Saturday, April 11, 2009

10 Must Have Tools For Bloggers

Blogging can be a cakewalk and great fun with the availability of amicable and easy to use tools. There are a whole lot of tools available to meet the different needsof blogmasters. Still only few seem to satisfy the needs of blogmasters perfectly. Now I am going to suggest you my personal list of favorite blogging tools that will let you blog with ease and efficiency.


NotePad++

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/commun/screenshots/scrsh_multiView.gif
Although most of the publishing platforms today offer friendly user interfaces and simple graphic layouts , but tweaking the HTML or the CSS directly is the only way to have complete control over the look of your blog. Notepad++ is as simple as the traditional Notepad, but it comes packed with many useful features, including syntax and HTML tags highlighting, auto-completion, drag 'n' drop, macros.


Browser Shots

When you load your blog on a different browser, other than the one which you used to design your blog, it is probable that some unpleasant surprises will appear. Browsershots takes screenshots of your site in different browsers and report them back to you. All you need to do is to type the URL of your site, select the browsers you want to test and wait some minutes to see the screenshots. The service includes all the versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera and you can even select different screen resolutions.


ServerMojo

Server monitoring is an essential tool for any blogmaster. Its a simple fact that when your server is down you lose money! Servermojo is a free monitoring service that can check your blog every 15 minutes to ensure it's up and running. It will monitor your servers web, ping, dns, mysql and more. The system will send you free notifications by Email any time your server is not responding.


Copyscape

Blog content plagiarism is widespread these days. This tool makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in the address of your web page, and copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you. You can also place free copyscape banners on your website to warn potential plagiarists against stealing your content.


Google Trends The best way in which you can gain more exposure is to write about whats hot and whats popular. You can view the latest Google search trends with this tool. It is very useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.


Big Boards

Tired of promoting your blogs in thw wild and having no traffic storm?..Hers the solution for you! A very simple yet effective way to promote your blog is through the use of online forums. Big-Boards.com is an excellent resource to find large forums related to topic of your blog. Most of the boards allow the user to create a signature, make sure you use it to place a link to your blog with a small description of what users will find there.Now you are set, just engage in the discussions and contribute with useful information, so that people will want to check out your signature link.


Meta Tag Analyzer

The title tag might be the most important factor on the header of a site, but all the other meta tags (description, keywords and author) should also be considered. Meta Tag Analyzer is a very helpful tool for understanding your meta tags. All you need to do is to type the address of your site and it will report the status of the page, the number of keywords, the relevancy of the title, the quality of the tags and much more.


FileZilla Client

FileZilla Client (also referred to as FileZilla) is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client. It is the most popular free FTP client. Whether you have a blog or a normal website one of the most important applications that you will use is the FTP. The File Transfer Protocol is the most efficient way to get pictures or files to and from the server that is hosting your site. This open source FTP client is fast and reliable and it also has all the advanced features that you will probably ever need.


Ecto


I'm a big user of this tool. It is blogging tool that allows you to post offline. It also has a nifty two click 'blog this' function that lets you highlight text in an article that you want to quote. With just one key stroke you can import the highlighted text, article title and a link to the article into your blog tool from your browser to be posted with just another click. Using ecto you can speed up your posting to over 50 posts per day.


Fireshot
I know that you are already using some firefox addon to take website screenshots. But this is an addon with a difference. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. It's possible to choose whether you want to capture entire web page or take screenshot of only visible part of the web page.

Friday, April 3, 2009

U Comment I follow

U comment I followThis blog is part of the U Comment I follow movement in blogosphere.Means comments on this blog are made do follow and will be spidered.Unfortunately the comments field in wordpress and blogger are made NOFOLLOW by default.This is done as a measure to reduce spam.But this has stopped link love.

Do you wish to join this movement? Goto Blogger Beta Template HTML with widgets expanded and replace
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'>


with

<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'>


And to make other bloggers know that you are part of the movement just add the following widget to your blog or you can manually add the logo you like from Randa Clay Design

Recent Comments Widget by BloggerPlugins

A highly customizable widget. You can set the number of comments to display, author name, date and size of comment. You can also use CSS to gel it with your theme.
You can customize the number of comments to display in the widget, whether or not to display the author name and the comment-date, and the size of the comment(in characters).
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Translation Widget by BloggerPlugins


This one click install widget add multiple language translation support to your blogger blog.



Recent Posts Widget by bloggerplugins

The Recent Posts Widget displays recent posts summaries in your sidebar. You can customize this widget to display the recent posts of any blogger blog that you like, you can customize the number of posts to display, whether or not to display a post summary and the size of this summary(in number of characters). Just Fill Out the Details in the Widget installer below
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Top Commentators Widget for Blogger / Blogspot with Advanced Features

Blogger has always lacked a Top 'Commentators Widget' which would encourage the readers to leave useful comments on your blog.
This widget has some additional features unlike other 'Top Commentor Widgets'.This allows you to filter out the blog author's name from the top commentators list. You can filter out as many names as you want by using the filtering option in the widget installer(the filters should be separated by commas). So if you don't want to list 'Anonymous' in your top commentator list then just use it in the filter field. Another feature of this widget is that users can navigate to the commentator's profile or site by clicking on his name in the list.You can also set the number of Top commentators that you want to display.You can see a demo of the widget here. If you wish to install the Top commentators widget use any of the Widget installation buttons below:

1) Widget Based On Recent 500 Comments.This will judge the top commentators from the latest 500 comments to your blog.

2) Widget Based On Recent 5000 Comments.This will judge the top commentators from the latest 5000 comments to your blog.This widget is only needed if your blog has high density of comment.I mean if you have more than 500 comments on your blog you can use this one..

Note:-Install the second widget only and only if your blog has lots and lots of comments.Else you should opt for the first one..


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