Today in this post, Hitesh Sahni from ProChow shares some very useful tools and services for bloggers.
Already there are overwhelming number of posts and articles on tools and resources which facilitate the work of a blogger and improve the blogging efficiency. So why another post again on the same thing. The previous statement itself has the reason for it. You can browse your way into the blogosphere until you find the real gems of blogging or you can read this post.
I would have easily created a list of 50+ or 100+ tools that I use on a regular basis but that would have given no value. This is because such lists are already available in abundance. Here is a list of particular blogmaster tools which are very little known but are heavily useful. These are the tools that make you feel - "I wish I knew about it earlier enough".Enjoy.
NotePad++
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
One of the key ways to get 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
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
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.
So that's it. There may be probably more tools. But they demand one's own discretion about whether they can be called as little known and heavily useful. Feel free to suggest your favorite tools.
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