of the extra bells and whistles of, for example, WordPress or Movable Type. It is not meant to compete with either of these services, however, NovaLet aims to make blogging a simple and fun experience for the user. From the outside, it looks just like a normal blog, tiny orange RSS icon and all, but when logged in, management is like no other blog service you’ve ever used.

NoveLet is written in .NET, and is hosted on a small, weak, Windows Server. The owner and programmer behind it, Mohamed Abdalla, went to a great deal of trouble to write the code to be small and snappy, as to make NovaLet what can safely be called one of, if not the fastest blogging engines out there.

Once registered, your blog is located at the easy-to-remember location of novalet.com/username. Mohamed has also indicated that in the future, the blog addresses might change to the subdomain format of username.novalet.com instead. Logging in shows the blog as it looks when you are logged out, except for some small management icons scattered around the interface. Adding, editing, and removing links and categories is all instant, thanks to some ajax, and posing is pretty hassle-free as well, supporting HTML or rich text. All post controls are self-explanatory.

There is a management area as well, for posts, comments, and pages, with basic controls like edit, delete, and unpublish (convert to draft).

Oh, and by the way, double-clicking on the text of a post when logged in automatically takes you to that post’s edit screen, without bothering any other content on the page or bothering to load another. Very useful.

A few preferences are available via the small gear icon in the toolbar to the right, including blog information, personal information, and presentation. The latter of which only has one option thus far, the default theme, but this will change as NovaLet’s owner has more time (or user contribution) in the future.

A thoughtful tidbit Mohamed included in the post composition is external media embedding, by pasting the URL of a video from one of the following services: YouTube, Google Video, Odeo, Veoh, MySpace, or Metacafe.

Some of the most impressive features are ones that are not documented anywhere, and had to be pointed out by the owner of the site when I asked about them. Some such features are support for the MetaWeblog API at novalet.com/username/api, and custom domain mapping.

Novalet is impressive, powerful, and fun to use, however, the owner has a lot going on right now, so development has been put on hold for the summer. It is amazing, and has real potential to pick up some steam in the hosted blogging market, but the default theme is just not that attracive, and I can’t imagine thousands of people using a blog that looks like that. Once Mohamed picks up the project again, Novalet definately has potential.

This article was written by Jetpacked guest poster Colin Hill. Colin hill is a web and technology enthusiast who you can catch blogging at loppl.com.

One of the best things you can do to generate repeat visitors to your blog is setting up a newsletter.

Some of your readers will of course prefer RSS; a newsletter works best if it compliments your regular blog, rather than a rehashing of your blog posts in email format. (For that, use Feedblitz)



People who actually subscribe to your newsletter are doubly interested in what you have to say. Treat them right, respect their time, add value to their otherwise busy & chaotic lives — and I guarantee your newsletter will blossom into a goldmine over time.



This is a guest preview post by Shanti Braford, check out the full article here:
Blog Traffic Hack: How to Add an AWeber Newsletter to Your Blog

What happened to social networking is now happening to social news. At first, there was only Digg and a few also-rans. Shoutwire and reddit have seen modest success. But now, just as niche social network sites like LinkedIn, Dogster, etc. have risen in popularity, so to are we seeing a surge in niche social news sites. One of the hottest entrants into the field is news.ycombinator.com, the brainchild of entrepreneur, Lisp hacker, and best-selling author/essayist, Paul Graham. Despite looking a lot like reddit (a YCombinator startup), news.YCombinator.com is actually written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp. But that probably doesn’t mean much to all but a few hardcore programming geeks out there. The real goldmine of News.YC is the community, links and resources featured on the site.

Link: news.ycombinator.com

About the poster: Shanti Braford has sold three web companies, grossing thousands monthly and attracting tens of thousands of visitors daily. He blogs regularly at On Web Apps.