Craft Blogging in the New Century

Add this effect to your own photos

Aside from being a crafts lover are you also a Blogger? If you are, I want to provide you with a FREE list of useful tools that might help you optimize your blog even better. You might know some, and you might not know others. If you find this post useful, please pass it on by linking to it in your own blog for the good of others. These tools are considered by some to be essential, I consider them very useful. You might come to use them a lot. They are FREE, which makes them all the better.

Here they are:
The First one is Feedburner: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home
This site generates a terrific feed that is compatible with all feed readers found for free online. It will also allow you to put easy subscribe buttons for XML, Add to yahoo, Add to Newsgator, Add to MSN etc. Read about how their single feed policy can benefit you. After you register, you can get from them a nifty chicklet button that willhelp you find out how many readers are you seen that particular feed to read your blog. You can also choose to have a headline animator that will display your last 5 posts in an animated form.

Bloglines is another site similar to Feedburner: http://www.bloglines.com/

SoloSub,RSS & ATOM Feed Subscription Made Easy: http://solosub.com/

So, if you have a great blog and now you know how to manage RSS and to stream out your content, Friend Feed is a great place to post your feed. http://friendfeed.com//
For example, this is my FriendFeed page: http://friendfeed.com/craftybegonia

One thing that some bloggers complain about Blogger Blogs is the lack of trackbacks. For example, I am a member of several crafting communities and sometimes when I post a pattern or a tip, I am asked for a trackback. I cannot give one thorugh Blogger, because it does not offer that service.
If you have had that experience yourself and wished you could give a trackback, you can use the following service: http://haloscan.com/
This way, you will have FREE commenting, FREE Ratings and FREE Trackback.
Haloscan will provide you with a nice seamless way to integrate free trackback in your blog by means of a small code. If you want to, you can also add their comments component, replacing the the Blogger comments.

On the other hand, if you are afraid of having to put up with spammers, you can use this service. It is FREE for personal use: http://akismet.com/ It will filter spamming.

Photobucket, image and video hosting: http://photobucket.com/

Flickr, a popular image hosting site: http://flickr.com//

Are you running out of the space allowed for free accounts in places like Photobucket or Flickr? Why not try ImageShack? It is a free image hosting site that can help you if you need an alternative place to post images for your blog. Here's the URL, just in case you want to try them:
http://imageshack.us/

Do you want to run a poll, here's a place where you can go: http://www.freeblogpoll.com/

One essential new step is that you claim your blog at Technorati.
http://technorati.com/

Use MyBlogLog as a metrics tool:
http://www.mybloglog.com/
MyBlogLog tracks outgoing traffic to allow you to pinpoint where your traffic is going.

You can get traffic statistics from this site: http://www.statcounter.com/

Pingomatic is an automatic pinging tool for you to let search engines that take pings know that you have have posted a new topic in your blog. http://pingomatic.com/

Slide, photo hosting and slideshows: http://www.slide.com/main

If you want to add interesting news topics to your blog, try this site: http://www.topix.com/

Of course, you can use YouTube to post videos that bring traffic to your blog, to show tutorials, how to make some patterns, etc. It can be your free classroom! http://www.youtube.com/
Personally, I've used to it to introduce things, and it has been a good help.

Do you like to add fun photo effects to your blog?

Bubome might be the one that fits your bill! http://www.bubome.com/index.html

BeFunky is a free online cartoonizer that willmake your photos look like cartoons and then you can take them somewhere else to make slide shows out of them: http://www.befunky.com/
It offers other special effects aside from the cartoonizer which you might want to try also.

RockYou, add glitz to your pics, make fun slideshows, and more! http://www.rockyou.com/

Fotline, fun special effects for your pictures: http://www.fotline.ws/

Dumpr is a site that lets you add digital special effects to your photos for free, such as turning them into jigzaw puzzles, into drawing sketchets, etc. Here's the link: http://www.dumpr.net/

FREE Button Maker For Your Blog: http://tools.bloggerbuster.com/buttons/

FREE Favicon Maker: http://tools.bloggerbuster.com/favicon/
If you don't know what a favicon is, it is a tiny image which shows in your browser window when you visit different sites. It is just a fun item.

FREE Blogger Templates: http://freetemplates.blogspot.com/

Web Analysis Tool: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/web-site-statistics/

FREE SEO Tools: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/free-seo-tools.html

Website Keyword Analysis: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/keyword-ranking/

Link Popularity: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/link-popularity.php

Indexed Pages: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/indexed-pages.php

Now, to a category closer to our hearts: Crafts!

There are some communities you should join to encouragement, networking, sharing, learning and also for fun, ehre are some of them:

http://www.mycraft.com/

http://crafterscommunity.com/

http://crochetme.com/

MyHandmadeRegistry is a brand new social communty for crafters which rewards you if you promote it: http://www.myhandmaderegistry.com/profile/ClotildeM

http://www.crochetville.org/forum/

http://www.getcrafty.com/

https://www.ravelry.com/account/login

I hope these tips will help you in some way to make your blogging better and more effective and your presence online stand out a little bit more. If you find this blog useful, Follow It! That way you will not miss a thing. Next week, back to regular crafting!

I leave you with a bit of Inspiration:

"Once I thought to find on earth
Love, perfect and complete.
Now, I know it carries wounds
In its hands and feet."
--Anna Hemstead Branch

If you want to get to know Him better, there's no other book like Steps to Christ. A sweet, short, beauttiful book. Read it online for FREE, here: http://www.stepstochrist.us/