17 Cool Tools and Resources for Bloggers
In the never ending search to find awesome things that bloggers can use, I found 17 more tools and resources that can make the bloggers life easier. Everything from grammar to monitoring to usability.
Franklin’s Grammar Cheat Sheet
This is a great grammar cheat sheet that explains many common mistakes every day people make. If you are looking to write for a bigger site or just want your blog to look professional, this is a great site to have bookmarked.
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
Richard Rutter has taken the principles from the book The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and applied them to the web. He is adding principles in the order they appear in the book and only if they apply to the web, so it’s still being updated, but it’s a great resource for this looking to be more professional.
50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills
This is a wonderful article from Smashing Magazine that gives you even more links to things that will help with grammar and writing.
Free Websites
Moogo
A free service that allows you to simply create a website. You can get an email address and your site will be located at http://username.moogo.com. Once you create a page and go through the trial period, you can choose to keep it free by allowing Moogo to add advertising, or choose a couple of low cost options.
Dinky Page
A completely free service that allows you to create “disposable pages”. It’s very simple and very easy. You use their editor to type stuff in or write the whole thing in HTML. So if you need a quick website and don’t want to pay for it, try Dinky Page.
Font Stuff
Typetester
Typetester allows you to compare different fonts on your screen. There is an incredible amount of customization that you can apply to see almost any font in any form. Some the things you can change are obviously the font, the size, the spacing between each word, the color of the font, the color of the background, the alignment, the space between each character, and more. In addition to customizing the font with the options above, Typetester will show what you selected in many different forms including all caps, bold, italic, small caps, and a lot more. This is a must use tool for web designers and bloggers.
Font Burner
Font Burner is a very cool web application that allows you to customize your page with nearly any font. Simply search through the fonts available on the site, copy the code they give you, and paste it into your sites code. Why would you want to do this? Basically, the font you might want to use won’t be on every visitor’s computer. This code eliminates the need for every visitor to have the font downloaded and installed on their computer.
WhatTheFont!
Have you ever seen logo that had an awesome font that you wanted to use, but had no idea what it was? WhatTheFont! is a free web application that tries to decipher the image and find the closest match in their database. There some tips for submitting images to get the best results and a forum of font enthusiasts to help if it doesn’t work.
Free online OCR
This is a very cool free web application that can scan an image you upload and extracts the type into an editable text document. Instead of typing the whole thing out, this free service does it for you. Obviously you should read the results to compare it with your image because it’s not perfect. Just in case you want to know, OCR stands for optical character recognition.
Website Monitoring
Howsthe.com?
A free service that monitors your site at intervals you select. If you site is down it will email you so you can figure out what is wrong and fix it quickly.
mon.itor.us
Another free service that monitors your site that is very popular. On top of monitoring your sites up-time, mon.itor.us can monitor your CPU, your Intranet, and memory. There is also a detailed analytics service with real-time visitor tracking.
Montastic
Free website monitoring service that claims to not suck. It’s simple, easy, and free.
There are a ton of monitoring services around and a lot of them are free. Here is a list of 45 monitor/analytics/counter services but the article gives no hint on which services are free or not.
Graphics
Supalogo
Supalogo allows you to create logos very easy. You can customize the font, the size, the outline, the colors, add a gradient, and choose a background or transparent .PNG file. If you are in the need of a logo quickly and free, try this site.
Artweaver
In order to have a successful blog one must have a good design and with that design should contain a logo. The most well known application for creating logos and other graphics is Adobe Photoshop but with a $700 price tag, it’s very expensive and too pricey for me. If you are in the same boat I am, then you should check out Artweaver. Artweaver is a freeware program that does a lot of graphics things and you can still turn out quality artwork.
Misc. Cool Tools
Screenjelly
A free service that will capture your screen activity and voice (if you choose to record your voice) and send it via Twitter or email. There is no downloading anything and it’s easy to share.
fivesecondtest
Fivesecondtest is free usability service that shows your site to other users for five seconds to “identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.” It’s a great tool and completely free. Once you have your site tested, why not help the site and other designers and take part in a couple of tests. You don’t get paid but it’s a free service.
Tags: fonts, graphics, Resources, Tools, typography
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Jul 13th, 2009