Increase Blog Traffic and Web Presence with BlogUpp!

You are not satisfied with the rate of your blog exposure to blogosphere and WWW? You want to attract more readers? You have space on your blog sidebar for extra widget? Try BlogUpp!

How BlogUpp! Can Help You?

Enter your blog URL in the form on the BlogUpp! Website and get your promotional widget. It is easy like that. No need to register and sign up, no need to pay or fill any mandatory offers. Note that all submitted blogs are analyzed individually and approved manually in a timely manner. There are not accepted adult, gambling, and illegal or inappropriate content websites. As indicator of the approval status is the color of widget bar with BlogUpp! logo. Hence Grey stands for pending, Blue - for approved, and Red - for denied. Is the strict approval procedure good or bad? Depends… If you have an adult or spam site, this solution is not for you. But if your blog has legitimate content, you need to trust your partners, and be sure your page will be exposed to something inappropriate.

So, how that works:

• BlogUpp! snapshots each blog and reads its RSS on a regular basis;
• For every 10 blogs shared in your widget, yours is shared in 9 others;
• The widget shows interactively the blog image and its latest post;
• The blog clicked in the widget opens a new window, not closing yours;
• Approved blogs get also listed in blog directory for more blog promotion;
• And all this is completely free and with no effort whatsoever.

 When you get any freebies you want to understand why that is free, and where is the catch. With BlogUpp! it is clear and transparent, since every 1 of 10 feeds on your widget will be substituted with ads.

What makes BlogUpp! different?

• FREE. No Sign up
• Dynamic blog targeting
• Handpicked quality blogs
• Cheat-proof and fair sharing
• Blogspot, Wordpress and alike friendly
• Welcome bonus for every approved blog
• Best de facto exchange ratio (10:9).

 Developers’ website: http://www.blogupp.com/

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Why You Should Try Wowzio Widgets on Your Blog

With Wowzio you can take any feed, and with that feed you can generate attractive widget for your site or blog. You can even have up to 15 feeds streaming the data on the same one widget. Wowzio looks at the feed and pulls out the blog posts as well as the photos or images with each post.

Any blog that is javascript-enabled, can install Wowzio's widgets by simply pasting the javascript code into template. Note that if your blog is hosted by Wordpress.com, Wowzio widgets will not work, because wordpress.com strips off javascript from the embedded html.

After you input the feed (RSS URL), you can start with a version of the widget which can be customized as per your needs. The theme, color, size and interactions can be configured, using Wowzio's WYSIWYG designer.

Wowzio provides a wide spec of the widget customization options in the following categories:

Live Activity Widget

The Wowzio Live Activity Widget provides you and your users with a "live" feed of the visits to your blog or site. Every time a page that the widget is on loads, the widget detects the user's location and the page they are coming from. This information is fed in real-time to every other widget open at that time, to give your visitors a rare insight into the vitality of your blog or site! You can see the latest activity on your blog and so can everyone else. They can see where people are coming from and what they are reading on your blog.

TagCloud Widget

This is a cloud of all your popular tags, extracted from your blog as well as from Technorati. It helps revitalize the rich content that is deeply embedded in blog posts. When a user clicks on a tag, the widget displays the matching blog posts inside the tagcloud widget frame, thus keeping the user on the same page.  If your blog post does not contain native tags, nor Technorati tags, Wowzio extracts tags using Yahoo's Term Extraction API, one of the APIs provided by Web Services by Yahoo! For each tag, the widget factors in its recency, frequency, and placement, and than assigns it a rating score accordingly. Finally, the tags are ordered by their score, and the top tags are picked first to display in the tagcloud widget.

Photo Gallery Widget

This widget provides an elegant and simple way for users of your blog to discover the awesome content created by you. Every photo provides backlink to the related blog post. This results in increased engagement of users on your blog, causing an increase in page views. This is great if you want to put together Flickr feeds of your favorite photographers. You can select a specific display option for the gallery and with auto sizing it should fit nicely to any blog template. The widget automatically displays the most recent 50 photos from your feed(s).

Panoramic Slideshow Widget

This widgets extends the capabilities of the Photo Gallery to the Slideshow, using the similar guidelines for the pictures, extracted from the RSS feeds. In this widget, the images just are smaller and you have additional previous and next buttons to flip through images.

Feed Content Widget

The content widget is a syndication and content distribution mechanism. You can aggregate feeds from multiple sources (up to 15) into one widget. You can use it for cross-promotion of content, or syndication via 3-rd party channels. This will display the content from your feeds including blurbs about each posts and images.

If you do not have a Widget yet, but you would like to get it, you need to send email to the authors at invite@wowzio.com, with a pointer to your blog. The members of the staff are giving away just 25 invites every 24 hours by email. So, you might need some patience, waiting “in line”.

If you already have a Wowzio widget on your blog, you can make changes to your widget by simply clicking on the "Grab This" link at the bottom of the Wowzio widget. That will take you to the Wowzio Widget Designer. After you make your changes, you will need to re-install the new html snippet/code.

Get more information and order invite at http://www.wowzio.com/.

The best review on the topic 10 Reasons Why You Should Try Wowzio Widgets On Your Blog/Site will give you more insights and considerations, while you are deciding if you need these widgets on your blog. 

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Share Files with your Blog Visitors through Embedded Widget

A simple, easy to use, widget from Box.net will allow you to share the files with your blog readers (or your profile visitors in the social networks, like MySpace) a simple and attractive way.

You just need to follow three easy steps to create your own personalized widget, from where anybody can preview video, audio files, and images, and download them as needed.

Example of the Widget:

Access the widget generation page: http://www.box.net/widget/

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Rotating Post Widget for Blogger Blog

In blogger best intentions is keeping the visitor as long as possible, keeping him busy with all the wonderful content you have. But, in many cases, due to the time-related blog building logics, your visitor is leaving the site, without even knowing how much interesting stuff he failed to read beside.

Many different widgets are trying to fill the gap, and random post widget for Blogger is one of them. If you have a blog with more than 20 posts than this gadget is just the thing you might be interesting in.

 

Main features:

1. Shows one post title at a time.

2. Links to the post.

3. Shows post excerpt also.

4. Every 5 seconds shows a new post.

5. Cycles through all the posts in the blog.

6. Starts a new cycle at the end of the list.

7. Once loaded continues cycling even when not connected to the Internet.

8. Uses official Google AJAX technology.

9. Can be used on other blogging platforms (not tested).

10. Hovering with mouse cursor over the post title halts the rotation till mouse moves off the gadget.

 

Drawback:

Posts are not random, the sequence is quite defined - from the newer to the older posts.

Code:

Get code from the developer’s post http://www.blogdoctor.me/2009/01/random-rotating-post-gadget-with.html. If you need to modify the widget as per your particular needs, review the questions and answers below the post. I removed the author’s name and date, for example, decreased dimensions and fonts in half, and placed it in the side column. You can review the Random Post widget modified in the right sidebar.

 

Note that there are three areas you need to put particular data from your blog to make it work. Change "MYBLOG" to actual blog sub-domain and "BLOG_TITLE" to actual title of your blog. Then paste the modified code in the Html gadget and save the gadget. Get your AJAX API key and put it in above code instead of 'PUT_AJAX_KEY_HERE'.

Installation:

1. Login at Blogger.com.
2. Click Layouts link on Dashboard.
3. Click Add Gadget link in sidebar on Page Elements subtab of Layout tab.
4. In popup window scroll down and click Html/Javascript gadget.
5. In Contents window copy the code below and paste after modifying it.

6. Move the new widget blog to the desirable location on your template.

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How to Fix Blogger Errors while Uploading New Templates

When you start your blogging adventure, you are so many things to learn, so at the first steps of your blogging career you just use basic templates available on the Blogger website. As time goes, you realize the limitations of the basic offerings and disadvantage that your site interface looks like thousand other basic blogs. There are some limited opportunities to tweak the HTML code of your template, but do you really want to mess with it? If you are not sure, just search online for “Blogger Free Templates” and you get many offerings to choose from. New template loading is easy and does not require any coding experience. If… everything goes smoothly. But if not, you are trapped. In this post, I will present the approach to resolve the typical templates loading errors to the Blogger interface.

Sample of these BX error codes are:

• bx-bliced
  
• bX-ev85ll
  
• bX-39cc9q
  
• bX-y6cz0v
  
• bX-982020

There are the following steps recommended for the problem resolution:

1. First of all, try to upload your new template in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your dashboard. Not all templates have been affected by this issue, so it is advisable to check before attempting to edit your template manually. If you do receive a bX-error code when trying to upload your template, you should proceed to step 2.
   
2. If your new template is an XML file (with the .xml intension), browse to where this is located on your computer and right click the file. Choose to open with Notepad (or your favorite basic text editor). If your template is contained within a text file (for you to copy and paste into the template editor), simply open this with your text editor.
   
3. Search for every instance of b:widget id= in your template, for example:
   
4. • b:widget id=’Header1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Blog1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Label1’
     
   • b:widget id=’HTML1’

Replace each of these IDs with the next number up. For example, Header1 should become Header2; Blog1 should become Blog2, HTML3 should become HTML4 and so on.

4. Once you have changed each and every instance of widget id to a different number, you should save the template under a slightly different file name (to be aware of your altered file). If this is an XML file, be sure to save with the XML extension.
   
5. Now you have made these changes, attempt to upload your file again in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your Blogger dashboard. Now you should not receive the error code and will be able to upload your template.

Note. If after following these steps you are still unable to upload your revised template, it is worthwhile to close your browser and delete all temporary internet files and cookies. Then restart your browser and try to upload again. Clearing all of these temporary files from your browser will ensure you receive a fresh page when editing your template. The reason why the bx-XXXX error occurs when you upload a template is because the Blogger developers changed the way template editor accepts certain third party code. They have seen a lot of data corruption due to ’bad templates’.

Now, with these advices, I know exactly what to do, when error pops-up. Before, if that happened, I just switched back, choosing the basic template from Blogger database, ensured that the basic template works, and than tried again to load a new template. In most cases, that worked, but sometimes I needed to repeat the procedure twice. Now I can understand, why the problem could be resolved by these actions.

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A new way to express yourself with Sketchcast

If you are an active blogger, you know that you operate in highly competitive environment. In order to attract, surprise, and keep your readers through your content, interface, and useful features. One of them is ability to add a quick drawing or sketch, related to a topic of discussion. Visualization might save you a lot of explanation and give your readers better and faster understanding of all details. Yes, you can prepare and add your images offline, but that will take a lot of time and efforts. If the illustration is simple, or if you have strong artistic abilities, cool Web2 application Sketchcast will be your valuable assistant.

Here is a brief tutorial of how to use this free service in three simple steps

STEP 1:
Register for a new account at Sketchcast.

STEP 2:
Filling out all the required info, you can start to draw (optionally, with your voice speaking).

STEP 3:
After drawing you can embed the sketch player in your blog.

 

Simple, isn’t it?

Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel on the developers website (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed).

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Adding Speech to your Blog

VozMe.com is a free web based application to convert text into MP3 audio. VozMe converts the text you type or copy to a simple textbox provided on site into an mp3 file, which can be downloaded and used anywhere, including simple integration to your website and blog. VozMe also provides a Google gadget to add to your Google homepage (iGoogle).

VozMe.com provided JavaScript to help bloggers and webmasters to integrate the widget into their blogs and websites. It enables the users to listen to the text in your website. VozMe also provides plugins for Wordpress, Blogger, and some other platforms to help in integration.

At the moment, the following languages are supported: English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan, but the localization list is growing pretty fast. You can also choose male or female voice for your recording.

Application is absolutely free and does not require registration for the services.

Access the Web2 Application: http://vozme.com/index.php?lang=en

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Do you need chat room for your blog?

Most of bloggers do everything possible to bring new readers for the blog and keep their attention on their materials as much as possible. That involves making an interesting, striking, and professionally arranged content. You encourage your visitors to be more active by allowing commenting, arguing, or supporting your point of view. But, can you go further, enhancing even more reader’s participation? Yes, you can.

New web application, Firef.ly, allows all site visitors discuss instantly your content between themselves. A simple code, embedded in your site, allows people who are surfing through it to chat amongst themselves in real time. This will allow you to quickly know what people think of your posts and your blog as a whole, creating a simple and effective chatroom. For site owner, managing the chat client is easy and straightforward. Once you embed the code, a nice bar will appear in the lower right hand portion of your site. With it, you’ll be able to see how many people are on the site at any one time and how many of them are actually chatting.

Definitely, to enjoy the advantages of this interesting and free service, you need to have certain amount of visitors to your blog at place, otherwise, you might be the only one, who will be interesting in content discussion.

In case you were wondering on the unusual domain, .LY is the top level domain extension for Lybia.

To see the new service in action, check the video, showing users communication on TWIT TV site as an example:

Chat Room on your Blog

Additional Reading:

http://www.killerstartups.com/Blogging-Widgets/firef-ly-chat-with-others-online
http://thenextweb.org/2008/08/01/firefly-chat-about-nothing-everywhere/
http://blogbadly.com/blog-content/inspire-reader-interaction-firefly-killer-chat-app/

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How to include social bookmarking submission after every post?

Every blog owner will benefit from sustaining the readers on the blog content. To reach this goal, it should be offered an easy and convenient way to subscribe to the blog through RSS reader and to allow submitting it to the Social Bookmarking sites. Social Bookmarking is indeed a great way to increase the blog exposure, bringing multiple benefits to the owner. Not just the reader preserves the post for further review and follow-up, but also the bookmark itself starts its own independent way of online existence. It will be indexed by Search Engine spider and will allow one more point of access to the blog content. It is just multiplying your blog exposure legally, with no additional efforts, and with no need to post duplicate your content on multiple sites.

Bloggerplugins offer a nice way to include small buttons after every post, allowing direct submission to the most popular social bookmarking sites with one click, without leaving the blog post.

To enable this option on your blog you should go through several simple steps of blog template code update:

1. Enter Blogger template in Layout section.
2. Choose Edit HTML.
3. Before doing any code modification, backup the entire template to the safe, easy identifiable location on your Hard Drive. If anything goes wrong, you can easily come back to your original template without loosing your blog structure.
4. Expand the widget template.
5. In the template:
a. Locate

<head>

b. Replace with

<head><script src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/simpletricks.js’></script>

c. Locate string

<p class=’post-footer-line post-footer-line-3’>

d. Place the following code below that line:

<!-- Social Bookmarking Icons Start www.bloggerplugins.org-->

<style type=’text/css’>

.bookmark img { border: 0;

padding:0px; }

.bookmark a:hover {

position: relative;

top: 1px;

left: 1px; }

</style>

<span class=’bookmark’>

<table align=’left’ border=’0’ cellpadding=’0’ width=’100%’>

<tr>

<td style=’vertical-align:middle’ valign=’middle’ width=’30%’>

<div expr:id=’"sbtxt"+data:post.id’>Bookmark this post<a style="text-decoration:none;" href="http://www.bloggerplugis.org">:</a></div><script type=’text/javascript’>showsbtext(&quot;sbtxt&quot; + &quot;<data:post.id/>&quot;,0)</script>

</td>

<td>

<a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",19);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’StumpleUpon’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_stumb.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarklet/add?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",6);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Ma.gnolia’ border=’0’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_mag.gif’/></a>

<a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&amp;url=" + data:post.url’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",1);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’DiggIt!’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_dig.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",2);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Del.icio.us’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_del.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&amp;Description=&amp;Url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;Title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",3);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Blinklist’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_bli.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=" + data:post.url + "&amp;=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",4);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Yahoo’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_yah.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=" + data:post.url + "&amp;t=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",8);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Furl’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_fur.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?url=" + data:post.url’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",9);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Technorati’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_tec.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",10);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Simpy’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_sim.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",11);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Spurl’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_spu.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://reddit.com/submit?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",17);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Reddit’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_red.gif’/></a> <a rel="nofollow" expr:href=’"http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=add&amp;bkmk=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title="+data:post.title’ expr:onmouseout=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",0);"’ expr:onmouseover=’"javascript:showsbtext(’"sbtxt" + data:post.id + "’",20);"’ target=’_blank’><img alt=’Google’ src=’http://files.bloggerplugins.org/icon_sb_goo.gif’/></a>

</td>

</tr>

</table><br/>

</span>

<!-- Social Bookmarking Icons End www.bloggerplugins.org-->

6. Save the modified template.
7. If the operation was successful, you should see the line of social bookmarking icons after each post.

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Display Recent Posts on your Blogger Blog

Recently, I have found an opportunity to display certain amount of the recent post of the blog on sidebar of the Blogger hosted blog. If your reader came to the particular article, he might just miss the opportunities to review your other content. So, the developed widget will help you capturing attention of your reader to your other posts.

"Display 10 recent posts" (10 posts represent just default setting, but you can alter the number as you like) widget is a free and can be easily embedded on your Blogger blog. You do not need to know scripting to do so. Just follow the simple steps given below.

Step 1: Go to Add and Arrange Page Elements page.
Step 2: Click Add a Page Element.
Step 3: Choose HTML/JavaScript
Step 4: Copy the following code to the ’HTML/JavaScript’ element.
Step 5 (optional): The red highlight code (var postshow=10) is the number of posts you want to display (Default is 10).
Step 6: Change the default address (http://yourblogaddress.blogspot.com/) to your blog address.
Step 7: Save your changes and review your blog.

Code to be copied from the developer website: http://kanlab.blogspot.com/2007/09/display-10-recent-posts-on-your-blog.html

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Live Traffic Widget for your Blog - FEEDJIT

Feedjit (http://feedjit.com/) is offering a widget that provides important information about who is visiting your blog or website. An entry is posted to the widget every time a person arrives at your website and again when the person leaves. Feedjit entries list referring web site where your visitors came from, what was their post of interest, and their geographical location. To visualize the gadget, Feedjit also posts a little flag near every entry to indicate what country each visitor is from. Feedjit also offers a separate map widget that shows the locations of the last 100 visitors to your website.

The offered widgets are all free and you do not need to register to get them for your blog or website. They are also extremely lightweight and won’t slow your site down.

If you’re a Blogger or Typepad user you can install any of the widgets with one click. If you use a different blogging platform or website, you can simply cut and paste the provided script into your blog template or website HTML. Feedjit will appear in the position you paste the script.

You can choose from four types of the Widget to install:

1. Live Traffic Feed
2. Live Traffic Map
3. Live Recommended Reading
4. Live Page Popularity

Take a glance on how the Widget (Live Traffic Feed) looks on the page (screen shot is take from my blog http://freeware4review.blogspot.com)

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Triggit: Add Content and Monetize your Blog with Ease

Triggit offers an interesting approach to enhance the ways of your site monetization. It is a web based application that matches your site content to multiple ad opportunities, through a meta-ad network, having access to millions of ads from numerous networks and allowing to receive one aggregate earnings check.

The biggest advantage of Triggit is a nice ability to drag and drop fitting ads directly into your site from your web browser. No hassle embedding HTML, PHP or CSS code on you site. This drag and drop feature works through JavaScript. If your publishing platform accepts JavaScript, you are in the game. So far the accepted platforms are Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress. The application works as a simple widget, but you can also manually insert the code snipper if you like the certain ad to
appear on your site.

Triggit is also lets a blogger adding YouTube videos and Flickr images to the page easily and in no time without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor

The bigger issue with this service is related to the browser limitation. Currently, Triggit only works with Flock and FireFox. This leaves all other browser of the page or blog owners out of the picture.

A little video from DownloadSquade shows how the service works.

Triggit gives assistance to blog and site owners

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Showing Labels on Blogger through Drop-Down Menu

For Blogger platform, labels are even more important for post categorization, than for other platforms, since Blogger template does not allow creating Categories. With growing amount of posts on your blog, the amount of related labels will be growing as well. Soon, it might capture a significant amount of the valuable space on your sidebar, and might create a feeling of the misbalance on your blog interface. Amanda Fazani offered a very elegant solution to save the space and still show the labels on your blog. She has created a widget, displaying all the labels in the drop-down menu. Detailed instructions on the Template modification are presented in the following post:
http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/11/drop-down-menu-for-your-labels.html
You can see the practical idea implementation on my sidebar. The process will take no more than 5 minutes of your time. All thanks are going to Amanda Fazani!

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21 Free Utilities for AdSense Users

Most likely, I do not have to explain to you, what the AdSense program is. Entering this market, Google drastically changed the map. AdSense are Google contextual ads that any Web Site or Blog owner can place on his/her Blog, Search Engine, or Web Site. Google, in return, will share a portion of the revenues generated from these ads. The specific pay rate varies, depending on the keywords on the Web site used to generate the ads.

You can review a brief informative tour at the Google Web Site on the AdSense basics:

http://www.google.com/services/adsense_tour/index.html

If you do not have a Web Site, but you still want to enjoy the piece of the Google’s pie Google, there are multiple opportunities for you as well. Find the list of the Revenue sharing Web Sites, I have created on RateItAll:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24229-revenue-sharing-web-sites.aspx

Your task mostly to submit content (posts, images, videos, etc.), and your host will do the rest, taking a small share of your AdSense income as reimbursement.

AdSense provides pretty good stats monitoring, giving you ability to track your visitors per artificial or URL channels and other parameters. However, some user pointed out on the certain deficiency of these statistics and inconvenience related to the need to log in to the site to check the trends. Also, there are occasional delays with the stats posting, which can misrepresent the visitors’ response trend for the high-traffic Blogs a Sites owners. To close the gap, several software packages were developed. I have prepared the list of the free applications on RateItAll, as usual, with brief description, rating, and links for download:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-24845-freeware-utilities-for-adsense.aspx

Enjoy the release!

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Enhancing Searching Capabilities on your Blog with BlogBar

As you may noticed, I am trying to keep the Blog layout very simple and non-aggressive. Presence of the blinking banners, flashing ads, and pop-up windows might be fascinating at the first glance, but on the long-term, it is taking away your readers' attention from your main content. However, I am constantly searching for the suitable utilities and widgets that can help my readers and myself as well to keep their interest on the Blog.

I am pretty sure, that Blogbar fills the very important gap on my blog related to the readers' need for additional information advanced search. Blogbar is a free search engine widget that can simply included in the blog or website template. With Blogbar, blog visitors are able to performed advanced searches, as:
- Search for an additional information within the Blog (you make easy for your visitors to research your other posts).
- Search the web with the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or all of them together for the same item).
- Search the Blog Search Engines for the needed information (Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc.)
- Search the Social Bookmarking Sites (Digg, Del.icio.us, etc.)
- Search in Wikipedia.
- Search for Images (Google Images, Flickr, etc.)
- Search for Video Clips (YouTube, Google Video, etc.)

Pretty impressive listing! Widget is very small, and the process of its installation will not take more than a minute. You can choose the color of the search box frame to fit the best to your blog layout. To finalize the presentation, the last, but not least reason to install the widget is additional monetization capabilities with it. If you have an AdSense account, simple placement your ID in the widget code will allow to account for all related searches and clicks.

You can see the described search form on the borders to the left, and you can verify, that whatever I review, it is all true. You can generate the Widget code through the following link:
http://www.blogbar.org/

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