Using Google Alerts to Monitor the Web

Providing fresh quality content ahead of competitors is one of the main keys of the blogging success. But that is not easy to be always “on top” of the things, especially if your blogging empire covers multiple areas of interests.

And here is another free Google service, which can be quite handy to assist you with the Web monitoring for news or any other posts on topics of your interests. It is like having young assistants who are working online and selecting for you the information of interest.

Service is simple, reliable, and with simplistic Google-style interface:

• Enter a search query you wish to monitor.
• Chose result type from the drop-down list, selecting from the following options:
• Everything.
• News.
• Blogs.
• Video.
• Discussions.
• Books.
• Chose monitoring frequency:
• As-it happens.
• Once a day.
• Once a week.
• Results quality:
• Only the best results.
• All results.
• Delivery:
• Your email.
• Your feed.

Website address: http://www.google.com/alerts

How to administrate automatically interactive tasks on multiple social media accounts?

If you consider Twitter as an essential element of your marketing campaign, you may increase its effectiveness significantly by creating automatic rules of interaction between your different accounts in various social media structures.

Many professionals admit that the new service with pretty strange domain http://ifttt.com can be a cornerstone of the automation. IFTTT acronym has, however, pretty descent explanation - it means “If this, then that.” Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that). The “this part” of a task is the Trigger. Some example Triggers are "I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook" or "I tweet on Twitter." The “that part” of a task is the Action. Some example Actions are "send me a text message" or "create a status message on Facebook."

Using this free service, you can set up list of rules-based automatic interactions between Twitter and other popular web apps, including Dropbox, Facebook, or Tumblr. For instance, you can set up a task that will automatically save your Twitter favorites to your Evernote notebook, or a task that will copy your Twitter pictures to your Flickr account, and send you an email, when the task is completed. Your options are endless.

Channels of interaction available:

So, take some time, define useful rules, and let the service do all the administrative jobs.

Website: http://ifttt.com/

Checking your blog for broken links with Xenu's Link Sleuth

As your blog fills up with posts, there is a high probability that the external off-blog links you refer to might become outdated overtime. Also, if you use third-party services to store your images, software, or other reference files, might become broken. Therefore, it is a good idea once awhile to perform blog maintenance and restore the links functionality. However, checking manually one-by-one might be a tiresome and time-consuming procedure. Today, we would like to present a free portable utility, which is going to help you performing the task.

Xenu's Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
• Partial testing of ftp, gopher and mail URLs
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

System requirements:

Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7, WININET.DLL required (included with Internet Explorer).

How to make utility portable (optional):

Download the ZIP package and extract. Extract the installer to a folder of your choice with Universal Extractor. Delete $PLUGINSDIR folder. Launch Xenu.exe.

Developers’ website: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Direct Download Link (latest release 1.3.8): http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP

Free Blogs Pinger - For Multiple Sites to Multiple Services

Several years ago, I have presented the rating list for the free multi-site online pinging services. While it is a good solution, I still find it somehow limited. Most of these services do not accept multiple blogs entrance at the same time, and in almost all services, the list of the links for your blogs to get submitted, is hard coded and cannot be changed.

For me, the ideal solution would be a simple script, when I can add as many blogs as I need, and I can ping all these blogs at the same time to the customer-made list of the sites, I will compile myself.

Today, I would like to present such a script to you, but with one catch. The software does NOT have English interface (at least, I could not find one). The software is in Russian, and since its operation is absolutely simple and straightforward, with my basic translation (I speak Russian fluently), you will be able to use it “as is”.

The software is portable, and does not need to be installed to the hard drive. Actually, it is one executable file with one two windows. In one, you post list of your blogs, in another, there is a preset list of services to ping to, which you can change as you like. Good thing, that after software is closed, all settings are saved in you user files (so, correcting myself, it is not cleanly portable, which is good in a way as when you reopen it next time, the last used listing is automatically loaded, so you do not have to input your custom URLs and pinger leads again).

The software is called PingXpert, and its translated screenshot is below:

Again, operation is simple: in the top window add all your blogs, in the bottom is pre-populated list of services, which you can edit as you wish. Click right button on the bottom and wait. The response code for each service will show, how successful the ping was. If it has reached the target, the code is 200.

Website (in Russian, you can use Google translator if you wish): http://www.pingxpert.com/

Direct Link for Download: http://www.ziddu.com/download/17787121/pingxpertfree_SendBlogPing.exe.html

Please share with me if you are aware on any similar script with English interface.