Which free tools do you use daily for your blog?

petercasier · 2008-12-14T18:45:42+01:00

Which free tools do you use daily for your blog? Blog tips forum. Find answers to your questions in the expat forum. Blogs, pictures, forum for expatriates on expat.com

petercasier

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petercasier

14 December 2008 18:45:42

petercasier

14 December 2008 18:45:42

Rome, Italy

The regular bloggers use a variety of tools to either blog, or manage their blog.

What are those? Which ones do you use the most, which ones can you recommend?

I use:

- Picasa picture editing tool (mostly to resize and compress pictures before publishing them)
- Flickr (as my main picture repository)
- Google Analytics (as my main stats monitoring tool)
- Woopra (as an addition to Google Analytics to monitor real time what's going on, on my blog)
- CSS Menu Generator (as the tool generating CSS code for my menu bar)
- Feedburner (for my RSS feed publishing)
- several tools to monitor my backlinks and pageranking
- Newsgator and Yahoo Pipes (to manipulate and aggregate RSS feeds)
- Google Gadgets and WidgetBox (for free widgets)
- Google and Yahoo webmaster tools (to check errors in links, robot monitoring...)
- CoolText and BrilliantMaker (for buttons, icons and badges)

More explained in this post.

Peter

NicoleB

Serial expat

Member since 23 November 2008

Sharm el Sheikh

NicoleB PhotographyGifts & Cards - Freelance for hirewww.nicoleb.org

NicoleB

14 December 2008 18:58:56

626

NicoleB

14 December 2008 18:58:56

626

Sharm el Sheikh

I use Picasa as well, but mainly as a quick tool to find any pictures in my bulk
(I'm looking since 2 years now to find the resize tool in Picasa. Where the heck is it??? )

I store the pics on my own hosting server (I got tired of flickr and other sites. whenever I move my pics get lost & my blog is my travel diary )

I offer feedburner as well, but also the usual atom, whatever comes with blog software thingy

I guess I will check out all the nifty things you mentioned
I guess I will learn something

Cheers, Nicole

petercasier

Active member

Member since 28 January 2007

Rome, Italy

The Road to the Horizon
The Signs Along The Road
AidNews

petercasier

14 December 2008 19:10:11

petercasier

14 December 2008 19:10:11

Rome, Italy

I'm looking since 2 years now to find the resize tool in Picasa

There are two steps in resizing I use in Picasa (version 3):
- the cropping function
- the export function (where it lets you define the quality you want and the largest pixel size (either height or width depending what is the highest of the two).

If you have any more problems, let me know...

P.

NicoleB

Serial expat

Member since 23 November 2008

Sharm el Sheikh

NicoleB PhotographyGifts & Cards - Freelance for hirewww.nicoleb.org

NicoleB

14 December 2008 19:20:53

626

NicoleB

14 December 2008 19:20:53

626

Sharm el Sheikh

I guess it would be export then.
I usually have to crop, but with my new Baby the pics are still way too big for my blog
Normally I have an editing prog open anyway, but sometimes I just wish for a quicky.
Thanks !

petercasier

Active member

Member since 28 January 2007

Rome, Italy

The Road to the Horizon
The Signs Along The Road
AidNews

petercasier

14 December 2008 19:28:18

petercasier

14 December 2008 19:28:18

Rome, Italy

I guess it would be export then.
I usually have to crop, but with my new Baby the pics are still way too big for my blog

Nicole,

Yes, cropping is ok, if you want to cut the picture, but if you still want to publish the picture as a whole, 'export' is the way to go. With the additional advantage it also allows you to compress the picture (compromising the quality a bit of course!), and to watermark it (put the name of your website on it)

rgds,

Peter