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A re-look at blogger’s tools

A few tools meant for the blogging community are discussed in this edition of NetSpeak.

Like an e-mail id, blogs are fast becoming an essential requirement for organisations and individuals. An offshoot of this trend is the mushrooming of tools that add more value to a blog. A few such tools/services are discussed here.

When a visitor reads a blog post and finds it useful, he/she may develop an urge to immediately update his/her friends. A blogger should exploit this potential enthusiasm of the reader as it might funnel more relevant traffic to his blog. This necessitates your blog to have the required tools that enable a reader to contact his/her friends via the channel of his/her choice (IM and e-mail) with ease. The ‘Tell-a-friend’ widget from Socialtwist (http://socialtwist.com/) is developed to meet this requirement. The widget allows a blog’s visitor to invoke a mail service (like gmail, yahoo mail) or an IM service (like GoogleTalk and MSN) without leaving the blog and send a message to selected friends in one shot.

Though English is a global language, a large share of netizens is from non-English speaking countries. This means, if a blog or web site can provide some means to translate the web page content to other languages, it could attract more readers. The free web translation widget, ConveyThis ( http://www.conveythis.com/), ably serves this need. Once embedded on your blog/site, ‘ConveyThis’ helps the site visitor translate the blog’s content to any language with the help of popular language translation services like Google and Babelfish. Another tool worth embedding on your blog is the real-time site traffic stats feed provided by Feedjit (http://feedjit.com/). Once placed on a blog, the tool displays the details of each of the visitors to it (like the page visited, visitor’s geographical location and the like).

Yet another service worth a look in this context is Wowzio ( http://www.wowzio.com/), which provides a variety of slideshow widgets.

Some or all your blog posts may have photographs attached to it. If all these photographs can be combined into a slide show (with each slide linked to its corresponding blog entry), blog readers would easily get an overview of its content by just watching the slideshow. Wozio’s slideshow widget helps one easily accomplish this.

Mainstream blog hosting services (like Blogger and WordPress) are so popular that it is almost impossible for a new provider to enter this segment.

Though the blogging systems mentioned above are very effective/efficient and account for the surging popularity of blogging, very little innovations come from them nowadays. In this regard, the new free blog hosting service, Onsugar ( http://www.onsugar.com/), with several innovative features, assumes significance.

Onsugar lets you create blogs in the format ‘your-name.onsugar.com’ (like: http://jmurali.onsugar.com/) with a few mouse clicks. Once an account is registered with the service, you can generate any number of blogs. An advantage of this service is the availability of multiple formats for posting different types of entries (like Text, Poll, Quiz, Quote, Chat, Audio and Video). In addition, Onsugar allows you to build a community that follows your blog posts (similar to Twitter followers). Another innovation worth a mention is the ease with which you can embed widgets on to Onsugar blog.

You can add a widget directly from the Onsugar admin interface. The facility to import content from other blogs, posting entries via e-mail and the like are some other useful features of this service.

Despite having several advantages to its credit, one cannot assume that OnSugar will become a formidable force in the blogosphere. Like several other on-line services it may also bite the dust. However, popular blogging systems may take note of Onsugar’s salient features and try to integrate them with their systems.

Looking for a good calculator that can not only do basic arithmetic but also can do a variety of functions such as unit conversion, solving equations, scientific computations and so on? If so, take a look at the free on-line service ‘ecalc’ ( http://www.ecalc.com/). For those of you who wish to use it off-line, the service offers a desktop version of the calculator as well.

Windows Sysinternals (http://technet.microsoft. com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx) is a suite of tools that help us manage Windows system with ease. The tool pack contains useful utilities such as Autoruns (for obtaining/managing the list of programs loaded when the Windows starts) and Process-monitor. Anyone can download and use these programs for free (http://live.sysinternals.com/). However, if you are troubleshooting an unknown machine and averse to install the tools, the sysinternals live service helps you run them directly from Windows explorer.

For this, enter ‘\\live.sysinternals.com’ into Windows explorer’s input box and press the Enter key. Now, you will find a set of folders (like Tools) that contain the various sysinternal tools listed on the Explorer window. To run a tool, access the appropriate folder and click on the tool’s icon.

Keeping files on the Net helps us access them anywhere, anytime. You might be aware of several on-line storage/backup services (like Dropbox and Mozy). Keepit.com (https:// www.keepit.com/) is the latest service in this genre encountered by NetSpeak. To backup/restore your files easily, the service provides a client. After installing the client, you can configure it so that it automatically transfers the files from a specified folder everyday at a specified time.

If you wish to restore the files on another PC, install the client on that machine, log-in to your account and access the ‘Restore’ option. Keepit.com’s fully functional free version offers 2 GB space.

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