AddThis is a very popular bookmarking and sharing tool on the Internet. It helps website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web, by making it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content to their favorite social destinations. AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages.
You must have seen the following Addthis button on various websites and blogs:
What can you share with AddThis?
AddThis can be used to share just about anything, including:
Websites
Blogs (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr)
Email newsletters
MySpace profiles
Microsoft Office Live workspaces
Embedded content, such as videos
AddThis offers several different ways to share your content and lots of ways to customize, so you can get the sharing tool that's right for you.
While browsing the net I came across a very informative blog post. I thought it would be a handy resource for the bloggers. The following is the excerpt from the blog post written by Amanda fazani from Blogger Buster:
When you publish a blog with Blogger, the default favicon which appears in your browser navigation bar is Blogger’sfavicon (the unmistakable orange and white logo).
Many Blogger users choose to display their own favicon instead of Bloggers, in order to “brand” their blog with memorable icons in keeping with their blog’s design. It is actually quite easy to add our own favicon to our Bloggerblogs, and instantly adds a sense of professionality to your overall design.
In this post, I’ll explain how easy it is to add a favicon to your Bloggerblog, along with resources for designing your own favicon and where you can host this for free.
What is a favicon?
The word “favicon” is short for “favourites icon”, and is a 16×16px square icon which is associated with a website (or blog). Browsers which support favicons will usually display a website’s favicon in the address bar (to the left of the URL), and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers which support tabbed navigation (such as Firefox and IE8) will also display the favicon next to the page title on each tab.
Favicons are usually found on the root of a domain, and use the .ico extension. For example, the favicon for Blogging Tips can be found here: http://www.bloggingtips.com/favicon.ico
Blogger users do not have access to the root of their blog hosting. This means that unless an alternate favicon is specified, Blogger’sfavicon will display in browsers accessing Blogger powered sites.
In order to add a custom favicon to be displayed in the browser of sites accessing a Blogger powered blog, we need to:
Create our own favicon
Upload this to an image host
Edit the Blogger template to reference this alternative favicon.
Let’s go through these steps in order.
How to create your own favicon for Blogger
A favicon is a small image, measuring 16×16 pixels. Favicons are usually made with the .ico extension, though it’s also possible to use .GIF and .PNG files to reference a favicon.
If you are a budding ‘Photoshopper’, you can create your own favicon from scratch. Don’t forget to use a canvas measuring 16 pixels square (or create a square image which can be reduced to this size) and save as a .GIF or .PNG image.
Those who already use a recognised icon for their site/blog logo can easily generate a favicon using one of these free services:
HTML-Kit favicon generator (download as favicon package) – Enables you to create a static or animated favicon; you can even create a favicon quickly using your Twitter username!
Alternatively you can download a “ready made” favicon from these sites:
Iconlet.com (use the 16 px square version of your favourite icon)
Upload your favicon to the web
While Blogger does not offer hosting for files we use in our blogs (eg: JavaScript, documents and HTML files), we can upload images for use in our blog posts which are hosted by Picasa.
After uploading an image to our blog post (even if this post is not published) we can extract the URL of the image and reference this in our Blogger template code. Surprisingly, we can upload .ico files to our blog posts with Blogger (as well as any .PNG or .GIF favicons you may have created too).
To upload your favicon to Picasa through your blog, simply create a new blog post and choose to insert an image in your post. Choose the favicon you have created/generated/downloaded and upload this to your post.
Then either preview your post or view in the rich text editor so your favicon image can be seen on the screen. Right click this favicon and choose to copy the location of the image. Save this to your clipboard or paste into a text file for easy reference.
If you prefer to use a different host for your favicon, here are a few free hosts which support .ico files:
Then save your template. Now when you view your blog in your browser, you should see your favicon appear beside the web address and in the bookmarks folder (if you have bookmarked your site).
Note: it is very important that you paste the favicon tags just before the closing tag, not earlier in the template code. This is because Blogger generates favicon tags when your blog pages are generated which would otherwise override your custom favicon references.
Important information when using custom favicons for Bloggerblogs
If you use Internet Explorer 6 or older, the favicon will not appear unless you have bookmarked your blog and refreshed your browser.
Also, any services which automatically extract the favicon for a site (such as Blogger’s “Feed” and “Blog List” gadgets) will still reference the Bloggerfavicon rather than our own custom favicons. This is because such auto-discovery scripts reference the favicon hosted on the same server as the website, rather than the favicon which is referenced in the HTML code of the page. As yet, there is no way to present our custom favicons to services which automatically discover the favicon for a site.
Using signatures is a simple and effective way to make e-mail messages, blogs and websites more stylish, underline their individuality and get the author's energy across. So, what can you say about animated signatures that give the real impression that the author is signing right in front the reader's eyes?
MyLiveSignature offers you everything necessary to create both static and animated signatures and add them to your email messages, to blogs, to your posts on forums and on websites.
There are three ways to get your signature on the site.
1. Imitate your signature yourself using step-by-step signature creation wizard.
2. Imitate your signature yourself using the on screen signature draw widget.
3. Write your signature with a pencil, pen or a felt-tip pen on a sheet of paper, scan the sheet and let the designers create the signature by sending the scanned image via a special form.
The outbrain widget is a simple yet powerful ratings & recommendations tool that blends seamlessly into any blog design, inheriting your own look and feel. The widget includes an interactive 5-star rater, and personalized recommended links from your blog as well as others.
User ratings are one of the best ways to get instant feedback from your readers. A simple click of the mouse and Voila! - their opinion is counted. The widget also displays the average rating and number of users who rated the post.
The widget works with a personalization algorithm, which tries to compute a unique Personalized Relevancy Score for each reader, and for every item that is viewed. If the widget has enough data, the reader will see a message indicating how relevant this post may be. The algorithm is mostly based on a reader's rating history so... the more ratings that are cast, the more content can be personalized for each reader.
Installation takes minimal effort and does not require any registration. A few clicks and you are done. The widget supports TypePad, Blogger, Wordpress (installed), Drupal, and custom Javascript for your site.
Widget features -
Blends into your blog design - It's your blog, and your content ratings, and there is no reason for it to look any different. All outbrainblog widgets inherit the hosting site's styling properties. Here are two examples:
No marketing crap - You won't see an outbrain logo or marketing language such as "Powered by outbrain" on the widget itself.
Adgitize is an advertising platform for bloggers. It is quite similar to Entrecard. You earn points by doing a variety of things relating to your blog and those points are then converted to cash. The more points you earn, the more money you’ll receive. You can also use Adgitize to advertise your blog on hundreds of other blogs for just $14 for a one month ad.
There are many of ways of earning points with Adgitize. You can earn 100 points for each day you publish a new post on your blog. You can only do this a maximum once per day but if you do it everyday; it’ll really accumulate many points.
You can also earn points for page views and ad views on your blog. The difference is that the ad views count can be higher if you have more than one Adgitize ad on your blog. So if I’ve received 40 page views today, but my ad views count is 80 because I have two Adgitize ads. The max amount of ads you can show is 10. If you have the max 10 ads on your blog, you’d be earning points for every page view, but x10 for ad views. That’s a lot of points!
Another way to earn points is by clicking on the ads of other blogs. If you see an Adgitize widget on someone’s blog - you’ll earn points for clicking on it. For this, you have to be logged in and a member of Adgitize. If you click on all of the available ads, you’ll receive 100 points for that day. It works similar to dropping an Entrecard on someone’s blog.
If you are looking for e-paper on the net or want to read e-paper from other countries, than www.epapercatalog.com is the site for you. It contains the list of online newspapers & e-papers from across the world. In a sense it is worldwide online newspaper hub. It lists more than 320 eEditions from 51 countries in 35 languages.
Newspapers are neatly categorized by countries arranged broadly as Asia Pacific, Africa, Europe, Middle East and America. You can also find online newspapers based on the language.
www.Qipit.comis a new online mobile service that lets you use your camera phone or digital camera to make a digital copy of any written or printed document to store, share via email or fax, or publish to the web. Qipit allows you to convert all of your written and printed documents into scan-quality digital copies (in black and white or color) for convenient online storage, without the need of a portable scanner, copier, or cell software. It's easy. All you do is take a picture of notes, a whiteboard or a document with your camera phone or digital camera; send it to qipit as a multimedia message (MMS) from your camera phone, via email or your qipit account; and qipit turns your photo into a clear digital copy, in PDF or JPEG format, that you can store or send to an email or fax number from your cell phone as a multimedia message (MMS) or mobile email, or on your PC via email or your qipit account. You can even publish your qipit copy to the web. Qipit is like a portable scanner, mobile copier, and a mobile fax machine, all in one.
What you can do with Qipit?
Turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs)
Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone
Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing
Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting
