Rating: 5

Version tested: 1.0.1 (6) beta

Description: Windows Live Writer is a true WYSIWYG blog authoring tool that can be used to write and edit blog postings (including pictures) locally and then post these online. It supports a wide range of blogging platforms including Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and Blogger. 

Let me start by saying flat out that I am in love with this program, mainly because it allows me to work on a blog posting locally and publish it when I’m ready. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Notable features : 

• WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get). It will download your site’s CSS and is able to preview exactly what your post will look like when published. The editing interface looks really good and is very well designed.
• Built in spelling checker.
• Instantly switch from normal view to the HTML code and to ‘web preview’.
• Tags Tags Tags! Enter tags straight from the Windows Live Writer interface. For Wordpress check out this plugin that will work with the Windows Live Writer tags for both tag and metakeyword support.    Read more »

Rating: 4 

Version tested:  Beta

[Note: this review was written by my friend Navdeep Dhillon; see his personal blog here; also see Infact, the free ebook site he built with his team - The Freewaregenius]

Description: Blogger is a free service owned by Google that allows you to publish your own blog and host in on Blogger’s own servers as a subdomain of blogspot.com or on a server of your choosing. Blogger beta introduces a dynamic blogging platform and other improvements such as tagging and drag and drop template modifications.

I recently started using Google’s new Blogger beta. Its definitely a big step up from the previous version of Blogger.One no brainer new feature is the introduction of tags. Perhaps a couple years late, but a welcomed new feature nonetheless. I was getting quite tired of loading my entries with keywords, and then relying on the search capability to “kind of” get tags to work. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.2.25

Description: SysSense is a system-tray based app that will retrieve data periodically from Google Adsense accounts and display real time notifications of your latest account information.

If you have a website (or websites) where you use Google Adsense you might want to check this one out. SysSense is resides in your system-tray and updates you on various account metrics. You can use it for multiple accounts (it allows for an unlimited number of accounts).

SysSense will periodically flash your information in a notification balloon (see screenshot) or can be told to refresh at will and display the latest adsense numbers - no need to log into your account(s) in a browser. Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  1.2i

Description: Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a program that will browse all pages of a website looking for broken links, and present these in a multi-column sortable report that is easy to work with.

If you have a website (or websites) then you know that the links you have on your website are (a) an integral part of the content of your site, and (b) that these are often unreliable, get broken, and have to be maintained on a regular basis. Enter Xenu’s Link Sleuth, a small and efficient program that will search for and find broken links for you (see screenshot above for a sample report). Xenu will also create a browser-based report than is also useful (see below screenshot). Read more »

Rating: 5 

Version: beta

Description: YotoPhoto is a search engine for royalty-free images that indexes a number of free image sources. Advances search features include search by size, by orientation (vertical, horizontal, square) as well as, interestingly, by color.

I did a search on YotoPhoto and found a good number of very good hits. The pictures were located on another free stock pictures provider, but I was able to download them, although I had to sign up and create an account with that site to do so.

Sizes differ but all pictures that I came across were hi-res and print-quality. 

Go to the YOTOPHOTO site

Rating: 5 

Version tested:  2.0

“In this changed world the keyword reigns supreme”.

I just felt like saying that. It sounds like a potentially meaningful and fashionable thing to say. It seems like you can really put your finger on the pulse of what’s going on if you knew what words/terms are being searched on a lot.

You also need to have an idea as to what keywords are being searched for if you’re interested in optimizing your site for the search engines. This information is also crucial if you are going to put together an effective paid search SEM campaign (which, in fact, is what I do for a living). There are a few free resources that can turn to for this; try Google Trends for a 3 year comparison of search terms complete with flags for significant events that might have affected them. You could also look at the media-oriented Yahoo Buzz Index for some entertaining trends. Read more »