Ever wonder how your blog or website stacks up against all of the rest?

Here’s a tool that will evaluate your site in a minute or even less: <<Website Grader>>

It’s easy! Just go to the site and enter your URL, add an email address, and then click on the “GENERATE REPORT” button. It is amazing how much you can learn about your site in the comprehensive report that quickly follows.

I have been using this tool for a couple of years now and check up on the progress of all of my sites every 6 months or so. The grader points out all of the strengths and weaknesses of your site. I have found it to be very useful in helping me to see where I can make needed improvements.

See the nifty badge above? This blog scored a ‘92’ this time around –far better than the first time. My best blog scored a ‘99’ –hooray!

HubSpot is the sponsor of the grader and also gives you the opportunity to download a “Free Guide: Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.” The guide is business oriented but the basic principles are useful for anyone wanting to improve the effectiveness of their site.            *Top

The video introduces the whys and uses for Google’s new “+1 Button”. It is somewhat similar to the “Like” button on Facebook but is intended to be used all across the Internet.

Plus according to those in the know, the button will be tied into the Google search engine so it will be important to tool up your blog or website to provide the new app. It is designed to give your blog posts better visibility on Google.

Take a look at the bottom of this article on the right side and you will see what it looks like. I put it on this site by installing the new WordPress Google +1 Button plugin. It is not only easy to install but gives you options for where you want it placed- before or after the post, or both and on the right or left hand side.            *Top

                  (Image via Wikipedia)

Ever thought about adding a forum to your website or blog? bbPress is one of the best and it is free: bbPress

Plus it has thousands of folks constantly upgrading the program and making it better. There’s even a forum about the forum with all sorts of help available on the bbPress website.

If you are running a WordPress blog it is now as easy as adding a plugin: bbPress  (Right now it is in beta 2b)             *Top

(Image via Wikipedia)

When I started blogging over 5 years ago, very few blogs actually had images, pictures, or videos incorporated into their posts. If there were pictures or images they were usually in the heading or on the side bar.

Now images are pretty much expected if you are a serious blogger. It is even more important for those trying to do some kind of ministry on the web. First impressions are very important and images now play a large part in that ‘first look’ equation along with the website itself.

Here are two recent articles I found with good info on the art of adding images to your blog posts. The first one is by John Saddington of Tentblogger:

“The Complete Guide to Using Images in Your Blog Posts”

John has tons of great information for those starting out and even for folks who have been around a while. The article is part of his “Developing Great Blog Content” Series. He gives a complete ‘hows and whys’ on images. Look at his blog and you can see that he knows what he is talking about –very helpful.

The second one comes from Build a better Blog by Denise Wakeman:

“4 Ways Images Enhance Your Business Blog [Free Report]”

Denise gives some great reasons why you should put up images in the first place and then provides a link to a more definitive article on her suggestions about how to effectively pull it off.

My Own Suggestions and Experience With Images

I have found that coming up with the right image sometimes can take nearly as long as writing the post itself, but I believe that it is worth it. I have cut that time significantly through the use of several ‘old standbys’ which I have found to be particularly helpful.

Personally I use a lot of images from Wikipedia which is a great source for ‘free’ use public domain images particularly when it comes to pictures of famous people. Plus I have come to rely on Zemanta as my number one source simply because this app/plugin offers possible images on your editor while you’re in the midst of writing a post plus provides a great search engine for ‘free’ public photos. Here’s an article I wrote about this free service:

“Need Pics and Links?–There’s Always Zemanta!”

Another good source that I have found for relevant media, particularly for video is Apture. The beauty with this app is that you can add pictures and media to a post after you have already published it:

“Capture with Apture”

Finally here’s my own definitive article on the subject which contains lots of links to possible sources:

“Dressing Up a Blog with Images and Pictures”

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1. Yubby allows you to find, collect, and publish videos from 30+ different video sites. First you search and find what you want. Second, Yubby gives you your own space—‘channel’–to save and collect your favorite videos in. Then finally you can publish the vids when you want on your blog.

2. RedLasso provides access to 1000’s of media news videos and more. Then provides you with the opportunity to edit, clip, and embed only that part of a video that you would like to share.

The raw news videos may contain minutes of extraneous material that you don’t need but maybe 30 seconds that you do want. RedLasso lets you edit out all the junk and makes it possible to share and embed just that part which is relevant for your blog. What a handy tool.

3. Also when it comes to video—don’t forget Apture. Apture can provide all sort of media including video for your posts –even after you have published them—check it out.

4. Don’t forget Tangle–it provides all sorts of ‘family friendly’ video for Christians. Also lots of other good stuff on their website—here’s a great vid to share about Jesus (3:19):

(Image by mansikka via Flickr)

Ever click on a link and end up on a 404 page? Everyone has–it is one of those little frustrations that we endure on the net. That’s why it is a good idea every once in a while to check out the links on your own blog. Some suggest that it be done once a month at least since search engine like Google supposedly downgrade or penalize your site if you have too many broken ones. Another good reason to take care of it is for your readers.

I was recently surprised to find that a good number of the links on my ‘Getting Started’ page no longer worked. Not only did I have to get rid of the broken links but in this case find new articles to replace the issues I was trying to cover on that page in the first place.

Actually I was just scratching the surface. Anyone who has been blogging for a while has far more broken links in the archives than one would ever suppose. One thing to keep in mind, anytime you link to an online newspaper, magazine, or news source site after about a month or so they stuff it into their archives and the links you used no longer work. Now what do you do—actually what can you do?

WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

In the process of checking my links over the weekend I remembered that a month or so ago I had come across a WordPress plugin that was suppose to help you find every broken link on your blog: Broken Link Checker

What does it do? Once installed it finds every single broken link on your blog and makes it possible to correct them all. Actually an incredible plugin. Each bad link can be edited or unlinked directly from your dashboard on the ‘Broken Link Checker’ page without manually having to go to and edit each individual post or page separately.

I had 46 broken links on this blog but it only took a half an hour to correct it all—amazing.

The only draw back is this– When the plugin is first activated it sort of locks up the backend for a while till it goes through your entire blog and finds all of the bad links. I found it difficult to do anything else with the blog till it was done. In the case of this blog it took nearly 10 minutes or so. It was much longer for my news commentary site which ended up having 135 broken links.

What was really great—after I fixed all the broken links the home page actually loaded way faster than it did before.

Update: After using it for a week I found that the backend continues to lock up each time I go to the dashboard and you really can’t do a thing until the Broken Link Checker checks for bad links. It’s no big deal on some of my smaller blogs but those with several hundred posts take way to long to load and resolve.

Solution: I deactivated the plugin and will turn it on at least twice a month to correct any broken links.  

*See some of the articles below for more on this issue–Xenu Link Sleuth is another program that some recommend. Also LinkPatch is a service that will monitor your site for a small fee.

(Image via Wikipedia)

From Mashable.com : “26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog”

A real helpful article by Barb Dybwad with 26 different places to go for ‘free’ pictures, audio, and video for your website and blog.

Also remember three great sources or plugins that I’ve posted about in the past—these apps help make the process quick and easy for finding appropriate media to incorporate into any blog post:

1. Need Pics and Links?–There’s Always Zemanta!

2. New WordPress Plugin: PicApp for Pictures

3. Capture with Apture

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After checking everything out with my hosting co. and doing a bunch of different things to get a grip on the reason for the slow load I finally figured out that it was my dated theme that was not working so well with the WordPress 2.71 upgrade and with the latest Firefox browser which upgraded about the time when I started noticing the problem.

In the meantime, overnight I had lost nearly 1/2 of my traffic on those sites using that particular WP theme. I checked it out on Internet Explorer and found that it still loaded ok using that browser, that’s why I still had at least retained half of my normal visitors. Then I checked out how the sites worked on Safari and found that they would not load up on that browser either.

So here is a lesson to be learned at my expense:

It is a good idea to check out how your blog or website reacts and loads on different browsers!

I have known this in the past and have noticed that by blogs look somewhat different using different browsers. My daughter alerted me one time a couple of years ago that my site looked somewhat distorted on her Mac–she was using Safari as many Mac folk do. After that I had her checking it out once in awhile. Also another time by accident I discovered that some of my blogs looked different on IE 6 than they look on IE 7. So it is important to even check out different versions of the same browser at times.

Right now I have the current versions of Firefox, IE 8, Safari, and Chrome installed on my computer just for a quick check. However, it takes up a lot of memory. Here is a great site where you can check out how your blog or website resolves on all of the different browsers and versions currently in use:

<<<Browser Shots>>>           *Top

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Here’s a link to a site that can help you make a “favicon” for your blog. Quite a clever tool:

Favicon Generator

What is a “favicon”? It’s that little symbol or icon that shows up in front of your URL address. Take a look above at my URl, I made that little red cross with an A using the favicon generator tool on the site above–crude but fun! I actually made it for my ANSWERS For The Faith blog but liked it so much I put it up on this one too.

If your blog is hosted on Blogger, WordPress.com, or TypePad you already have one automatically generated by your web host like the ones under the post title. Also, you do not have access to the code on these hosted sites so will not be able to make your own custom favicon.

Process: After making the icon, you save it on your computer than upload it to the root directory of your website. Then place the following code on the code page for your ‘header’:

 <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico" />

Make sure you replace “http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico” with the exact address of where you uploaded your icon.

Actually this was far easier than I expected. If you’ve fooled around with your blog code before and uploaded images, plugins, and themes you should be able to get it.

Notice that the generator also has a color palette generator that gives you the code for any color you might click on, quite a handy tool that I’ll probably use in the future when I’m looking for that special color.

Google also has a favicon generator and WordPress.org has a ‘Favicon Generator’ plugin available but not highly rated (1 star). I haven’t tried out either of those yet–I’ll have to report back later on those apps.           *Top

“The images are fully licensed, come from the most prestigious content partners such as Getty Images, Splash News, Corbis and alike, these are full size images that come tagged so they improve your SEO and indexing to drive more traffic to your site (beyond the obvious value of enriching your blog and enhancing readership:)”

Once the plugin is installed, the PicApp appears beneath your WP editor while writing a new post. All you have to do is search for an appropriate image to go with your article and then point and click. Way too easy and the program gives you placement options to boot.

Below is a picture of  Tim Tebow I chose just for a fun demonstration:

I typed in ‘tim tebow’ in the PicApp search beneath the editor and chose this picture from 24 different ones offered.

Click on the picture and it lets you chose where to put it–I chose to put the picture on the right.

Click on ‘embed picture’ and there it is.

The only thing that I don’t particularly care for is the blue and white PicApp ad under the picture. PicApp needs to work up a less intrusive ad link that blends better with the picture.

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