10 Free blogging tools I use daily
There is a mass of interesting tools available for the serious and less serious blogger. Here are 10 free tools I use almost daily for my blog.
1. Picasa
Via my brother Kris, I learned the benefits of Picasa, a free download from Google. Picasa lets you store all pictures on your hard drive in a library and perform basic editing like cropping, tone adjustment and watermarking. But I use it the most to compress pictures in size and quality before posting them on my blog so the download speed is reduced.
Picasa also allows you to synchronize all your pictures with your online library.
2. Flickr
I store all my picture on Flickr a free online service by Yahoo. They have a small tool which lets you right-click on any picture to add it to an upload batch. Pictures are organised in folders and refered to by an URL. Flickr provides basic online editing with Picnik. You can publish pictures for the whole Flickr community allowing comments, grouping,…
3. Google Analytics
There are many free web statistics tools available, but the most well-featured is probably Google Analytics. It provides deep analysis of your blog visitors, top content, referral sites, search keywords, etc.. All data can be displayed in a wide array of graphs and can be exported in a spreadsheet or PDF.
3. Woopra
Ready for a different flavour of web activity monitoring, and a bit more complex? Try Woopra. While still running in Beta, this tool monitors activity on your blog or website in real time. It consists of a small script on your page and a downloaded tool for your PC.
Woopra shows your visitors as they come in (with all usual details such as browser, country, referral site, etc..) and navigate through your site, tracing the visited pages.
More than a curiosity or a ‘big brother’ tool, Woopra comes in handy e.g. to check which of your posts propagate visitors through your site rather than have them bounce off after the first read.
Woopra also offers the standard summarized and graphed page visits, referrals, user characteristics,.. but in real time. Handy comes in the user tagging tool, alerting you when a particular user comes in. Allows you to catch the spammers.
4. A menu bar generator
The drop down menu bar you see atop this blog, is made with the CSS Menu Generator by WonderWebWare. Through an interactive freeware, you customize your menu layout, style and its links, after which it generates the HTML/CSS code, which you can cut and paste into your template.
One tip: While the Menu Generator lets you save your menu for later changes, it does not store the styling of your menu, only the structure. I work around it, by saving the HTML in a text file, and when I do updates, I cut and paste the part of the structure only.
5. Feedburner
Feedburner is probably the most powerful and commonly used feed tool. It allows you to customize your feed, to keep track of your feed users, provides a wide range of tools allowing users to integrate your feed into their favourite reader, and has a ’subscribe to this feed by email’ function.
6. Backlink searches and page ranking
Going into the “Nerds” category 
As for any website, a blog gets a Google pagerank, a point of measure of the “importance” of your blog in the blogosphere and the Internet itself. Google uses pageranking to “prioritize” sites when a user searches for certain keywords. The pageranking algorythm is based, amongst others, on the number of people link to your blog.
I use prchecker to monitor the blog’s pagerank.
To monitor the backlinks, I use mainly three tools:
- Google backlink checker
- Yahoo Site Explorer backlink checker
- Google Blog Search
Some curiosities to measure your “penetration” in the blogosphere:
- Trifecta
- Website Grader
7. Manipulating RSS feeds
I wrote before on the use of Yahoo Pipes and NewsGator, two tools I use to aggregate, customize and reformat RSS feeds.
On The Road, I use them for the comments feed, and the humanitarian news feed in the right column.
On The Other World News, Newsgator is used to generate a script searching all aidnews feeds and display the latest.
Yahoo Pipes you can see in action on my “meta” blogs: AidBlogs, For Those Who Want To Know and AidNews… All together, about 100 different blogs and other websites are re-mixed, summarized and re-published for a reader to get an overview “what’s up”.
8. Gadgets and widgets
Google offers a wealth of gadgets you can use on your blog. From tickers counting down to a certain date, local weather forecasts, related YouTube videos, Quotes of the Day, jokes to games. I use Google Gadgets for the translation widget in the right column.
Another great resource is WidgetBox, featuring thousands of widgets. They also make it easy to make your own.
Keep in mind though, the more widgets you add to your blog, how slower your page will download. So keep the tips I published in this post in mind.
9. Google and Yahoo webmaster tools.
Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer are two essentials for webmasters. Both require you to register (no fees), and facilitate the overview of how crawl robots look at your site, check backlinks and outdated links on your site.
10. Buttons, icons and badges
Buttons, icons and badges are a great way to make a link to a service, a page or a function on your blog with a graphical interface. The two tools I use are Brilliant Maker and CoolText. Free and easy to use.
Follow me
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
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thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.
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