Musings and things that amuse us

Analyzing Your Blog

1. AWStats

AWStats is a free, powerful, and open source tool that generates advanced web streaming, ftp or mail server statistics graphically.

The log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

2. Stat Counter

If your site has less than 250K pageloads/month, Stat Counter offers a free, real-time, invisible (no ads on your blog) web tracker.

Results can be viewed in graph or list mode and include summaries of: popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, where visitors came from, keyword analysis, recent keyword activity, search engine traffic, visitor paths, visitor length, returning visits, pageload activity, visitor map (including country, state, city, ISP), browser and system stats.

3. URL Metrix

Powered by Google App engine, this tool shows you your blog information at a glance. Information offered includes: Google toolbar pagerank, Alexa rank, Compete rank, Quantcast rank, Technorati rank, number of pages indexed in Google and Yahoo, Delicious bookmarks, Wikipedia mentions, and DMOZ links. Great for a quick overview.

4. Keyword Suggestion Tool

A free tool developed by Aaron Wall that taps into Wordtrackers database.

5. Infected or not

Panda’s Infected or Not is a free service that lets you quickly see whether there’s malware on your machine; it also tracks PC infections around the world.

6. How much is your blog worth

A calculator using the Technorati API. Just enter your blog URL to see how much it’s “worth” using the Weblogs/AOL math.

Legal Resources for Bloggers

7. Legal Guide

Compiled by the Citizen Media Law Project, partner of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, this guide focuses on the wide range of legal issues online publishers are likely to face, including topics such as defamation, privacy torts, intellectual property; access to government information, newsgathering, and general legal issues involved in setting up a business.

You can search by keyword, by state (US only), or section.

8. Legal Guide for Bloggers

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s goal is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger, to let you know you have rights, and to encourage you to blog freely with the knowledge that your legitimate speech is protected.

9. BitLaw

BitLaw is a comprehensive Internet resource on technology law, containing over 1,800 pages on patent, copyright, trademark, and Internet legal issues.

10. Copyscape

Copyscape is a free service that searches for copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in your URL, and Copyscape does the rest.  It looks for sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you.

11. United States Copyright Office

The USCO can help you understand the basics of copyright, search copyright records, download reports, or file a copyright registration for your work through the Copyright Office online system.

12. Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides free tools so you can easily mark your creative work with the freedoms you want it to carry.

CC defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright – all rights reserved (total control, and the public domain no rights reserved (no control). Their licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work – a “some rights reserved” copyright.

13. Bloggers’ Code of Ethics

Cyber Journalist has created a model Bloggers’ Code of Ethics, by modifying the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics for the Weblog world. These are just guidelines – in the end it is up to individual bloggers to choose their own best practices.

Online Research Tools for Bloggers

14. Fact Check Org

Use FactCheck.org if you want to confirm what politicians are saying in speeches, ads, interviews, brochures, etc.

15. The SEDAR database

SEDAR provides databases of public company documents and investment fund documents, including profiles, links and new filings.

16. SEC Filings

Securities information from the SEC EDGAR database; you can search by name, industry, business, SIC code, area code. Offers free alerts.

17. Gallup

Gallup has a great collection of survey information on various topics including Election 2008, business and economy, consumers, housing and even news on rising gas costs.

18. Sensible Units

The purpose of SensibleUnits.com is to make units of measurement understandable. It takes a quantity with a scientific unit and turns it into several quantities with sensible units–like elephants, buses and Great Walls of China.

19. Latest Web Apps

Emily Chang maintains a list of newly released Web 2.0 app and offers short synopses of each.

Useful Organisations for Bloggers

20. Cyber Journalist

Cyber journalist offers tips, news and commentary about online journalism, citizen’s media, digital storytelling, converged news operations and using the Internet as a reporting tool.

21. American Press Institute

Founded by newspaper publishers in 1946, the American Press Institute is the oldest and largest center devoted solely to training and professional development for the news industry, conducting more than 30 residential seminars a year for journalists, sales, marketing and management professionals in print, broadcast, cable and digital media companies.

22. Media Bloggers Association

The Media Bloggers Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of “blogging” or “citizen journalism” as a distinct form of media. An associate membership is $25/year.

23. Stop Badware

StopBadware.org is the leading independent authority on trends in badware and its distribution. If you’re a blogger, you can learn about common attack techniques and how to detect them on your site.

24. News University

NewsU provides interactive, inexpensive courses that appeal to writers at all levels of experience, and in all types of media.

Using Images On Your Blog

25. Flickr CC Search

Search Flickr for photos to share with these variables: safesearch on, search photos, screenshots, illustration art, only within Creative Commons license.

26. StockXpert

With over 1.9 million images, StockXpert offers royalty free images from $1.

27. iStockphoto

With over 3 million images, iStockphoto offers royalty free images from $1.

28. Favicon Creator

Favicons (favorite icons) are the small images that are associated with a website. They are displayed on the address bar, on browser tabs, and in the bookmark list.

Favicon CC has thousands of user created favicons for you to use, or create your own. The service is free.

29. Dumpr

Dumpr is a Web based photo editor that quickly adds effects to photos. Determine the effect you want, upload your image and voila. You can download your image to Dumpr from your computer, or grab them from Flickr or any photo URL. The real timesaver Dumpr provides is the quick link panel beside each picture it renders, which lets you quickly inject your edited photos into Facebook, Blogger, Wordpress, and more.

30. Emoticons

List of emoticons and what they mean.

Blogs about blogging

31. Blogging Basics 101

Blogging Basics 101 is a must read for every beginning blogger.

32. SEO 2.0

If you want to turn up in search results, read SEO 2.0 and understand how to optimize your blog the right way.

33. Dosh Dosh

Read Dosh Dosh if you’re interested in marketing your site on the Web especially through social media channels.

34. Social Media Explorer

Musings on all things social media and Internet marketing.

35. John Chow

If you’re interested in making money with your blog, this is the site for you.

36. Find more blogs about blogging at Alltop

Grammar Cheat Sheets For Bloggers

37. When to use capital Letters

38. A or an?

39. How to write numbers

40. Difference between active and passive voice

41. Using the apostrophe

Miscellaneous Tools For Bloggers

42. Poll Daddy

Poll Daddy is a free service that allows you to create polls and embed them on your blog. With custom templates you can create a poll in minutes, and use Poll Daddy’s reporting engine to aggregate, print and export your results.

43. Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey offers more features and functionality than Poll Daddy if you need more indepth Q&A. Select from over a dozen types of questions (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, and more…), and control the flow with custom skip logic. You can even randomize answer choices to eliminate bias.

44. GEOLOC

GEOLOC is the only geolocation counter that shows you the locations of all visitors to your site. By embedding this widget on your blog, you can see where people come from with green and red dots. Green dots show where people are from if they are currently on your site, red dots show where people came from that have left your site.

If you’re a new blogger, you need to understand the basics of HTML; whether you want to leave a comment on another blog, or you want to include a text widget on your own blog, knowing some basic HTML helps.

To help you do this, we’ve created a basic bloggers HTML cheat sheet for you to download, print up, and refer to.  If you are unfamiliar with HTML, read this post first for a brief overview, or scroll down to the end if you want some online resources to learn more about HTML.

Note: This is by no means a complete guide to HTML, but we’re fairly confident it will give you a good start. If you have any questions, or suggestions, we’d love to hear them.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language; simply put, it’s a language used to create Web pages.   It contains embedded commands called tags that are interpreted by a Web browser; these tags allow you to format your text so it appears as bold, italicized, links, headings, lists etc.

Basic HTML Jargon

Command: A command is what you want the browser to do.  For instance, make something bold, or create a list, or link to another site – you are commanding the browser to do something.

Tags: Tags are where you place your command and are represented by the less than and greater than symbols: < >.

Generally, each command will have two tags; the opening tag [always <>], and the end tag [always </>.   In the space between them is where you put the text you want to manipulate.   Occasionally, you will need to use a single tag; this happens with image and line break commands, but they are more the exception than the rule.

Opening tag: The beginning or opening tag is always represented as

Less than symbol, command, greater than symbol e.g.: <command>

End tags are always represented as:

Less than symbol, forwardslash, command, greater than symbol e.g.: </command>

Note: Most commands require the end tag.  Of all the commands listed in the cheat sheet, only the line break command <br /> requires no end tag.

Attribute: Certain commands can be modified further by using specific ‘attributes.’  For instance, when using the font command (telling the browser which font you want to use), you can further modify it by adding a ‘color’ attribute, which will change the color of the text, or the ’size’ attribute, which will change the size of the font.   A space must always precede the attribute.

Tip: Commands are not case sensitive. However, convention calls for lower case.

Note: Stylesheets (CSS) may override some attributes. As we are not talking about CSS coding here, this should not apply to you.

A few things to keep in mind:

Tags Used for Headings are Important for SEO

Headings range from H1 (the largest), to H6 (the smallest).  This is important to know for SEO purposes. If you think something deserves to be a H1 because it is important, Google too sees it as important, and gives it more weight than it would give a H2 or H3.  It is important to remember with H1 tags, that you should only use one per page.

If you want a thorough understanding of heading tags, take a look at Stoney deGeyter’s post: How to use Hx Tags over on the Search Engine Guide blog

Bold vs. Strong Tags, and Italic vs. Emphasized Tags

There is some confusion about which command is best to use when creating italic text and bold text; let’s just clear that up quickly.

Originally, the bold tag was represented as <b>.  A new command has now come along, known as the strong tag <strong>.  While they do much the same thing, the sturdier of the two is <b>, as <strong> does not necessarily work in all browsers yet. To play it safe, use the original <b> for bold.

The same applies to the italic tag.  Originally represented as <i>, the newer command is <em>.  Again, the sturdier is <i> and should be used to ensure your italicized text appears correctly across all browsers.

Useful HTML Online Resources:

Online HTML Tutorial:

W3 Schools offers free tutorials and references relating to web development, from basic to advanced.
Their references cover all Web-building technologies, including W3C standards like HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML as well as other technologies like JavaScript, PHP, ASP, SQL.

Additionally, with their online HTML editor you can edit the examples and experiment with the code as you learn it.

W3Schools HTML Primer
W3Schools HTML Tutorial

Other online HTML Resources:

HTML Basics 101: from The University of South Dakota

WebMonkey: Free public resource for Web workers

Color Lovers : Thousands of colors and their HEX values; searchable.

Cheat Sheets:

Bloggers HTML Cheat Sheet (PDF)

More advanced HTML Cheat Sheet from Added Bytes

One of the nice things about FeedBurner is that it allows people to receive your feed updates via e-mail.

FeedBurner lets you see the e-mail addresses of your subscribers, and even allows you to download them to your computer, so you can count them, graph them, as is your want. However, it’s not as easy as it should be.

This post is a step by step guide to exporting the e-mail addresses of your subscribers to Microsoft Excel – just remember, don’t abuse the privilege of having access to people’s e-mail addresses.  If you spam them, they may unsubscribe.

How to Export E-Mail Addresses From FeedBurner

Step 1: Select your feed

Select the feed which you want to view the e-mail subscription for.

We will use our “My Feed” feed – the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Step 2: See More About Your Subscribers

Select “See more about your subscribers”.

Step 3: FeedBurner Email Subscriptions

Within the “Email Subscriptions Services” section select “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”.

Step 4: Manage Your Email Subscriber List

Select “Manage Your Email Subscribers List”

Step 5: Export to Excel

Select “Excel” as the export type.  If you don’t have an application which can read Excel XLS files, then you can download the subscriber list as a text file in CSV ( Comma Separated Values) format.

Step 6: Save As

Save the file to your computer now rather than later from within the application used to view the file.

Yep, we use Firefox, as do most of the people who read our blog.

Step 7: Browse

Browse to the folder you wish to save the file to.

Step 8: Download Complete

Wait for the file to be downloaded – should be quick.  If your file is considerably large then congratulations, you must have lots of subscribers.

Step 9: Opening Downloaded File

Open the file downloaded.  Either double click the entry, hit Enter, or right click and select Open.

Step 10: Viewing Subscriber List in Excel

The data can now be viewed and manipulated within Excel.

Step 11: Sorting Subscriber List in Excel

if you want to sort the data, so that all the Active e-mail subscribers are at the top for example, then make sure you are within any of the data cells, select Data – Sort and then select “Status” as the first column to sort by.

Don’t Spam

Remember, don’t abuse the privilege of having access to your subscriber’s e-mail addresses.

If you want to know what people are saying about you on the Web, consider using these free online tools.

Blogdigger allows you to search, as well as subscribe to RSS feeds, on specific keywords

Boardtracker will track threads in forums and sends alerts on specific keywords

Google Alerts will send you e-mails on the keywords you select

Ice Rocket helps you find mentions of you on the Web that Google misses

Linqia lets you search thousands of online communities via keyword

Serph shows you what is being said about you across social media sites – in real time

Summize searches Twitter for specific keywords in real time

Technorati lets you search on keywords, or subscribe to specific tags via RSS

Twing lets you search for forums by posts, threads and topics

If I’ve missed any you think are great, please let me know.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written ten years ago by four great Webcelebs; Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. It’s targeted at businesses that want to understand their customers better, and turns your understanding of marketing and communications on its head.

From Chapter 1: Internet Apocalypso

The question is whether, as a company, you can afford to have more than an advertising-jingle persona. Can you put yourself out there: say what you think in your own voice, present who you really are, show what you really care about? Do you have any genuine passion to share? Can you deal with such honesty? Such exposure? Human beings are often magnificent in this regard, while companies, frankly, tend to suck. For most large corporations, even considering these questions – and they’re being forced to do so by both Internet and intranet – is about as exciting as the offer of an experimental brain transplant.

Blogged Directory

Launched in February 2008, Blogged is a clean, fresh looking, human edited blog directory.

Once you submit your blog (free), the editors check it out, and if it passes muster, they include it. When I submitted BlogWell, it was reviewed within 24 hours.

From their about page:

Our blogs are reviewed, rated, and categorized by our editors, so you won’t have to experience the frustration of filtering through blogs that are either spam, outdated, or irrelevant.

52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break

Jennifer has put together a brilliant list that describes how to optimize your blog, and each tip takes no longer than 15 minutes (your coffee break) to implement.

Do yourself a favor and bookmark this post.

Add your blog to your email signature
Yes, many of us are lazy and don’t add a signature to our emails, whether it is because we send out emails that are totally not related to the blog, or just one of those things that has been on the to do list forever. Add a blog and a short tag line to intrigue people to visit. You never know, your daughter’s softball coach might actually be a fan of whatever you blog about and your signature just got you a new reader.