Evaluate your Blog with Blog Grader

Do you know, how good your blog is? May be you sure it is good, but your traffic is not reflecting the fact. What are you doing wrong? If you need professional feedback you turn to the professionals. If you need just fast and free overview to get some side view and fresh ideas, online free grader, offered by HubSpot.

The fast test, which does not require registration or login (you need to enter email address, but that can be any address), will bring you some sort of feedback on your blog structure and elements. You do understand that your content or design will not be evaluated by this service.

So, input your blog address and wait about a minute for the results generation. What you will see once the analysis has been completed includes an embeddable “Blog Grade” badge, a very large “Tweet” button and an analysis breakdown of (5) main categories:  Grade Summary, Blog Subscribability, Article Engagement, Search Engine Findability and Blog Content.

You may like what you see, you may not like what you see. But read carefully enclosed recommendations for the length of your titles, posts, presence of links and images. That is actually the most useful part, because it might show you some hidden flaws you never thought about before. You may also like the section for your posts analysis, where you can see the popularity of each of your latest post at Twitter and Facebook.

Do not get upset by the results. That is just one of many, and very specific, view on your virtual home. Use the provided advice to tweak your writing style and post characteristics for better performance results.

Access Blog Grader at http://www.bloggrader.com/

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Collecting all online traces at personal Web page

In one of my previous posts I have presented Sweetcron as automatic lifestreaming solution for bloggers http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2009/02/automated-open-source-life-stream.html).

If you did not like the presented solution at the time, Frindo might cover your needs. Take a look!

FriendFeed is an excellent web service that collects your online activity to share with others in a social setting. It automatically picks up the stuff you share on over 40 web sites, like YouTube and Flickr.

FriendFeed

But you may want to embed this information at your virtual home and have people that visit your website to get all of your Diggs, Tweets, YouTubes, Flickrs, etc. So Frindo is just a simple script that uses the FriendFeed API to put your life stream on your website in a highly customizable way.

An example of Frindo in action can be seen on the home page at http://screwtheman.com

Requirements

• Web server running PHP4
  
• Friend Feed account
  
• Minor knowledge of CSS, HTML, and web servers

Directions
1. Download the zip file and unzip it. The result should be a folder named ’frindo’.
2. Upload this folder intact on to your web server to a place that it can be seen by a web browser.
3. Temporarily make this folder writable.
4. Further information on embedding frindo into your site is on the configuration page when you run it. Frindo will detect that that it has not been configured and will show the configuration and usage interface.
5. Fill out the form and hit submit.
6. If everything is fine change the permissions on the frindo folder and frindosettings.php back to read only. If you ever want to reconfigure it, just remove or rename the frindosettings.php in your folder and follow the configuration process again.
Note: For additional security, you may want to put those files in a differently named folder than ’frindo’. As long as they’re together, it doesn’t matter what the folder name is.
Developers: http://code.google.com/p/frindo/

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