Your blog's best friends! Great Tools!

What tools or apps have you found lately that seemed like such a good idea you actually tried them? Leave a comment and let me know.

I love Wibya! This download for your blog is so simple and wonderful I don't know where to begin. By signing up for an account and following the directions, you can install this tool bar and it appears at the bottom of your blog. You can even install it on more than one blog which is better yet...and it's FREE. It is very much like the one you find at the top of your Firefox page. This little app gathers all those functions you want your readers to use to say nice things about your blog. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, recent posts, RSS, even your pictures are easily accessed from the toolbar. With just a little encouragement your readers can Twit your blog or recommend it on Digg! I am seeing so many possibilities because it is very clear what the reader is suppose to do! (Don't you try to find the follow button or the Twitter button on blogs and finally give up? I do.)

Have there always been toolbars for the bottom of our blogs and I just slept through the whole thing? I can't imagine. I actually looked at the other apps that are out there and now I understand why I didn't even try them. They are just confusing and the setup has a lot more information than I wanted. So this is what I think has happened...they have always been there but this is the only one that actually made sense, was very easy to set up and very noticeable. You can even pick a color that will compliments your blog. The one I saw installed on a blog caught my eye immediately. Here's hoping it works for me too!  Take a look at mine on Retire in Style Blog.  I like orange so that was the color that worked for me.  (You could even just click on digg and give me a boost...I wouldn't mind!  :) )

I had never taken screen shots or screen capture (apple) before today. This opened up a whole world of new ideas for me. Why haven't I been using this before? I down loaded a function called aLot which adds a tool bar at the top of your web browser page. The first photo of the desktop was taken using this function...the quality was a little iffy and I needed to install the picture in iphoto and crop it to show make it work.  (I may remove this toolbar...it would like to override my google search and I am not ready for that.) I went back to the search page and found Apple has a function on my computer allowing me to do the same thing using the keyboard...command-shift-3 and the screen capture happens with no further ado. The image is stored on my desktop using this command. Other shortcuts are available through MacRumor: Guides. The second picture you see was snapped using this function. It is a lot clearer so I will be using this function rather than aLot.

The idea that we read each others material is so important. We can weed out what we like and don't. The Wibya toolbar would make it easier for blog readers to give the good material a boost. If we posted screenshots of relevant material, our readers could get a better picture of what we are talking about. It turns out all the advice promoting our need to read other blogs, comment and follow is right...it can lead to great ideas. After all imitation is the best form of flattery. Right? The plus may also be that we can become more successful!