Do you know Yahoo has a media player that can auto-detect & play all the mp3 links on your site without taking your visitors away from your own page? Yahoo Media Player is still in beta. But what attracts me most is its simplicity to use. From a webmaster perspective, all you need to do is to add a single line of HTML code in your script. And all the things are taken care of automatically. Now whenever you post a mp3 link in your site or in your blog post, Yahoo Media Player will detect it & add a play button just before it.
And when user clicks on that link a floating media player panel will open at the bottom of your page. It will play the next track automatically when the current one is finished & even has a button to play the next track if you don’t want to listen to the current track anymore. It’s like making your page an active audio playlist.
As, you can see, it is quite simple & soothing to the eye. And, yet it has all the basic functionalities. So if you post lots of mp3s in your blog & want users listen to them & stay at your page, it can be a handy tool. I tested it in a Wordpress blog. I just added the single line of HTML in a widget & it worked fine.
Recently I told you about Google url shortening service that you can use with FeedBurner feed to serve your blog updates automatically in Twitter. I told you that I was looking forward to use this fully Google operated service. But I couldn’t access my TwitterFeed account to remove my feed from there as Technorati OpenId is working no more. So I contacted TwitterFeed through Twitter few times & they transferred my feed to a new account that I created. They usually replied back within a day or two & I am quite satisfied with their sincere effort.
From then, I thought I can stick to them. Their service is pretty good after all. For serving blog updates in Twitter, Google has one more option of creating Hash Tags automatically from <category> element of your blog platform like “Labels” element in Blogger. Hash Tags help different Twitter clients to filter & group tweets depending on these tags. But TwitterFeed has one distinctive feature too. You can find the total number of clicks for each of your post that you served as blog update in Twitter. That is also a handy feature. So for now, I am with TwitterFeed
It’s first day of 2010 & I am starting it with a rough review! About a few weeks ago I wrote a post on CopyGator as a potential free Copyscape alternative. I was pretty impressed with their large database & the results that they showed for copied content when I searched for few blogs. But as I tried to submit my RSS feed there to keep track of copied content from my blog, it left me pretty disappointed. Though the page says that my RSS feed is in queue & I will get an overview page within 10-15 minutes, more than 15 days have passed & still no luck. It got stuck in the queue. I mailed their support several days ago, but they didn’t reply. Though it is a free service & I can’t ask much, I just wanted at least a bit better service from their part.
No doubt, when you search for copied content of your blog you usually use CopyScape. They are the leader in checking plagiarism after all. But using their free search I usually get some false results & for unlimited searches you need to purchase their premium account. So it is not bad to look for one or two free CopyScape alternatives that can search for stolen contents from your blog all over the web.
Recently I stumbled on to CopyGator that exactly does that in a complete free way. And you can choose from two neat options to get notified about your stolen content. You can add a small banner like in the screenshot in your blog. And when CopyGator finds a copied content of your blog in blogosphere it will automatically get turned into red.
Or if you don’t want to display that image badge, you have the option to submit your RSS feed to CopyGator & they will create an overview page for you where you can see who copied your content. And you don’t have to do anything anymore. It will keep track of all subsequent posts from then & watch over the blogosphere for any copied part.
The search results seem to be relevant. And according to them, they aggregate data from over two million blog feeds & parse around half a million new blog posts per day. So the database range seems to be huge & there is better chance that you will find the plagiarism. It’s worth to give a try.
Several months back I wrote about Tynt Tracer, a free service that lets you get a backlink automatically from your copied content. Recently they have changed the name of the service to Tynt Insight & it seems they have added more features. And for a limited time they are allowing you to use the Pro features for free. Free means free, without any credit card required.
Some of these pro features give you the detailed stats about which content is most popular in your site & gets copied frequently. You can even find where your content got copied to the page-level, i.e. you can see the particular page that copied your content. Besides, the have a few traffic generation methods for Pro account. Based on the popular content of your site, they will tweet that link automatically from your Twitter account so that you gain more visibility. And you can show custom flash visualizers on your site that will show those popular contents that they analyzed from the statistics. That may attract your visitors to other pages of your site & keep them on your site for a longer time.
So, as it is risk-free think about trying it out. If you don’t try, you never know
Not long ago, before my blog went down, I was looking for some free advertising. I got a chance to put a 150×100 banner on a sidebar of a blog. I was looking for a quick & simple way to create one. BannerSketch was just that kind of service. With easy five steps you can get your banner in no time:
Choose a banner size. All standard banner sizes are there
Create custom colour or you can even upload picture for custom background
Now select number of frames & text to add
Add custom-made border with your chosen colour & size in pixel, if you want
Banner is ready to generate
Get the code & use it. Your advertising banner is ready. No doubt, there are similar services there But I am quite happy using their service. They have some very neat & detailed options to create a custom banner & that’s also in a pretty quick way.
I have previously written a post about updating Twitter automatically with every new blog post that you make. I was using Feedlr service & quite happy with it. But recently I noticed that my last blog post wasn’t showed in my Twitter update. So I checked Feedlr & saw it suspended. I visited the Feedlr blog. There I found that Feedlr was having repeated posts problem due some bugs in the code. The admin of Feedlr is now planning to rectify the code & migrate the site to the Google App. But it will take time.
So I am moving to the other service Twitterfeed. You will keep on getting my latest blog update through Twitter if you wish.
While browsing I have found this cool free tool that can get something out of your blog scrapers. Go & register your site with Tynt Tracer. You will get a line of code that you have to add before </body> tag of your blog page. You can easily find it in Wordpress by going to footer.php file. Now run “Test My Script” to see if it has been correctly installed. You are done. Now when a blog scraper copies any part of your content a link back to your site is added to the copied content. The linkback can be removed manually. But very few scrapers would care to see & do so. Check the stats & find out who copied from you.
Yes, I don’t mean adding PDF file, I mean embedding. Obviously you can easily hyperlink a PDF file. But the user has to download it or open it with Adobe Reader from the browser as a separate file. What about embedding a PDF widget where necessary? Readers can see the PDF directly from your site or blog post. They can even resize the widget to full screen to read it & come back again to your site. Also there is option for downloading the file. Acrobat just do that for you. Sign up for a free account there. Upload your PDF. Now copy the embed code & paste it where necessary. It’s quite simple. Here is an implementation.
Personally I don’t like to use widgets. They tend to make a site slow to load. But this widget really looks cool.
It can be useful if you have more than just a blog. Think you write a blog under a particular niche. Sometimes you write a few articles about the same topic in EzineArticles & other article directories. You would like to share all of these with your readers. Even you may want to share what you read or bookmark on social bookmarking sites about the matter. Just go to RSS Mix & enter respective RSS feeds into the box. Click “Create!” button. You will get a single RSS feed that will combine feeds from all of these sites.
