Bloggers do not just write articles! They have to do a lot of things to manage and promote their blogs. These activities range from commenting to finding useful design and software tools. Often such tools are life savers, allowing more time for the business of writing and keeping readers happy. But at the same time, finding perfect tool for a task is difficult and time consuming. So, we searched internet for best free blogging tools and services for bloggers and summed them up in this post.Content:
Image Credit: ABContentOnline.com
- Zemanta: Zemanta is a content suggestion tool that searches for related content (articles and pictures) around the web and also suggests tags and links. Zemanta has been one of our favorite plugins here on Blogging With Success. Recently, Zemanta announced support for Opera, Safari and Chrome. With this, major browsers are covered and it can be considered a complete solution for bloggers.
- Copygator: Search web for duplicate copies of your content. Also gives a subscription option so that you can stay updated via email about scrapping.
- OpenOffice.org: It is a free open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Do not worry, it works with Office files. OpenOffice.org Write, the word processor lets you export files and PDF and retains links. Useful for creating e-books with links. Note: This is not an online tool.
- Ping-O-matic: Automatically pings(notifies) online services about your blog updates.
- Pingoat: Another automatic pinging service.
- LinkWithin: A related posts widget/plugin for Blogger, WordPress and other platforms. No signup, no ads. Just place code and related posts from archives will be shown under posts.
- BlogThis!: Add to Firefox browser, a toolbar to access to Blogger’s ‘blogthis’ feature where you can make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Use this interface from a page or article you want to ‘blog about’ — it seeds the draft post with highlighted text, the website url and any other text you want to key in, on the spot. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
- StumbleUpon: Browser toolbar lets you discover web sites based on your interests and refer them to your SU friends.
Design:
- BrowserShots: BrowserShots is a free website that lets you get screenshot of any website. More than 70 browsers are available and you can request any number of shots for free.
- FireShot: A Firefox or IE extension that lets you create customized screenshots of your web pages. There are tools that let you edit the snapshot and add text annotations. This software is good for web developers, and for communicating unique graphics to your blog readers. Captured & edited images can be downloaded as png, jpg, gif or bmp formats or uploaded to a free public screenshot host.
- MoFuse: Mofuse lets you create a mobile friendly version of your website for free. You can customize colors, logo and even put ads on it without paying a penny.
- DaButtonFactroy: Lets you create buttons for your blog. You can customize almost everything from background shadow to text and colors etc. Here’s a demo button:
- Favicon.cc: Lets you create a free favicon. You can even add animation.Here’s a tiny animation by Mr I (as he admits, not a big artist, so no wonders here.)
- WordPress Theme Generator: Lets you make your own two/three column WordPress theme for free. Colors, header image and width of sidebars can be changed.
- PsycHo Free Template Generator: Generates Blogger template. You can customize number of columns, color scheme etc. Note: This tool is being redesigned and new version will be online soon.
- I Like Your Colors: Like colors on webpage and want to know HTML codes for them? This tool extracts all the colors from a given page and shows the corresponding hexadecimal values.
- ColorZilla: This is a Firefox addon that uses an eye dropper icon as a color-picker. Get color codes for anything on any webpage. Also use there different color palettes and select or compose the right color you want from a slide rule for hues and saturation. You can also zoom any online page! Useful for those tiny font messages you might get, which someone forwarded from a mobile device.
- Firebug: Yet another Firefox addon with a wealth of development tools that let you edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript on any web page.
- CSS Portal : An excellent guide on using Cascade Styling Sheet elements to format text inline, overriding your template defaults.
- Easy Calculations: Use this to convert colors form RGB to hex and vice-versa.
- WebDeveloper: A menu and a toolbar extension for Firefox with various web developer tools that allow you to analyze all the different parts of a web page, including the CSS per element and outline objects. You can edit CSS on the screen and save the code to later update the template.
- Degraeve.com: This software generates a palette of colors that match and complement any image your provide. You can match theme colors to a key component in your header for example.
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