Yes, I don’t mean adding PDF file, I mean embedding. Obviously you can easily hyperlink a PDF file. But the user has to download it or open it with Adobe Reader from the browser as a separate file. What about embedding a PDF widget where necessary? Readers can see the PDF directly from your site or blog post. They can even resize the widget to full screen to read it & come back again to your site. Also there is option for downloading the file. Acrobat just do that for you. Sign up for a free account there. Upload your PDF. Now copy the embed code & paste it where necessary. It’s quite simple. Here is an implementation.
Personally I don’t like to use widgets. They tend to make a site slow to load. But this widget really looks cool.
It can be useful if you have more than just a blog. Think you write a blog under a particular niche. Sometimes you write a few articles about the same topic in EzineArticles & other article directories. You would like to share all of these with your readers. Even you may want to share what you read or bookmark on social bookmarking sites about the matter. Just go to RSS Mix & enter respective RSS feeds into the box. Click “Create!” button. You will get a single RSS feed that will combine feeds from all of these sites.
I am talking about Ritecounter. I wonder how many of you have ever tried it. Let me clarify one thing first. It is more than just a hit counter. It’s an awesome visitor tracker. I don’t want to get into the details about the features as they are to many to write about. Instead I am adding a screenshot of the features list:
As you can see you will get all the important stats about keywords per day, keyphrases per search engine, referer, visitor’s route around your site and links & forms used. Obviously you will get other statistics like visitor’s country, IP, OS or even browser etc etc.
Just add a few lines of code in your page & you are ready to go. I started using it a few years back in my early days of blogging. And i didn’t have to move to any other service except for testing. If you are not happy with your current traffic tracker, check it. Who says you can’t get good things for free
Do you know you can get a feed rank for your blog or site that offers RSS feed. This numeric system is created by RSSMicro & no way affiliated with Google. Just like PR, it checks your feed with a unique algorithm & assigns a grade number out of 10. You can get the code to show your FeedRank in your site.
See my current FeedRank image:
The algorithm checks traffic, data etc. & most importantly a new concept Feed Delta. Feed Delta is a mechanism that checks array of articles of your site for uniqueness. It helps to separate potential spam sites from content rich sites.
Every rank has a separate meaning. You can find that in this page. There you can check your blog or site’s FeedRank too.
If you are having trouble installing CGI proxy script in your server, then use this free installation service. Just give your FTP username & password. It will check the server for CGI & PERL module support with a test script & then will install CGI proxy in the url you specified. You have nothing to do except clicking your mouse button for a few times.
The CGI installer has been running since 1999. So it seems you can trust them with your username & password.
Twitterfeed & Feedlr are two third party services that can automatically update your Twitter with your new blog posts. They support both RSS & Atom feeds. So whether you use WordPress or Blogger or whatever, you would have no problem with that.
You just have to give your Twitter username & password to validate your account. They will synchronize your blog feed with Twitter account. You can choose to show only the post title or can add an excerpt of the post to it. You don’t have to do anything anymore.
You can login to both the services with OpenId. But Feedlr lets you register your own account on that site if you want.
Choose anyone. If you are using WordPress, the best part is that you don’t have use another plugin to update Twitter with your posts.
If you use Blogger blog, you may feel this. You are looking to add a favicon but there is no facility to do it. Here iconj.com comes very handy. They will host your favicon for free & you will get a direct link to it from your blog. All you have to do is to add a few lines of HTML code in between <HEAD> </HEAD> tags. Besides, it includes both the codes so that favicon gets compatible with old & new browsers. If you are using free hosting for your site or WordPress blog, then Hotlinking might be disabled on your server. You can use this free service in that case too.
Iconj have free favicon generator service also. Upload a image file & they will convert it to .ICO file that you can download or host in their server. Some browsers like Firefox & Opera support .PNG or .GPEG files as favicon. But .ICO is the most common type & IE supports only .ICO files as favicon. So it is recommended that you use this format.
What makes Iconj more interesting is its dynamic hosting. You can add multiple favicons in your account. Then you have to just specify the times like particular days in a week or particular months in a year. Iconj will automatically change your favicons accordingly. If you have limitations in your server, it is worthy enough to give a try.
