Archive for 'blogging'

Online Website Planner

create a website online

Jumpstart is a sophisticated free online website planner. Among other things, it allows you to export your online website outline to a Wordpress blog.

From the site:
Use Jumpchart to quickly plan out the navigation of your site by adding pages, and sub-pages. If you change your mind, easily drag pages to new spots within the site hierarchy. There is no better way to organize the content for your website.
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WYSIWYG Blog Editors

Most blogs have decent posting interfaces but if you want to write blog posts offline or in something more like a wordprocessor there are quite a few excellent free options.

Blogdesk

free wysiwyg blog software

A freeware offline blog editor with lots of features and support for many blog platforms. Images can be directly inserted and are automatically uploaded. With the ImageWizard you can not only insert images to your posts - it’s possible to edit them as well (crop, resize, rotate, shadow etc)

Links can be easily inserted and edited. If you link to local files (such as MP3 or PDF), BlogDesk will automatically upload them. You can even publish simultaneously to multiple blogs with one click.
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Post2Blog

offline blog editor

Similar to Blogdesk but has a few unique features. This blog editor allows you to use a flickr account to store your photos. It also offers live spell checking as well as the ability to post directly from MS Word.

Windows Live Writer

write blog posts offline

Last but not least is my personal favourite, Live Writer, the free offline blog post editor from Microsoft. Perhaps the slickest of the three, it has quite a few nice features and supports plugins, of which there are many. My favourite is the Snagit screen capture plugin which makes it a breeze to add a screen capture which will then be automatically uploaded to the blog when you publish the post.

A new feature in the latest version is the ability to insert a video from your computer and have it automatically published to YouTube when you publish the post.
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Easily Add Free Photos to your Blog Posts

add free photos to your blog post with this plugin

The PhotoDropper plugin lest’s you easily and quickly add free photos to your WordPress Blog posts with 1-click! Once you enter a keyword for a photo “Photo Dropper Browse Photos” menu it will show you all the available photos matching that keyword, then all you have to do is select the size you want and the image will appear in your post along with links to the original site and license.

There is an option to use only commercially available photos if your site is a business.

The amount of Creative Commons images uploaded to Flickr daily is astonishing so this tool will become more valuable by the hour.

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Get More Traffic to Your Blog

get traffioc to your website Starting a website is just the first step and probably the easiest. Now you need visitors, this is the hard part.

Here’s a very good article covering some of the best ways to get traffic to your site. There are no quick ways to get and keep visitors but by following as many of the tips in this article you will be off to a good start.

A chance popular posting to a social networking site could bring hundreds of visitors in a few days, but to build up a good stream of regulars can easily take a year or more so be sure to love what you blog about.
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WordPress Tricks

wordpress tricks

Want to show thumbnails of each post? Show category images? Make your blog mobile friendly? Automatically post Del.icio.us daily link to Wordpress? Then this article is for you. 40 WordPress tricks and hacks.
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Manage Blog Ads with ScribeFire

manage blog ads

ScribeFire Quick Ads allows you to manage and publish ads to your site easily. The ads (banner images and/or text ads) are served up from many of the largest networks out there, Google Adsense, Kontera, Advertising.com, etc. Payouts are monthly once a minimum of just $5 has been reached.

From the site:

  • Point and click ads directly into your blog without adding a single line of code to your site
  • The first service to enable publishers to serve both optimized banners and in-text ads on their sites via a single platform
  • QuickAds greatly simplifies ad inventory management with a powerful optimization decision engine, which matches each impression with the highest revenue producing ad
  • Ads are selected from our ad inventory pool, which is fueled by our experienced sales team and relationships with over 100 ad networks
  • QuickAd’s advanced in-text advertising solution guarantees site publishers the highest degree of relevancy between content, keywords, and ads

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50 Great WordPress Themes

free wordpress blog template[11]
50 fantastic and free WordPress themes over at SixRevisions.com
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