One thing you cannot ignore about your blog is backing up the data. You don’t want to wake up to find your hosting mess up the backups and you have lost all your data.

Relax. I know just the thought of that would make a hard working blogger like you shudder.

I had written a detailed post here on different ways of backing up your blog. See if you find it something you can use or at least get you thinking in the right direction.

One such way is using an online blog backup service such as BlogBackupOnline.com. At the time of writing that post, it was a beta service and they stayed in beta for almost a year and now they have come out of beta. BlogBackupOnline is a cool service that lets you backup your blogs for free (up to 5MB). The great thing about this service is that it takes no technical knowledge to set up your blog backup.

You sign up for a free account, provide them the url of your blog and they will take care of the rest.

Now, they are in a mode called Freemium which means they are still free for most starter blogs with less than 5MB of data. But, they are also ready to cater to bloggers who want to back more data as well who require technical support.

Professional account will include:

• 50 MB of storage
• Support for backing up content linked from your blog
• Support for restoring your blog
• Email support
• $4.17 per month ($49.95 per year)

Enterprise account will include:

• 1 GB of storage
• Support for backing up content linked from your blog
• Support for restoring your blog
• Phone support
• $8.30 per month ($99.95 per year)

You have nothing to lose by trying out this free service and can sleep tight knowing you won’t lose your blog content. Again, it is always wise to have multiple backup strategies but this will be a good start if you don’t have any at the moment.

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Blatant plug warning!

WordPress and Firefox have something in common. They are both extendable by user generated add-ons - WordPress Plugins & Firefox Extensions.

I love finding and trying out new Firefox Extensions and WordPress Plugins. You can find all these in the official Firefox Add-ons directory or the WordPress Plugins directory. But, often times I have found useful plugins through someone else’s recommendation.

Top Firefox Extensions

So, I started out creating my Top Firefox Extensions list. This list serves as a reference for myself as well as anyone else looking for great Firefox extensions recommendation.

Top WordPress Plugins (65+)

With this list being the most viewed post in ShanKri-la, I decided to make a Top WordPress Plugins (65+ plugins) list where I could categorize and publish the plugins I try and use. I have just started creating more blogs and find myself going to ShanKri-la Admin Panel to find out what plugin I was using. This list is going to help me a lot and I hope for you too.

15 WordPress Tweaks for a (New) WordPress Blog

I have published my collection of WordPress Tweaks, tips & tricks at Techie-Buzz.com that I gathered and implemenred in various WordPress blogs over the months. I wanted this list to be an excellent resource for a new blogger on WordPress blogging platform to get the most out of this wonderful solution. Even if you have been on WordPress, I am sure you’ll find a few tweaks that you can implement.

Plus, when my friends or fellow bloggers ask me about a Firefox Extension or a WordPress Plugin I use, I can just direct them to these lists. Such a time saver!

I am not trying to create a link bait post with these lists by creating it once and leaving it to rot. The first two lists are to be constantly updated as I find new extensions and plugins. So, don’t forget to bookmark the lists to come back for new stuff.

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Black Friday is gone. But, great deals and savings on items you buy online are not limited to after Thanksgiving day sale. You can find them year round if you know where to find them.

ProBargainHunter is a great site for deal news and coupons. They are all about finding great deals from around the Internet.

So, you love frequenting popular deal sites on the Internet and love sharing those great finds with your friends and family. What if, you could get rewarded for sharing those great deals?

That’s where Buxr.com comes in and it is by the same folks I just mentioned. Buxr.com, just launched on December 3rd, is not only a way for you to find great deals, shop and save money, but if you had a blog or website, you can share these deals with everyone and get rewarded when someone makes use of the offers.

Quick facts about Buxr

• Hand picked hot deals
• Deals are tagged and categorized helping us to find similar deals by same merchant.
• Buxr widget is highly customizable and you can track clicks and conversions in the control panel.
• Widgets show the latest hot deals and can be narrowed down to show certain deals based on your niche.
• Referral program offers 10% of the people you refer’s commission for 12 months!
• I was offered a $10 commission just for signing up in beta but now that they have launched it, it may not be available.

Win a 8GB iPod Touch

Buxr.com has a contest running now that offers a 8GB iPod Touch to the person with the most referrals. They are also giving away a 4GB iPod Nano & a 4GB USB Flash Drive for the runner ups. You can periodically check the standings and you can keep promoting it until January 4th when they announce the winners. Even if you don’t win one of the 3, you can still win the 10% referral commissions.

Should I Join?

I realize Buxr.com might not look like a great fit at first look for every niche. But, the way I see it, everyone loves a great deal on the Internet. With Christmas shopping on top of the list for those celebrating Christmas, this is a fun way to find and share deals with your friends and family.

There are plenty of ways to make money online but I love this idea of trying to make some money while you can save some yourself finding good deals.

I am finding myself checking this widget everyday as they really do post some of the hottest deals on the Internet.

If you would like to show some referral love, you could sign up using this link for a Buxr Widget. (affiliate link)

Are you tired of logging in to your Google Analytics or your blog hosts CPanel interface to look at where your visitors came from? Those methods are absolutely great for analyzing data once in a while. How would you like to see who is visiting, from where they are visiting from and where they left to? All in real time.

FEEDJIT

FEEDJIT brings real time traffic monitoring to your blog right in your sidebar in the form of a widget. Some quick facts about this excellent service:

• No Registration required
• Shows you which location your visitor is from
• Shows you which site referred them
• Shows you what they clicked to leave your site
• Easy to customize options
• Customize the widget, colors of the widget
• Easy click access to add the widget to Blogger & Typepad blogs
• For other blogs, just simply copy and paste the script to your blog
• You could also get a live traffic map and it offers similar customization options.
• Its completely FREE!

Real time monitoring can be fun as well as informative about the behavior of your readers. Instead of trying to come up with ideas of how this can be useful, I am going to open up the comment thread to you to tell me how you would use this information.

By K-IntheHouse of ShanKri-la

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Diwali is a great Indian Festival of Lights. ShanKri-la is celebrating reaching 200+ RSS subscribers and Diwali 2007 by giving away some cool stuff.

What do I win?
2 winners will be selected randomly and each of them will receive one of the following:

• 1GB Kingston DataTraveller USB Flash Drive [OR]
• 1GB Kingston PhotoLoader SD Memory Card - comes preloaded with software to allow automatic transfer of photos to your PC & upload to Shutterfly.

How Do I Enter?
You can do any one of the below to enter the contest:

• Post about it in your blog with a link to the contest post. It doesn’t have to be a post by itself. Even speed linking would do. Just leave a comment or use our Contact page with a link to your post - 5 entries
  As a bonus, you get a free PR4 link back to your contest post in a post announcing the winner of the contest.
• Subscribe to our RSS feed. Before the end of the contest, you will get a secret word at the bottom of a post (it will appear only in the feed). Email it back to me to gain your entries. I will make sure it is easy to find in the RSS feed. - 2 entries
• Stumble our home page. Just leave a comment if you did and I’ll take your word for it - 1 entry

Do just one of the above or do them all and gain 8 entries! If you already read ShanKri-la in your feed reader, all you have to do is email me when you spot the secret word to gain 2 entries!

Contest Ends
We will randomly choose a winner from the entries on Wednesday Nov 7, 2007. So, get your entries in by midnight EST Nov 6th.

With a contest so easy to enter, what are you waiting for? Get your entries in today!

Organic search traffic is essential for any blog that is hoping to monetize with ad programs like Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, etc. Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in garnering your share of search engine traffic. How a search engine perceives your site is very crucial in this.

In our day to day blogging we link out to several sites. Search engines follow these links (unless you specify rel=nofollow tag) and assumes you give a positive vote to the site you have linked to. Likewise, other sites link to your site as well. Depending on the quality of the site you are linking to or the site linking to you, your search engine ranking can be affected.

So, how do you go about checking for good links and bad links in your blog?

Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker

This excellent tool scans the url you provide and checks for bad links and flags problem areas in your site. After it has scanned all the links in your site, it shows the total number of links, number of unique links and number of questionable links.

Here are a few things this tool shows:

• Link Density: It refers to the number of links in a single page. A high number of links (over 100) in a single page will be looked at as a red flag according to Google Webmaster Guidelines.
• Bad Neighborhood Warning: The tool shows a warning if your blog has an anchor text in a link to a usually spammy industry like sex, gambling or pharmaceutical. This is probably just a false warning. For example, my post titled ‘Check for Sex offenders in your area’ threw a warning flag even though it was a genuine post.
• Blog Spam: If a page you have linked to is in a domain which is appearing as a link from a lot of blogs, it could be indicative of blog comment spamming. My recent link to buymybrokenipod.com was flagged with this. In fact, my links from Blog About Your Blog is flagged as Blog Spam by this tool as I contribute as an author as well as a commentator quite often.
• 404 Not found: A handful of these isn’t usually a problem. To a search engine, a site that returns a lot of 404 errors would means lower trust factor. So, you may need to check the 404 errors in your site and correct the errors.

As you can see, this tool is not 100% fool proof but it can give you a very good overall idea of who you are linking to and how a search engine spider will look at your blog. For eg. my archives page has links to all my previous posts and shows 306 links. I had previously used robots.txt file to stop the bots from spidering this page but I’ll have to recheck if it’s still working.

Also, check out my previous post on Free tools to Check the Health of Your Blog.

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous and incremental process. Tools such as the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Checker can be a great addition to your toolbox that help with making your blog a little bit more optimized.

I would love to hear about any other tools you use in the pursuit for SEO nirvana! Drop a comment below if you have one.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la - where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable. (RSS)

Blogging is fun but sometimes it can be hard work. If you use Firefox for browsing, you will be amazed at how your tool for browsing can be transformed into a tool that supercharges your blogging experience!

Here are some Firefox extensions (in no particular order) that can give you that extra oomph in blogging. I have included a few tips on how you can leverage these extensions in various aspects of blogging so that this post doesn’t end up being another list of Firefox extensions.

1. Clippings - If you find yourself typing information over and over again in web page forms or forums or in your email, you will absolutely love this extension. Just type once and save it to access it in 2 clicks from your context menu or status bar. Clippings Manager offers folders to organize your Clippings and an option to export and import your clippings between computers.
   Tip: I use Clippings to store my frequently used blog post urls that I refer to or link to in comments. The bottom meta text in this post is from my Clippings.
2. Copy Plain Text - When you are trying to copy text to quote someone or provide an excerpt from another blog post, it can be annoying to paste the text with all the original formatting. This simple extension adds an option to your right click menu to copy plain text.
3. FireFTP - An excellent ftp client that will open right in your browser. Upload/download pictures or files to your blog host from within your browser. Features like directory comparison, directory sync, SSL encryption, search and filtering makes this a valuable tool for your blogging arsenal.
4. InformEnter - Clippings is great for big blurbs of repetitive text that would like to copy. But, aren’t you tired of typing your information in web forms over and over again? InformEnter adds a small clickable icon next to each field and you can click on it to enter the information you need. You can toggle it on and off with a single click on an icon in the status bar.
   Tip: Create different profiles and switch easily. I have one for commenting in blogs - with the usual Name, email & web address. I have another for registering for user accounts in various web sites. I have one for shopping with my home address. You can also store your frequently used blog post URLs with your comment profile.
5. Screengrab - I love adding pictures/screenshots to my blog posts. A picture is worth thousand words indeed. Gone are the days when you would have to printscreen the whole page and then use Microsoft Paint to crop the image you want. Use ScreenGrab to snipe just a portion of the page you are looking at save it to your computer or clipboard. You have option to grab just your mouse selection or complete page or just the visible part. You can set the option beforehand to save it to either jpg or png.
   Tip: If you’d like to resize, edit, crop some more or add some effects to the picture right after taking it, try a portable freeware called FastStone Capture. It is fast and offers more screen capture options like freehand selection and comes with a really capable image editor. The image you capture automaticall opens in the fast editor and you save it as it is or resize/work on it before saving it. With FastStone, you are not limited to screenshots of stuff in your browser.
6. ScribeFire - Previously named Performancing, it is a blog editor for Firefox. It is a love and hate relationship for a lot of bloggers with this extension. It is very capable and has a lot of options and would be great for anyone who would like to write from within the browser. Also, it could be very handy if you are trying to write on your laptop with no internet connection. You could just Publish it to your blog from the editor as soon as you have an internet connection.
7. SearchStatus - This extension is mostly known and used for SEO. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to use this. In its very basic form, while surfing other blogs quickly see their Google Pagerank, Alexa rank and Compete rank with this extension. When you are looking at blogs with dofollow enabled for comments, this can be of great assistance to help determine where to concentrate your commenting to gain backlinks.
   It also features other SEO features such as keyword density analyzer, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links and more.
   Tip: By commenting in ShanKri-la (after 2 comments), you start getting free PR3 backlinks! A lot of blogs have top commentator plugin enabled and it could be easy way to getting a prominent link for free.
8. ScrapBook - I could write a whole post about ScrapBook. Its Google Notebook in steroids. Better yet, it resides in your browser and requires no signing in!
   Instead of reiterating all its features, I have Screengrab-ed the list of features for your reference. It’s so feature-rich that you would want to cry when you start using it. The options are mind blowing, so take your time setting it up as you go and as you get familiar with all its capabilities.
9. StumbleUpon - Facing blogger’s block? Some might suggest taking a break. But, if you are trying to make money blogging, taking a break might not be an option. Get a StumbleUpon account and start stumbling your favorite topics. Inspiration comes standard with this extension.
   Note: Even though it is available as an add-on, you are actually installing a toolbar.
10. OneClick Installer for WordPress - This a WordPress Plugin + Firefox extension combo. Once you have this installed in your WordPress blog, installing plugins and themes are just a click away in your right click menu in Firefox. A real time saver. No more FTP for installing themes & plugins.

I hope this list brings atleast a couple of new ones to your attention. If you find atleast one of these extensions that is going to supercharge your blogging, then my time spent writing this post is well worth it.

Let me know if it did and please share your favorite Firefox extensions that help you blog efficiently.

To read more technology related topics, visit ShanKri-la - where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.

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Getting targeted traffic to your blog is an incredibly nice goal to have for a blogger. And what if you could get this for free?

Yes, BlogRush is a free service that is all the rage in the blogosphere. It is kind of a multi-level pyramid scheme and the whole setup is explained by Maki by DoshDosh very well. And the blogs your content will be shown is supposed to be contextual. So, if your blog is about making money, then your posts will show up on similar money making blogs.

As a short overview of how it works,

• Sign up for a free account
• Install the BlogRush widget in your blog
• Your blog will be shown in relevant blogs as many times as your widget gets seen in your blog (credits)
• Refer someone to signup and you get their credits on top of the credits you earn from your blog (up to 10 levels)

From reading things around the blogs, this seems to be catching up like wildfire. I have installed it in my blog and you can see it in action here in the sidebar as well.

You can use my referral link below to sign up (and show me some love) or click on the widget in the sidebar to show some love to Blog About Your Blog.

Free BlogRush Signup

Even though there is no guarantee to getting huge traffic, any free traffic is good. But, for a free service you have nothing to lose in testing how this works.

[via Chris at Blog-Op]