If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, don’t let fear that you don’t know how to blog, or enough about technology, or that you might not be a good enough writer keep you from taking the plunge. Everything that you need to know about blogging and blog tools is available for free on resource sites like this guide to how to start a blog, and frankly all over the Internet. in recent years setting up a blog has become much easier, and many web hosts offer free installation software that is pretty much one-click. Once you’re set up, remember that you can move at your own pace; no one says that you absolutely must post every single day to have a successful blog of which you will be proud.

Maybe the expense of creating and maintaining a blog has put you off from getting started. Well, aside from hosting costs and registering your own domain name (if that’s something you desire) there is virtually no expense at all that you must necessarily undertake. The fact is that many bloggers have very large and very popular blogs that not only cost next to nothing to own and operate, but that bring in much, much more than hosting costs! In addition, if you’d like to start a blog and literally spend nothing, blogging platforms like blogger and WordPress offer free hosting, without having to register your own domain. Most people would prefer to spend the $10 or so per year to register their own imaginative personalized domain name, and the few dollars a month that it will cost to self host a site, but it’s really up to the blog owner.

As far as technological know-how goes, hosting companies like GoDaddy and hostgator offer the aforementioned one-click blog set up, and if you get stuck there as 24/7 customer support waiting to help walk you through. It really is quite simple though; you’ll most likely be very surprised. Once you’ve got your blog set up, almost all of your interaction with it will be through your own password-protected backdoor to the administrative control panel. Here you will create posts, add photos and video, manage comments that others leave on your blog, and make changes to your blogs functionality and appearance. If all this sounds very abstract, not to worry; dive in and you’ll see how easy it is. If you go with WordPress, you will have a lot of fun choosing the theme that you install on top of your basic WordPress installation. It’s incredible the range of looks for your blog that you can test out with a couple clicks and switch over to literally with one click. I want to emphasize that it is not necessary to spend any money for an excellent WordPress theme, however one that I use on several of my own blogs is The Thesis Theme for WordPress, and although it is not free, it has many features that make it easier for you as a new blogger to quickly change the look of your site with zero tech knowledge. Just something to think about.

If you’ve been wondering if you have what it takes to create posts on your blog, known generically as “content”, I cannot advise you strongly enough to put the doubts aside and get started! This is not school and no one is grading you on the quality of your production. Regardless of the theme, style and subject matter of your site, believe that the world will be a better place for your publication of your own thoughts, flights of fancy, political diatribes, tributes to children or spouses or automobiles, or whatever else inspires and drives you to either write about what you’re interested in, or take photos or video of it, or all of the above. Case in point: that was a ridiculous run-on sentence, but it didn’t hurt anyone!

Part of the beauty of the blog form is that there are very few rules. Most people approach their blog as a sort of public diary, less personal than a private daily journal, and hope that introducing themselves and their thoughts to the world will provoke responses from others, usually in the form of comments in the comments section of each post. Your blog will be found over time by people who either share your interests or who enjoy your attitude or writing style, and trust me they will leave comments for you. The amazing thing is that the geography that formerly separated people with common interests suddenly becomes less relevant when other people discover your blog, and you will be astounded at the places in the world from where you will gain readers, if you post regularly. People come together almost as if by magic, because of their genuine commonalities, despite traditional barriers.

Many people conceive of their blog as a commercial platform of one kind or another, whether it be as an online multimedia resume, or to sell specific services or products. Even if you don’t think you have anything to sell, at least right now, just creating a regular readership can indirectly become a source of income. You’ve probably heard of bloggers who make a full-time living from their blogs, and this is most certainly something that happens. Blogging has become a sort of informal journalism, a meritocracy of ideas where people who can regularly produce interesting or valuable content are rewarded by having enough regular traffic so that their blogs become online billboards for third-party advertising, or as platforms for a the blogger to sell his or her own products or services. There are a million places on the net that will help you learn how to blog for money, should you decide to purse it.

Asking how to communicate successfully is exactly the same as asking how to blog successfully: the answer is sincerely and thoughtfully. Regardless of your subject matter, this approach will serve you well. Don’t be too self-conscious and most definitely don’t allow any doubts regarding costs, the technical know-how required, or your own ability to communicate restrict you from getting started today with your own blog.

Why WordPress

For many people WordPress has become almost synonymous with blogging. There are many reasons for its success as a blogging tool, some of which are only really becoming clear now, but suffice it to say that if you intend to start a blog nowadays, you really have to give WordPress some very serious consideration. Since it works well as a blogging platform for so many people you would expect it to have breathtaking flexibility, and it really, really does. In this article I’ll look at just a few of the reasons why it’s such a good solution for people who want to create a web presence that is at once visually impressive and also allows for easy addition of content in absolutely any form or combination, all while requiring very little in the way of technical skills.

WordPress Makes You Feel Like A Graphic Designer

There are now many tens of thousands of WordPress themes available to apply to your basic WordPress installation. These themes or templates establish the basic look and feel of your website. Once you have cleared the minor technical complexity of installing WordPress on your host it’s just a few clicks to find and swap out themes, testing them to see which one you like the best. Expect to have so many options that you have a hard time choosing between suitable templates and establishing your site’s basic look. There are some functional differences between themes, but the main differences have more to do with aesthetics. If you decide you’d like to change your theme down the road it’s as easy to do two years from now as it is when you first set up your blog, by the way.

It’s quite easy to find very good free themes or templates all over the Internet, as you might expect. In fact the word “ecosystem” has been applied to the hundreds or even thousands of people worldwide who spend time creating WordPress themes. Very often these web developers or designers are first rate programmers and graphic artists, and you will probably be amazed at the quality and variety of templates that they create and make available, often asking nothing more of you as a user of their theme than to keep the link back to their website somewhere on your site.

Naturally a lot of these professionals charge for a license to use themes that they create, but the cost rarely exceeds $100. For people who are not very technically inclined, the support that comes with a premium theme license probably makes it worth the money spent, especially if one is not familiar or comfortable with basic programming.

If you’re reading this as a blogging neophyte you’re probably wondering if it’s necessary to buy premium theme to have a WordPress blog or website that is elegant and functional. The answer is that it really is not necessary, especially if you don’t mind learning a little bit about basic programming such as CSS (cascading style sheets) and HTML. If your motivation for starting a blog with WordPress is more about business or simply creating content and you really aren’t interested in getting to the nuts and bolts of your theme when you want to modify it, I would seriously consider paying for a premium theme, though. Again, the ready answers to questions you might have should you decide to customize your theme, or if you have problems, will most likely be well worth the money you spend.

It has to be said also that bloggers who have absolutely no desire taken into the technical aspects of their blog can easily find web programmers on eLance and other sites who are capable of major or minor modifications. The success of WordPress benefits you here again– platform success equals support opportunities for experts, so they are easy for you to find.

All this leads us to a primary part of the attraction of using WordPress as your blog tool, and its overall success: it is completely functional and customizable right out of the box with a learning curve that can be measured in hours, but if you have technical capability or interest you can use WordPress in ways that are only limited by your imagination. A lot of people find that they grow in technical proficiency over time as they familiarize themselves with the inner workings of WordPress. Again though, if your only interest is in writing or sharing your photography or video, you will be well served by WordPress and its compelling aesthetics, as a container for the content you want to create.

10 WordPress Plug-ins For Every Need

In addition to themes, WordPress is attractive as a blog tool because of further functional enhancements you can easily make with plug-ins and widgets. These are small bits of code that you can easily download and install on your site. If the theme houses your content, plug-ins and widgets might be analogous to interior and exterior customizations of the basic structure that expands what the blog can do, beyond what the theme establishes. There are many many thousands of plug-ins available and as a quick example of what they do, take a look at this plug-in, which allows you to
As WordPress has evolved it has become simpler to install plug-ins: as with themes, it’s usually simply a matter of finding what you want and installing it with a few clicks. Most often these plug-ins are free, although they usually come with an appeal to make a donation to the programmer if you find the plug-in useful.

Your Domain Name On Your Host Or WordPress.org

Another benefit of choosing WordPress to be your blogging platform is that you have a choice as to whether you want to install it on your own unique domain name and pay for your own hosting, or let WordPress.org host it for you for free. In the latter case you would choose a URL or domain name whose format will be username.wordpress.com, where “username” is a name you choose. Many bloggers, especially those who aim to create commercial sites, prefer to purchase their own domain name and pay for hosting, but either way the Wordpress software is an option for your blog.

By the way, it used to be that if you did buy a domain name and host your own blog, you were more or less on your own when it came to installing the WordPress software by file transfer protocol (ftp). This is no longer the case though, as many hosting companies will supply you with software auto installers that make database creation and a file uploads to your host as simple as a few clicks. Be sure and ask the hosting company you are considering if they offer Fantastico or something similar. They will know what you mean! This makes the prospect of having and controlling your own .com (or other extension) domain name even more attractive. Other blogging platforms such as blogger offer free hosted blogs, but if you want a blogger blog, self hosting it is not an option at this time.

Making Money Using Blog Monetization Techniques Or As A Virtual Storefront

Whether your motivation for starting a blog is to make money or to simply share things that interest you, chances are you’ve thought about ways to bring in a little bit of income with it. WordPress as a platform can accommodate monetization elements ranging from small ads and banners to helping you establish a purely commercial storefront for your online business, whatever its scale. Again we see that with the flexibility of WordPress, a blog can be almost anything you’d like, as its function and appearance are really constrained only by your own imagination.

SEO Benefits With WordPress

A major source of traffic to most websites are search engines like Google. To ensure that your site can be found by them, the internal structure of your site, the programming of it, must be optimized to be friendly towards the virtual robots that scour the Internet, enabling search engines to create indexes of websites and webpages, hopefully including yours. Does it sound like a lot of work, and a lot to learn?

If you build a site from scratch using HTML or other labor-intensive methods, you’ll have to create it with an eye toward how it appears to search engines. WordPress makes it very easy to simply create content that will be presented, by default, in a way that is quite easy to read by the search engines. The degree to which your blog will be optimized so that search engines can find and crawl it easily will vary depending on what theme you choose for your blog and many other factors. But features baked right into WordPress, such as categories and tags, will ensure that you have at least a basic level of so-called SEO. There are also many, many WordPress plug-ins available that can help you optimize your blog for search engines even further.

Other blogging platforms such as Blogger or Movable Type help to establish a site as search engine friendly as well, but suffice it to say that WordPress makes SEO easy.

photo credit: Julie, Dave & Family

There isn’t a blogger out there who doesn’t use images-I mean photographs-to transform their site from something akin to a book into a true multimedia experience. It’s part of the compelling nature of blogging for both readers and content creators that these sites of ours are not limited to text. And after all if you have something to share a picture can convey so much.

We face a dilemma though, when it comes to putting photos into blogs. If you do a lot of photography or if your purpose for blogging is to showcase your own photography, you may never feel the desire to use photos taken by others. But for the vast majority of bloggers, even those of us who do take our own photos, using a photograph that has inspired us or that conveys a point in a post that we create is often a temptation.

The fact is that there are different categories of rights that are applied to a photo that appears on the web. Many photos you find online are off-limits for  uncredited commercial republishing, i.e. using them for your own blog, as they would be if you owned an offline magazine and appropriated and used images you found in other publications without permission.

Many people do simply take these online photos and place them on their sites, but in addition to leaving themselves open for possible legal action, using the creative efforts of others without their permission is stealing, whether we care to admit it or not. Crediting the owner of a photo in an attempt to sidestep this fact is of no consequence if permission was not explicitly granted, and let’s face it, you’re probably not going to attempt to find out who owns rights to the image, much less ask for permission to use it.

Why have I taken 300 words just to explain the basic problem of finding images to use on a blog? Because for years I had no good solution. I have nowhere near enough variety in my own photos to address the needs of my blogs, and a fast, simple way to find quality photos that have been OK’ed for general commercial usage by their owners, has eluded me. This all drives home why the solution to the problem, which I am about to share with you, is indeed a very valuable resource and time saver.

photo credit: JoeChavez

The Photodropper plug-in for WordPress is an absolutely fantastic way to find free, high-quality photographs to use for your blog, quickly. Photos that you find through it have no rights issues because every single one of them has been designated as being under the Creative Commons license by the photographer, which allows you to use and even modify them, as long as you give credit. After it helps you find a photo and use it, Photodropper automatically put a small text credit underneath the image.

Here’s how it works: simply search and install the plug-in through your WordPress dashboard. When you do a post and you’d like to place a photograph that is somehow related to your subject or just to set a visual tone, simply hit the Photodropper icon. Enter a keyword that describes what you have in mind. You’ll be presented with thumbnails of photographs from the Flickr catalog that you may use, that are tagged with the keyword you typed in. If I type in an obscure keyword or one that describes an abstraction, I may be presented with very few choices, but if I keep it concrete I’ll often get dozens of choices.

The quality here is often very, very good. Granted, there is also a lot of mediocrity as well. But it’s a very rare case where I don’t find something usable and fitting to a post that I am doing.

Photodropper lets me choose from three different sizes of images, and as I say the photographer credit pops in automatically.

photo credit: Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho

By enabling photographers to designate photos as being licensed as Creative Commons, Flickr encourages exposure of good photographers based on the merit of their photos as determined by millions of Flickr users. While the images find fitting homes all over the Internet, making bloggers’ lives easier, creative people whose work might have remained unknown can get some help in establishing themselves as photographers.

What blogging tools have you found to help the task of adding photographs to your blog articles and posts? With all the WordPress plug-ins out there it wouldn’t surprise me if even better tools than Photodropper are now available. I would love to hear what’s worked for you-please let us all know in the comments.

I wrote this a while ago as part of a suggestion to a friend who wanted to start a personal blog but was having mixed feelings about format. If the blog was meant to be personal should he include a lot of extra detail to give context as to what was happening in his day-to-day life? My opinion was that you could never fill people in entirely even if you wrote a autobiography so not become too concerned with the length or amount of detail in your “about me” page, or even in your posts, unless it’s pertinent to your point.

Why try and bring everyone up to date as you begin your blog? Let the details come out as you go and they will establish the setting entirely. Involve the reader in small interesting things that are of you and your life, that are enough in themselves to create interest in your site. Otherwise you risk getting to heavy-handed and pretentious over presentation. Trust that you and your take on things are interesting enough to carry your writing and your site.

This applies to the abstract thread that runs through blog posts as well as the “real life” elements that you include also.

As to style: should your imagined or intended audience to find your approach and your tone? You count too many different approaches and sensibilities in your friends and acquaintances to really write “for” anyone but yourself. You haven’t the slightest idea who will run across your blog anyway. To proceed in the most honest way possible, knowing that you will defy the interest of some people, is your only option.

What do I write when I’m not answering an e-mail? What do I think when I’m alone thinking? I suppose that’s what goes in a blog. Responses to no one. Other people and small incidents will draw you out as you share them, but in my opinion the best personal blogs and the best writing is that in which those things are secondary to your own small, honest, original musings.

As someone who does blog posts every single day I can share with some authority a blogging tool that has been indispensable to me in the months since I purchased it. My voice recognition software has transformed my daily writing ritual into something that does not stress me out physically anymore, and instead allows me to focus on the thoughts I’m trying to convey.

I have a level of typing ability that might be more properly referred to as typing inability, because I never really learned how to touch type. I’m fairly fast but the problem is that I have to look down at the keyboard constantly and this seems to tighten the muscles of my neck and shoulders. I know, I know: why don’t I just learned how to touch type? The stories I hear about repetitive stress injuries make me wonder about touch typing as a solution and I have always been ambivalent about it. Instead I’d remained curious about voice activated software for years, and I always had a feeling I’d buy it.

Still, as I say, discomfort in my neck seems to be increasing over the years, and I had always wondered about getting voice typing software. Finally I figured that at this rate the pain probably wasn’t going to get much better and maybe I could prevent a more serious ailment down the road if I spent the money now on the dictation software. I’m an active blogger, so I just saw it as a blog tool like my keyboard or my hosting plan.

On Mac your choices as to software for voice typing are relatively limited, and as I researched it I found that the software that came most highly recommended, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, was unavailable for Mac altogether. This actually put me off spending the money earlier because I had no interest in paying for an inferior product.

I stumbled across an article on voice recognition software that talked about the company that makes the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software for Windows having licensed the technology to a company called MacSpeech for their ‘Dictate’ voice typing software. That was enough for me and I plopped down $170, still a little skeptical.

I don’t intend for this article to turn into an advertisement for either of the companies I’ve mentioned. My point here is that as far as using voice typing software as a blogging tool, I could not be happier that I invested in it. It’s not just that I can lean back in my chair and not be hunched over as I hack away at the keyboard. I actually think that my writing flows better as I’m able to look in a relaxed way around the room or out the window. A little experimentation revealed that I don’t even have to use the included headset to dictate, that the software works fine with me just talking into the small microphone above the screen of my laptop.

I think the only downside was the price. Even for a tool I use every day it was fairly expensive, especially when you consider that I have a keyboard sitting right in front of me. But this is an expenditure for the long-term. I figure I’m almost certain to have avoided injury or least greater discomfort that might have occurred in the future. And if you prorate a cost of over many comfortable years, I suppose that as blog tools go, voice recognition software is one of the best investments one could make.

Today I want to tell you about an absolutely terrific blogging plug-in that allows you to turn your blog or website into a multimedia experience simply by installing it. First, it has been incorrectly called a Wordpress plugin before, but the fact is that it can be installed on blogs that useBlogger, MoveableType, Typepad, as well as Drupal sites, self-hosted Wordpress blogs and many other platforms as well.

Anyway, I’m not just talking about adding photographs, video or Google maps. If you have not heard of Apture, get ready to be just a little bit overwhelmed by the new possibilities for your blog.

What if there was a way, when you write a post about any subject under the sun, for you to transform any word in your post into a link that is a further jumping off point to any one of over 50 authoritative content sources, like NPR, IMBD, Wikipedia, and the New York Times? Apture is a way to add background information to your post without having to research to get the data and find specific links. Maybe this blog post is already giving you the idea. This free blogging plug-in has been invaluable for me on sites that I have that have to do with Bali travel, people, or more technical subjects like web programming as well. It’s not that I’m too lazy to dig up facts to corroborate my point (well okay, maybe I am pretty lazy), but why duplicate effort if the New York Times has an excellent article on a museum or IMBD has extra facts about a movie I have reviewed? Apture gives you away to fill out the information or opinion that you are putting forth, extra information to complement what you’re writing about, so that subjects that are peripheral to your point but maybe still interesting to your readers can be easily covered.

One feature that I have to mention is how Apture lets you clip only the portion of a YouTube video that is relevant to your post, or that you care to show… very cool.

The only downside with Apture might be that you are tempted to overuse it. I suppose it’s possible that the substance of your post could be diluted by all the extra information you are linking to. But used sparingly, I think it really has to enhance your readers’ experience. I urge you to try the Apture plug-in: what a great blogging add-on it is.

I want to tell you about a blog tool that I have found invaluable for certain types of sites that need more content added to them or more readers and reader involvement. In a word, that is probably most websites and blogs!

Skribit is a widget whose code you simply paste into your blog, probably on the sidebar, that allows your readers to easily ask you questions and request that you write about a given topic.

The first thing that this widget will do combat writer’s block. Someone might ask you a question completely out of the blue that you never thought of addressing, or didn’t think there was any interest in. Imagine how easy it will be to write on a given specific subject if there is a real person on the other end asking, who cares enough about your opinion to post the question first place via Skribit.

The other benefit that you get as a blogger is helping to work up a rapport or dialogue with your readership, no matter how small. You can make the case that this is most valuable when you’re just starting, out which is why I would suggest that new bloggers definitely install this widget. Imagine how you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of any reader who asks the question, from all the other anonymous blogs out there. It’s easy to see that you encourage repeat visitors by doing this. Just having the tool on your sidebar gives a certain professionalism to your blog, and by the way Skribit is customizable.

I have found my readers to be very receptive to leaving questions right there on the home page with this blog tool. Put yourself in your readers’ place. If you have established yourself as an authority on a topic, they might be tired of doing Google searches to find an answer to a specific question that they have. The prospect of a real person addressing their specific point could be worth a lot to them, and certainly worth leaving a brief question to you involves minimal effort.

This plug-in is a win-win for website publishers and bloggers on one hand and their readers on the other. It’s an example of how incredibly easy the Internet makes the exchange of information between individuals, as opposed to always having to refer to a centralized repository like an encyclopedia in the old days, or even Wikipedia today.

Skribit can be added to various blogging platforms, certainly not just WordPress. It is also free, although to add additional blogs you have to ‘go pro’ and pay. It may very well still be worth it to install and test to see the response you get.

It is a blog tool that might just put you down the road to having an audience with whom you interact, much faster. Don’t forget that that interaction more than anything is what separates successful (even professional) bloggers from the millions of people out there who are finding it difficult to connect with an audience.

Analytics–What Is It Good For?

As a blog tool, Google Analytics isn’t exactly something that makes your blog run better or gives you an easier time of adding content every day, but most bloggers would agree that installing analytics provides you with vital information about your readers.

It is valuable to know where your readership is coming from before they visit your site, what other sites on the Internet linked to you and in turn sent visitors. It’s also very valuable to be able to analyze the search engine traffic that comes to your site e.g. the keywords that people typed into a search engine that brought them to you. Google analytics allows you to check in detail statistics regarding these things and a whole lot more.

Analytics Installation

Installation is very simple. Simply create an account and add as many of your sites as you’d like to watch. You must have write access to a site’s files in order to add the analytics code to the site. (You cannot install Google analytics on any site you are interested in) when you finish the sign-up process you will be given a code snippet that you simply copy paste into the header or footer file of your blog or website. Is easier than it sounds; if you need help finding the files in which to paste the code, it’s easy enough to find on the Internet.

How to Read Google Analytics

Once the code is installed, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips. From the dashboard you can choose a given time period, from a single day to any date range you specify, and immediately drill down to see a lot information on your readership for that period. Interesting and useful stats include: how many unique visitors you had, overall page views, pages per visit, and visitors’ average time on your site. A fascinating feature is the map overlay area, which tells you where your visitors came from geographically, sorted by country and with the ability to drill down to have a look by state or province, right down to the individual city from which your visitors came, from any country in the world! You can also quickly check out what the most popular pages on your blog or website are.

What To Do With Analytics Information

So what value does all of this Google analytics information have to a blogger? It can be used in many ways.

What if you found out that half of the visitors on your recipes blog came because they want to find out more about barbecue recipes or techniques? Your visitors are telling you what they’d like to read about, and it’s very possible that you will see a real jump in readership if you will give it to them on a more regular basis. Without Google analytics you may never have known how well-appreciated your blog posts on barbecues were. Comments are one way to judge a blog post’s popularity, but they are very imprecise way of doing so. Conversely, you may have imagined that the world needs more salad recipes and that that would be a big source of interest and traffic for you; it’s possible that you are wrong in this notion, and with your analytics data you could redirect your energies into articles that your visitors appreciate more, if you want to.

What if you started a blog on car repair, thinking that you can help people who are interested in the fixing up old cars and turning them into hot rods? Google Analytics might inform you that a high percentage of your traffic actually comes from India, where people might be using your high-quality information to turn junk cars into basic transportation. Knowing that your readers are less interested in hot rods and more interested in just getting engines running might affect the subject matter of your blog.

The “new visits” statistic has value. If, over time, you’re seeing the percentage of new visitors slowly decline, it means that more people are bookmarking your site to revisit later. (Assuming the overall amount of visitors is not declining of course!) Certainly this would be an encouragement to you. Seeing that the duration of the average visits your site is increasing would also be encouraging; Google Analytics tells you this too. “Pages per visit” is another interesting stat: generally having the number rise is a good thing, although some experts point out that having people visit one or two pages on your blog and then leaving might be a sign that they found exactly what they were looking for, then quickly left. Statistics are always open to interpretation, and Google Analytics information is no exception.

Analytics offers a ton of information about how your site is being used by visitors. Seeing that visits are (hopefully) increasing over time is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use an analogy of your blog being a retail store, analytics tells you a lot about the reasons that people came to shop, what precisely they were searching for, and what they found. If you are interested in increasing visitors to your site over time and enhancing their experience while on your site, you really need information like this.

One more thing: the Google Analytics blog tool is free. When you think about it it’s easy to see that whatever other motivations the company has, Google wants your sites to become more popular and useful, and this is a great tool for that.

If you are a new blogger, or even if you’ve been blogging for a long time(!) it’s important to understand that just because you save and publish a post it doesn’t mean that it is reliably saved forever on your host. From time to time hosting companies have problems, and sometimes it happens that files are corrupted or lost irretrievably. It’s also possible that in tinkering with code you can make changes that you don’t intend to make, even if you’re quite sure that you know what you’re doing. Another source of problems for bloggers in the area of losing data or even entire websites is that the addition of add-ons or templates to your blogging software installation can sometimes result in myriad unintended problems. This happens especially when a template or add-on hasn’t been adequately tested against the latest version of the blogging software. It’s at times like this when you will wish there was something you could do about your loss. It happened to me once. But it won’t happen again!

The way to avoid problems of this sort is to proactively back up your files before you have a problem. You can manually create a zipped copy of your entire website and store it on your hard drive or some other media, or e-mail it to yourself. The problem is that if you’re an active blogger, to manually create backup files on a regular basis will become very time consuming, in addition to requiring a little bit of technical know-how.

Luckily, most blogging software packages have an add-on/plug-in that automates the process of backing up your site so that problems, regardless of whose fault they are, can be handled by reconstructing your entire blog from the backup if necessary. Wordpress in particular has many options when it comes to automatically backing up your blog files. One that I can recommend personally is the WordPress database backup plug-in by Austin Matzko. It is very easy to use, and lets you immediately back up your WordPress blog and e-mail the resulting file to an address you specify. You can also very easily select to have backups performed automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and again, have the backups sent to you.

Don’t wait until you really, really need it to become convinced of the value of having a reliable, automatic blogging tool that lets you backup your files. Pick one and install it today.

Photographs: virtually every blog or website needs them, and it has always amazed me how difficult some photo editing apps make it for me to get a properly proportioned image of exactly the dimensions I want, on the fly. If I have written my post and chosen a photo, the last thing I want is to fight to get the image for the post exactly as I want it.

Big Blog Tool covered an amazing way to easily add photos to your Wordpress blog with the Photodropper plugin, which lets you filter creative-commons-licensed photos from Flickr’s endless archive based on keywords you type in. It is a wonderful tool for adding images to your WP blog or website, especially if you don’t have a any of your own photographs that fit a particular blog post or article, but there are times when you have exactly the right photo of your own, and you simply want to add that.

Picnik is a photo editing tool that is handy for fine-tuning your photos so that they are exactly suited to whatever you will use them for, so its value and application is by no means limited to to Wordpress or any other blogging platform. There are many, many photo editors out there, but after trying a lot of them I came to the conclusion that ease of use was more important than the app being able to do 1000 things when I really only wanted it to do four or five things, quickly and easily. For me those things are:

Just take a look at the site. Getting started by uploading a photo is so simple, as is the tabbed navigation once you have done so. After you are finished editing you simply save the image to your computer, print them or share them.

Did I mention the standard version is free? Upgrading, which you can do for as little as $2.08/month, gives you a lot of interesting effects and other extras, but I think the simplicity of Picnik is where it really shines, and I haven’t felt the need to upgrade. If you haven’t found a blogging tool that makes it very easy to add photos to your blog or site, do check our Picnik.