Entries Tagged 'Tools' ↓

Promising a Link Lovin’ post on Friday + forgetting and not delivering it = epic FAIL. I just turned 27 an hour and a half ago so I’ll blame old age. Better late than never right?

If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you have those days when you have no clue what day of the week it is, let alone what time of day it is. Men With Pens have some fixes for us crazy time-challenged foo’s.

I mentioned in my Google Alerts post about deep-linking to your blog posts when commenting on other blogs, but Jenstar has another clever way of gaining pageviews and getting some use out of older posts.

Google Analytics is a very powerful program to have under your belt but it can be pretty confusing. It’s so much more than just a traffic stat program and it has a lot of features. Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing has a short video that I found really helpful. (By the way, Web Marketing For Dummies – which he co-authored – is available so check it out.)

And because it’s me birthday and it happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I’d leave you with a post from the Ezine Articles blog that has a few interesting facts about St. Patty’s day that I didn’t know before.

Now I’m off to paint my face green and eat a bunch of green birthday cake after guzzling some green beer.

I wrote a review about Aweber Communications two years ago which was a few months after I had first signed up. I had heard tons of great things about them and was so happy when I could finally afford to start my own Aweber newsletter.

Now it’s two years later, and I’m just as happy – if not more happy – with my Aweber membership.

It’s obvious that they strive to bring their company to new heights so that it continues being a great experience and valuable business asset for their customers. One such change they’ve done recently is to redesign their interface and organize their menu a bit.

New drop down menu

I have to admit that the way it was before left me feeling a little frustrated at times, but with the new drop down menu I am a happy camper. The old menu was a hover menu and it managed to piss me off every time I logged in. Now it’s a nice, clean, drop-down menu that works!

Setup Wizard floats at the bottom

Another thing that annoyed me about the old control panel was how much space the Aweber Setup Wizard took up. It was obnoxious and right in your face every time you logged in, but now it’s tucked away neatly at the bottom so you know it’s there but not in your way. I did finally use the wizard today to finish setting up a few of my lists and it really does come in handy. There are quite a few features in Aweber but the wizard navigates you to exactly where you need to go which is a big time saver.

I’m excited about all the new changes Aweber has implemented, and I’ve been spending a lot more time on their site as a result. That’s good news for me since it means I’m paying more attention to my email marketing.

Final verdict

In my Aweber review, I gave them 4 1/2 stars out of 5. Now, I give them 4 4/5 stars out of 5. I just cut the tip off the last star, so whatever that is!

Coding and designing is not my strong point, but these past few weeks I have learned a lot and am proud to say that I pulled some CSS code right out of my butt and it actually worked! It’s great to be able to have an idea of what you want a web page to do and know what code to write to make it do exactly that.

One of the tools I’ve been using will have to take most of that credit – WampServer. I’m not exactly sure what took me so long to download this, but I’m almost sick to my stomach when I think about how much time I’ve wasted before installing it.

This handy dandy little program is perfect for anyone who customizes Wordpress themes. I’m sure there are lots of other methods but this one works perfectly for me, and it’s allowed me to learn CSS much more quickly than before. Did I mention that WampServer is free?

So what does WampServer do?

Let’s say you want to spruce up your Wordpress theme a little bit, or put up a brand new theme, but you don’t want all your visitors to see any changes (or mistakes) you’ve made until you’re finished. Installing WampServer allows you to use your computer like a server so you can install Wordpress locally. You can make all the changes you want and nobody will ever see. When you’re done, just copy the code and paste over your existing Wordpress files on your regular server.

This is also a great way to mess around with some code to see what does what. Delete some code, save the file, refresh your page, and see what happened. Now you know what that chunk of CSS you just deleted was for. If it was something slightly important, just overwrite the file with the original one you’ve smartly kept on backup.

After years of messing around with CSS, this is hands down the best method I’ve used to figure out just what the hell I’m doing – and in such a short amount of time. Not to mention the fact that I can customize a Wordpress theme in a fraction of the time it used to take me. There’s gold in that thar WampServer.

I’m a very visual person, and I like to see numbers in front of me. I created different reports that I religiously update, and now I’ve added a “word count” report.

I’ve been keeping track of how many words I write each day and keeping my tally in a file on my computer. It assures me that I actually did something positive each day, plus I can strive to write more every time while getting more efficient at it.

Wordpress has a built-in word count tool, but I find that it isn’t entirely accurate so I use a free online tool. I just copy and paste my articles into it and it pops out a big fat number for me.

If you like to challenge yourself, and you’re up for some healthy competition, start keeping track of your own word count and try and beat your record each week.

I’m a bit rusty with my writing, so I wrote 2491 words today. Can you beat that?

Here’s a cool new Wordpress widget you can download for free. It displays how many visitors your blog currently has, as well as how many visitors you’ve had in total that day, plus the country each of the last 5 visitors are from.

Here’s what it looks like.

A widget like this is a fun way to make your blog a little more interactive. Your readers can see how many other people are reading your blog at that very moment, and they can get an idea of where your visitors are from.

You can download the “Online Now” Wordpress widget here.