One Tip A Day » Blogging

How to Resize Images and Add Effects Online

Umar — Sun, 17 May 2009 01:35:39 +0000

I earlier reviewed a free web service that allows you to add reflection effect to photos online in two simple steps. Today, I’ve confronted another simple yet helpful tool which lets you resize your images in hardly less than a minute.

Picresize is an online image resizer utility which enables you to quickly resize and crop photos while your on the internet. Picresize doesn’t require any registration and helps you get the job done in seconds.

To get started all you have to do is log on to the website and upload your image from your computer. Once done it will open up a new page where you will be able to resize your image according to your need. In addition to that you can use the one click feature to add special effects to your photo right away.

Select your preferred options and save image in PNG, JPG and GIF format.

Check out PicResize

Webmastery 101: How To Cut Fat And Build Muscle

Tony Williams — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:38:08 +0000

No, this is not a late New Year’s resolution post. I’ve just read a brilliant post over at Connected Internet that gives some great tips on how to optimise your site, cut out the blot, and drive lots and lots of traffic.

The tips given include how to use a robots.txt file, how to validate HMTL and CSS, and how to use SEF urls.

More: Connected Internet

10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read (at least once)

Tony Williams — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 19:36:00 +0000

One Tip A Day is nearly a year old now and is starting to get some nice traffic, so I’ve been on the lookout for ideas to make it even better. A post by Ryan Caldwell from Performancing entitled ‘10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read (at least once)’, popped up in my feedreader today which seemed like perfect timing.

I’ve had a quick skim of some of the posts and they are definitely a good selection of posts that all bloggers should read:

1. How to Write Magnetic Headlines

2. How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life?

3. Scannable Content

4. 10 Killer Post Ideas

5. 7 Steps to Being Recognized as an Expert

6. Converting One off Visitors to your Blog into Regular Readers

7. 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang

8. The Art of Linkbaiting

9. Before You Begin Blogging: A few things you should know

10. 5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more)

Latest Version Of MyAvatars Plugin For MyBlogLog Released

Tony Williams — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:00:40 +0000

I’m amazed by how many of my readers have registered for MyBlogLog. I can tell because I use the MyAvatars Plugin For WordPress that displays MyBlogLog avatars for commenters if they have one. I’m convinced that the plugin is one of the main drivers of registrations for MyBlogLog.

The latest version of the MyAvatars plugin has just been released that fixes a number of issues that have emerged as MyBlogLog have updated their systems. The full features of the new MyAvatars Plugin are below:

Added nofollow for avatars
“No image bug” solved
Title attribute for avatars in english
“Big images” bug fixed
Improved XHTML validation
Gravatar support (not active by default)
Trackbacks/Pingback support (Works good, but it’s not perfect)
Support for blogs with more than 1 author, works very well
Separated CSS Style
Email address is now safe!!!
Customizable title for the avatars
Gets MyBlogLog avatars of your commenters
Links directly to their MyBlogLog profiles
Easy installation & template integration
Added email support for retrieving profiles
If not MyBlogLog member will prompt the registration page

Upgrading the MyAvatars plugin isn’t as simple as just loading up the new version, so make sure you read the instructions.

Thoughts.com: New Free Blogging Community

Tony Williams — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:49:02 +0000

I got a call from a friend today who has been travelling around the world for the last 12 year or so. Before he left he asked me to recommend a blogging service so that we all could keep up with his travels. At the time I recommended Typepad, as I thought it was a strong platform, but he now says that he is feeling a bit isolated and that blogging has become a bit of a chore.

One of the problems with blogging sometimes is you need a bit of support to keep you blogging on those days when you’d rather be doing something else. That’s why I think thoughts.com, who have just purchased this impartial review, is an interesting free blogging service.

Like many other services, thoughts.com offer free blogs, but the service works very hard to create a community out of its users. Thoughts, photos, videos and podcasts can all be shared with other community members. Finding like minded bloggers is easy as there’s a handy search engine, which can filter results by people, photos, videos and podcasts. Blogs are also organised into tags for quick browsing.

Having lots of similar blogs close to hand can also solve the problem that many newbie bloggers have, which is feeling that no-one is reading their material, because no comments are being left. By creating a ready-made audience for your material, thoughts.com have solved one of the biggest problems for new bloggers.

If you’re looking for a fully customizable blogging platform that you can tinker with, then thoughts.com probably isn’t for you. You probably would be better off with a platform like WordPress, which powers this site, which will give you full control over how your blog looks and how it behaves.

However, if you are just looking for a bit of a fun and nothing too serious, then thoughts.com is definitely worth a quick look.

More: thoughts

How To Publish Code In WordPress Blog Posts

Tony Williams — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:58:35 +0000

I love WordPress, but one of the features I’ve had problems with in the past is how to publish code in posts. I’ve managed to find my way of adding code to posts, but it’s not particularly user-friendly and not one for sharing.

Luckily, the lovely Lorelle has put together a great guide to Writing and Publishing Code in WordPress Blog Posts. As with all of Lorelle’s work, it’s very well written and laid out. Essential reading if you are WordPress User.

More: Guide To Writing and Publishing Code in WordPress Posts

ǝuı1uo uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ oʇ ʍoɥ

Tony Williams — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:20:47 +0000

I’m guessing that the title of this post got your attention! If you want to write upside down on your blog then check out this great Flip tool.

It couldn’t be easier. Just visit the site and write the text you want to Flip into the first box, press the button, and copy the generated text wherever you want to use it.

¡ǝ1dɯıs

Friday Time Out: Test Your Blogging Addiction

Tony Williams — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:21:37 +0000

How addicted to blogging are you? I think that my addiction is controlled by the fact that I only post One Tip A Day, but I still spend a lot of time obcessively checking my stats and deleting spam.

This test will tell you just how addicted you are to Blogging. I came out as 64% Addicted, which is ok I think as there’s still hope for me. If you get a score over 80% I think you need to get out more!

64%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

One For The Bloggers

Tony Williams — Tue, 29 May 2007 21:49:00 +0000

If you’re an avid blogger, then you really should check out the Bloggers Face-Off series from DailyBlogTips.

Every Tuesday Daniel features a weekly short interview with top bloggers, which provides useful insights into how they’ve become successful bloggers, and more importantly for some people, how they’ve managed to generate money.

The series was kicked off in style with Darren Rowse of Problogger Vs Jeremy Shoemoney. This week’s Face-Off features my good buddy Everton Blair Vs JohnTP, and previous Face-Offs include:

Some big names from the blogging community in there, and lots of useful insights can be gleaned from the interviews.

Optimize Your CSS with CleanCSS

Tony Williams — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:07:28 +0000

Daily Blog Tips have discovered a very nice service that will automatically tidy up your Cascading Style Sheet, or CSS. Cascading Style Sheets make websites much more efficient because they allow the browsers to cache style-related information from the .css file directly, removing the need to read that information every time a single page is loaded.

Even if Style Sheets are naturally more efficient than HTML tables you can still optimize the CSS code to make your website cleaner and faster. If you’re not much of a coder like me then this can be a daunting task, but CleanCSS takes aways this problem. All you have to do is paste in your current CSS and it will be automatically optimized.

Remember to make a backup first just in case something goes wrong!

More: CleanCSS

Keep Up With The Cricket World Cup Online

Tony Williams — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 21:51:56 +0000

Never heard of Cricket? Then today’s tip probably isn’t for you, although if you are a lover of great competition then read on. Cricket is an amazing game that was invented in England and exported to its Empire. The Cricket World Cup is contested every four years, with Australia, South Africa, Pakistan and the West Indies amongst the favourites to win.

The Official Google Blog of all places has given some interesting ways to get more out of the tournament which started yesterday.

Talk cricket on Orkut
Cricket discussions that started in the elevator can spill over to the Orkut network. Especially this season, in association with us, cricket expert and former Indian cricket captain Krish Srikkanth has created his own community on Orkut to interact with cricket lovers, debate the latest happenings and just share cricket views.

Express yourself on a blog
There’s a cricket blogging contest for Indian audiences.

Get cricket scores & news
If work or school are getting in the way of your cricket enjoyment, keep up to date with match scores and World Cup cricket news by personalizing your Google homepage with the latest cricket gadgets. If you prefer, you can also get cricket scores, exciting images and cricket videos straight to your desktop with Google desktop cricket gadgets.

OnlyWire: One BookMarklet To Rule Them All

Tony Williams — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:30:45 +0000

Bookmarking services are popular with non-bloggers and bloggers alike. Non-bloggers love bookmarking services as they make it easier to store favourite sites, and bloggers love bookmarking services as they can drive significant amounts of traffic.

One of the problems, though with bookmarking services is that there are so many. Luckily, services like OnlyWire go a long way to solving this problem. Using the OnlyWire “Bookmarklet” will submit your post to 15 bookmarking sites in one go. Using the bookmarklet is simple. Just drag it onto your browser and click on it whenever you are viewing a page you want to save.

OnlyWire’s bookmarklet submits pages to the following services:

Pretty impressive huh? To register for an account click here.

Get On Track With The Tech Link Train

Tony Williams — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 00:01:06 +0000

One of the best ways of moving up the search engine listings and to improve your page rank is to get more sites to link to you. For a new or small website backlinks can take a long time to buildup.

A quick way to speedup this process is to participate in linking games. These can occasionally prove successful as they can generate an enormous amount of links in a very short time. I got tagged by Everton yesterday in the latest such game, Tech Link Train. The game works by getting tagged sites to list tag five other sites, which then get added to the list the next set of bloggers use, who also add their tagger to the list.

Anyone can play so feel free to join in. Confused? Then just follow the instructions below.

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content string. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra linkback.
2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.
3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.
4. Add no more than 5 new TECH, SCIENCE, or CONSUMER ELECTRONICS blogs to the list in the “My Adds” section.

My Adds:

DoshDosh
SRIDHAREENA
gHacks
Ajay
largeheartedboy

The Originals:

Brainblogger
DigitalPhocus
Alpesh Nakar
OneTipADay
The How To Geek
The TechZone
Mega TechNews
Tech Buzz
Techzi
Connected Internet
John Chow dot Com
Ted Leung on the Air
Geek is a chic.
you’ve been HACKED
IDIOT TOYS
JMH Techtronics
Web Services
UtterlyGeek
Tech It Like A Man!
Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot
techboyardee
The Tech Inspector

Reduce WordPress Spam By Creating Fake Comment Forms For Spam Bots

Tony Williams — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 08:52:00 +0000

Last month I gave tips on how to eliminate WordPress Spam forever. Today I’ve got an ever better tip for reducing comment spam on WordPress blogs, but should also work on other sites with comment forms.

My friend Billy came up with a neat mod to trick these spam bots on my site, which is increasingly coming under attack. Most comment spam comes from spam bots that try to post comments to the first comment forms they see. So, what I’ve done on this blog is create a few fake forms that are placed in front of the real comment form, and are invisible to real readers. This means that the stupid spam bots try and post spam to these forms first, and never make it through to the real forms so I never see the spam!

To add fake comment forms to your site do the following:

Create the Fake forms

In your WordPress comments.php file look for the following lines:

Control Which Areas Of Your Site Are Indexed With A Robots.txt File

Tony Williams — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:10:03 +0000

Sometimes there are areas of your site that you don’t want indexing by search engines – e.g. admin files or images. By creating a robots.txt file, you can tell search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed.

A robots.txt can be created quickly with Notepad. If you are using WordPress a sample robots.txt file would be:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp- Disallow: /feed/ Disallow: /trackback/

“User-agent: *” means that all the search bots (from Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on) should use those instructions to crawl your website. Unless your website is complex you will not need to set different instructions for different spiders.

“Disallow: /wp-” will make sure that the search engines will not crawl the WordPress files. This line will exclude all files and foldes starting with “wp-” from the indexation, avoiding duplicated content and admin files.

If you are not using WordPress just substitute the Disallow lines with files or folders on your website that should not be crawled, for instance:
User-agent: * Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /any other folder to be excluded/

After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and you are done!

Thanks to DailyBlogTips for today’s tip

Simple Way To Improve Search Engine Listings

Tony Williams — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:21:03 +0000

One of the rules I’m trying to stick to on this site is to only feature tips that are simple and quick to implement. Today’s tip is no different and is an important one for anyone who runs their own personal blog or any other site.

Most blog and site templates (including this one until I fixed it) place the hyperlink to the permalink for the article in the articles homepage. However, this causes problems for certain search engines including Google, when they crawl their site. This was confirmed in the excerpt below from an email from Google:

In order for Google News to include articles, each article must hyperlink to a page dedicated solely to that article, as your site does. Yet, when the headline on this page is an active link, we often have difficulty crawling…Making these headlines regular text, not links, will increase the likelihood that our crawler will index all of your your articles.

This will come as shocking news to most bloggers. Luckily, as promised, there is a simple solution. Instead of adding an active link to your titles then just place a small icon with the permalink next to the article title. I’ve just done this on my homepage and I’m fixing my other templates as we speak.

Now as search engines crawl my site they’ll be able to locate easily my permalinks to my full articles, which will now get fully indexed and available on search engines. I can’t wait for the extra traffic!

Install Important WordPress Security Update

Tony Williams — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:11:11 +0000

Despite only launching a vital security update 10 days ago, WordPress have just launched another in version 2.07. Given that WordPress 2.1 is supposed to be launched at the end of the month, this update is clearly important if they can’t wait a few days. If you installed the last update (2.06) then all you have to do to update is change the following files:

Because this is a much smaller update than previous versions, you do not have to update all of WordPress’ files if you’re upgrading from version 2.0.6. Here is the list of files that have changed since 2.0.6:
wp-admin/inline-uploading.php
wp-admin/post.php
wp-includes/classes.php
wp-includes/functions.php
wp-settings.php
wp-includes/version.php
We know it sucks to have a release only 10 days after our last one, but we think it’s important enough for your blog to be secure to do it, and hopefully only having to change a few files will make the upgrade easier than normal.

Other users with older versions should download the full WordPress 2.07 zip.

Submit Your Blog For ‘Pimp My Blog’

Tony Williams — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:00:05 +0000

Everton Blair and the readers of Connected Internet are collectively running a blog optimisation programme called ‘Pimp My Blog’. Every week the team are selecting one lucky blog in need of a makeover, or just tips on increasing advertising revenue and traffic.

I’m thinking about submitting One Tip A Day, which is starting to build up a surprisingly high level of traffic in under 3 months, yet all of my readers appear to be very shy and don’t leave any comments. I’d like to know how to get more readers to leave comments.

To submit your site for a ‘Pimping’ then click here.

The Dos And Don’ts For Driving Traffic To A New Website

Tony Williams — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:00:11 +0000

Connected Internet has written a great article entitled ‘The Do’s And Don’ts For Driving Traffic To A New Website’. The site author has singled out the options that would benefit new sites, more than just writing a generic list of steps a site owner can do.

The one I can resonate the most with is ‘Don’t Use A Naff Template’. I spent many a night trying to find a template I liked for One Tip A Day. I wanted something that would look nice and clean, which would also be easy to maintain as this is my first blog. I think this current template is about the 15th I’ve tried, but I’m finally happy so I can now concentrate on developing the readership and quality of the tips.

A summary of the ‘Dos And Don’ts’ Are listed below:

Do Submit Articles To Aggregators
Do Email Big Bloggers
Don’t Use A Naff Template
Do Ask For Advice
Don’t Waste Your Time With Link Exchanges
Do Write Comments – Lots of Them
Do Make Buddies – There’s Safety In Numbers
Don’t Waste Time With Blog Directories
Do Add Your Feed To My Yahoo! And Google
Do Leave Trackbacks
Do Link To Bigger Sites
Don’t Use Long Titles
Do Add Tags To All Posts
Do Keep Posting

To read the full list then visit Connected Internet.

Get More Traffic From Technorati

Tony Williams — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:09:19 +0000

John from JohnTP is currently on a mission to get as many Technorati favourites as possible to increase the amount of traffic he is getting.

Another quick way to get additional traffic from Technorati is to add an a picture to your profile. This way when users search Technorati, your picture will stand out and you’ll have a better chance of getting traffic. It’s a very simple tip that will take mere seconds to implement, and can really benefit you in the long run.
If your image is also quite funky then this will make it stand out even more.

More: Technorati

WordPress Video Plugin

Tony Williams — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:02:39 +0000

Embedding videos in WordPress can be quite difficult. Daburna.de have created a plugin that should make problems embedding videos from Youtube, MyVideo, Google video and Clipfish a thing of the past.

To use the plugin do the following:

Download the plugin and extract it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it
Afterwards, you can include a video on your posts or pages by writing this (without quotes):

Youtube: ["youtube" id]
MyVideo: ["myvideo" id]
Google Video: ["google" id]
Clipfish: ["clipfish" id]

You’ll find the necessary id in the address of the video. A typical address looks like this, the id is highlighted in bold:

youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DHOZW_8OPk
MyVideo: http://www.myvideo.de/watch/366128
Google Video: http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=5024787479139933029
Clipfish: http://www.clipfish.de/videoplayer.swf?as=0&videoid=NDE2fDM0&r=1

More: Video Plugin

10 Ways To A Killer Blog – SlideShare

Tony Williams — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:01:55 +0000

Scoble is one of the few elite bloggers, and he’s shared some great tips on how to be create a killer blog. Essential viewing for all wannabe probloggers, and it’s worth taking 5 minutes to run through the presentation even if you are already an up and coming blogger.

Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts

Tony Williams — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:18:57 +0000

I loved this list so much I submitted it to Digg. Everton from Connected Internet has posted a great article that walks users through the best mods you can make to a WordPress blog to drive Engagement – i.e. get users to delve deeper into your blog.

I’d heard of some of the plugins before, but I’m going to try out some of the new ones next week when I have some time. Regardless of whether you are new to blogging or an old-timer, you should definitely read this post.

More: Connected Internet