Widget does not consume much resources, requires no registration, and very intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post.
Get the Widget here: http://www.outbrain.com/get/ratings
17 May 2008
Instant Rating for your Blog Posts
Give readers of your blog ability to express their opinion on your blog content by leaving instant rating. Add the Outbrain Rating Widget to get immediate feedback. The Outbrain Rating Widget is free for bloggers and is very simple to add to your all popular blogging platforms, as Blogger, TypePad, WordPress (hosted), Drupal, or others. After widget installation a simple, but up-to-the-point 5-star rating will be added to the bottom of every post you publish.
13 May 2008
Piwik - Open Source Competitor to Google Analytics
Piwik (previously known as "phpmyvisits") aims to be an open source alternative and direct competitor to the famous statistics from Google Analytics. As both programs are free for its members, the main fight for the users will be on the level of the usability, user interface, and set of features available.
Piwik provides detailed reports on the web site visitors, enhanced statistics per pages popularity, overview of search engine keywords, languages used, traffic origins, and much more. If in US it is just starting its way to the consumers, in Japan it is already well-known to the bloggers and website owners.
What makes Piwik different:
* Open APIs
* Plugins Architecture. New features can be added and unneeded stats can be dropped. In its basic format, there are four different categories - dashboard, visitors, actions, and referrers. Each section includes multiple analytical widgets that can be added and removed easily. Outcomes can be presented as bar graphs, pie charts, or plain text.
* Data abstraction layer
* Customizable dashboard.
* Innovative customizable User Interface. You can drag and drop the widgets you want to display and create the reports you want.
Note, that Piwik should be installed on your webserver, while all the data is stored in your own database.
Give it a try: http://piwik.org/
08 May 2008
BlogIt - New Facebook Application for Bloggers
Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad and other popular blogging services, has launched a new Facebook application designed to broadcast your posts to several of the most popular external publishing systems at once.
Blog It allows you to compose and post updates within the Facebook interface and have them simultaneously appear on any one of the ten supported services, including Movable Type, TypePad, Pownce, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.
The idea behind Blog It is to simplify the process of updating all the various sites and services you use, offering a single interface for updating all your sites. It’s a bit like turning Facebook into a fire hose that sprays your thoughts across the web.
FriendFeed is also toying with similar, though much more limited cross-posting features, like the ability to send comments to Twitter. Blog It, however, offers far more complete updating capabilities.
Which isn’t to say that Blog It is feature complete just yet. For now, you’ll miss niceties like a rich text editor or the ability to upload and include pictures in your posts. In the video below, Six Apart’s David Recordon makes it clear that the company is aware of the application's short-comings and promises feature upgrades in the near future.
But while Blog It may be a work in progress, even in limited form, it’s the easiest way I’ve seen to broadcast posts across platforms. It offers the ability to pick and choose which posts go where on a per-post basis so you’re always in control of who sees what. Every time you add a new service to update, Blog It offers the option to automatically post to that service, though you can always uncheck any of the services when you actually post something.
Blog It is a pretty slick Facebook app, perhaps the best I’ve used. And while it still lacks a few features (OAuth support is reportedly in the works, but for now you’ll have to give Blog It all of your passwords) it definitely makes it easier to broadcast your life to multiple locations. It's a nice cure for the fatigue of having to keep up with all of your data streams by logging into each service separately.
Recordan has hinted elsewhere that Six Apart may expand Blog It to work from other platforms — like Plaxo’s Pulse, or perhaps even as standalone AIR application like Twhirl — but for now Blog It is tied to Facebook.
To get an idea of what Blog It looks like in action, check out the video below where Recordon walks you through the process of setting up and using Blog It (and also offers the best OAuth metaphor I’ve heard: “it’s like a valet key for the web”). If you’d like to jump in with both feet, you can go ahead and add Blog It to your Facebook account.
Blog It allows you to compose and post updates within the Facebook interface and have them simultaneously appear on any one of the ten supported services, including Movable Type, TypePad, Pownce, Twitter, Blogger and WordPress.
The idea behind Blog It is to simplify the process of updating all the various sites and services you use, offering a single interface for updating all your sites. It’s a bit like turning Facebook into a fire hose that sprays your thoughts across the web.
FriendFeed is also toying with similar, though much more limited cross-posting features, like the ability to send comments to Twitter. Blog It, however, offers far more complete updating capabilities.
Which isn’t to say that Blog It is feature complete just yet. For now, you’ll miss niceties like a rich text editor or the ability to upload and include pictures in your posts. In the video below, Six Apart’s David Recordon makes it clear that the company is aware of the application's short-comings and promises feature upgrades in the near future.
But while Blog It may be a work in progress, even in limited form, it’s the easiest way I’ve seen to broadcast posts across platforms. It offers the ability to pick and choose which posts go where on a per-post basis so you’re always in control of who sees what. Every time you add a new service to update, Blog It offers the option to automatically post to that service, though you can always uncheck any of the services when you actually post something.
Blog It is a pretty slick Facebook app, perhaps the best I’ve used. And while it still lacks a few features (OAuth support is reportedly in the works, but for now you’ll have to give Blog It all of your passwords) it definitely makes it easier to broadcast your life to multiple locations. It's a nice cure for the fatigue of having to keep up with all of your data streams by logging into each service separately.
Recordan has hinted elsewhere that Six Apart may expand Blog It to work from other platforms — like Plaxo’s Pulse, or perhaps even as standalone AIR application like Twhirl — but for now Blog It is tied to Facebook.
To get an idea of what Blog It looks like in action, check out the video below where Recordon walks you through the process of setting up and using Blog It (and also offers the best OAuth metaphor I’ve heard: “it’s like a valet key for the web”). If you’d like to jump in with both feet, you can go ahead and add Blog It to your Facebook account.
04 May 2008
Triggit: Add Content and Monetize your Blog with Ease
Triggit offers an interesting approach to enhance the ways of your site monetization. It is a web based application that matches your site content to multiple ad opportunities, through a meta-ad network, having access to millions of ads from numerous networks and allowing to receive one aggregate earnings check.
The biggest advantage of Triggit is a nice ability to drag and drop fitting ads directly into your site from your web browser. No hassle embedding HTML, PHP or CSS code on you site. This drag and drop feature works through JavaScript. If your publishing platform accepts JavaScript, you are in the game. So far the accepted platforms are Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress. The application works as a simple widget, but you can also manually insert the code snipper if you like the certain ad to
appear on your site.
Triggit is also lets a blogger adding YouTube videos and Flickr images to the page easily and in no time without editing HTML or even launching your blog post editor
The bigger issue with this service is related to the browser limitation. Currently, Triggit only works with Flock and FireFox. This leaves all other browser of the page or blog owners out of the picture.
A little video from DownloadSquade shows how the service works.
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