Blogging Mints

Tools that will help you check your site

If you are a coding geek, you might want to check that your site validates, maybe you want to find out your Google pagerank, number of backlinks, how many subscribers you have, etc. Here is a list of tools you might want to check out.

• Xinu - Will check pagerank, backlinks and much more at the same time.
• Sitescore - Will rate your site and check your coding for errors.
• Blog Juice Calculator
• WebsiteGrader - Will check almost everything, you can also compare your site with competing sites.
• The Scrutinizer - 283 tools in one place!
• dnScoop - Does pretty much it all
• Text link ads calculator - Calculates how much a link on your blog is worth
• And of course W3C’s HTML validator and CSS validator.

Wordpress tip: Wordpress Theme Generator

A couple of people in my feeds have talked about this nifty little generator already, but I think it’s worth mentioning again!
And yes, you read righ, it’s a Wordpress Theme Generator which allow you to actually see the design while you are working with it!
Then it’s just to click “save” and download it, and then extract and upload it to your theme folder. Incredibly simple!

Adding a signature to your blog posts

I was admiring Lorelle’s handwritten signature she had at the end of every blog post. And one day she told the secret behind it!
So I decided to make my own since I think it gives a nice personal touch to the blog. And you know what? It actually almost looks like my real life signature!

Here is how to do it!
Surf over to MyLiveSignature and choose to create a new signature in the menu. Then choose the “signature creation wizard” and follow the simple steps to make your own. There are many fonts to choose between, 120 to be exact.

You will also be able to choose the size, color and slope. When you are done you may choose to animate the signature (costs money), to download the signature to your computer or to generate HTML or BB code to direct link your signature.

I chose to download it to my computer and then upload it to my Photobucket account.

How do I add it to my post?
You can either use this Wordpress plugin called LiveSig that adds it automatically for you (then you have to save the code that MyLiveSignature gave you when you were done). I haven’t tried this plugin because I thought it actually were easier to add it manually (easy if you know how to work with Wordpress’ coding).

You can add it manually by, after uploading your signature to your own server/Photobucket/etc, open up the theme viewer (in your WP admin panel, Presentation -> Theme Editor), choose the Main Index Template (or index.php, depends on your theme), and then add a normal img tag wherever you want your signature to appear.

I chose to do it a bit differently. I added it through pure CSS. That means that I added an element called “postfooter” and then added the signature as a background in the CSS file.

How to track your Blogger statistics with Google

A while back I wrote “How to track your Blogger statistics with Google” on infektia.net.

Google owns Blogger (Blogspot), everyone knows that. But we all Blogger bloggers miss the statistics module that for example Wordpress.com blogs already has. Since they’re in the same family I think it would be a good idea to implement Google Analytics with Blogger. But you never know, it might show in the future.

However, if you want to track your visitors on your Blogger/Blogspot without putting up a linkback-image to the tracking-service on your blog (that’s so 90’s!) then Google Analytics is the tool for you…

Go here to read it: How to track your Blogger statistics with Google.