Fine Art of Blogging

Tennis players and fans all over the world are familiar with Do It Tennis – one of the best places that provide every ting tennis including the top Tennis Racquets of 2009 including Head Tennis Racquets, Prince Tennis Racquets or Dunlop Rackets, Volkl or Yonex Racquets, tennis clothing, and tennis shoes online.

Now they are also offering the SKLZ Sun Brella for maximum sun protection. SKLZ Sport Brellas will also brighten up your tennis courts with new tennis nets, and tennis wind screens. What is more, there are some great rewards and discount being offered. Have a look and see what they can do it for you.

Backordered item available only until July 15th, SKLZ Sun Brella is best for tennis courts or at the beach as the SKLZ Sport-Brella gives you instant protection from the sun, rain, and wind with its domed shape, side flaps and 125 SPF. It sets up in just three seconds and fits the family or the whole team.

Do It Tennis is a neatly laid out and users friendly site. They offer many options for payment including Paypal and Google checkout. The shopping is secure online and easy. Have a look and see what they offer for you. What else, SKLZ Sport Brellas is already on my wish list.

I try to read as many blog as I can every day. If you also read a number of blogs, try Feedly - RSS blog reader. Feedly weaves your favorite content into a fun, magazine-like start page. Feedly is built upon Google Reader and Firefox and you need both to play. Feedly displays your Google Reader feeds in a magazine-like format, allowing you to browse over multiple categories, preview post pictures and all your read items are synchronized back to Google Reader. However, if you are already using Google Reader and Firefox then the Feedly Firefox extension will add a new level of ease and enjoyment to your blog reading. Imagine the difference between a text book and People magazine – that’s the difference between most RSS readers and Feedly. Explore and see what all it is offering and how you can take advantage. There is lot more to it than what meets the eye.

Zenni Optical offers some of the most stylish prescription glasses online. They carry huge selection on very affordable prices. They sell only their own manufactured frames direct to the customer so they're costs are low. With no middlemen and almost no advertising budget, there's no need to make their products expensive. Which is why Zenni Optical on TV!!! and media articles like How You Can Start Spending Smart and High Five to Zenni Optical are suggesting using Zenni products and saving. I suggest you also try ZenniOptical.com.

One recovering addict is using a free program called X3watch that runs in the background of his Web surfing and keeps a running log of questionable sites he visits. The program then emails the log to to a self-appointed “accountability partner,” in his case a long-time friend, who then proceeds to give him a talking-to. A $19 pro version allows for more reports and accountability partners.

Read at the WSJ

Google has sensed a window of opportunity: The company is taking aim at Microsoft's Windows operating system by releasing an operating system of its own. "The system, based on Google's Chrome Web browser, is designed for all classes of PCs, 'from small netbooks to full-sized desktop systems', and will be available in machines from 'multiple' PC makers in the second half of next year," according to the Financial Times. Google promised its OS would resolve many of the frustrations of Windows users, from slow start-up times to viruses. The Chrome OS will first appear on notebooks in the second half of 2010.

One of the best places for skiers to start is Park City Ski Rentals. This can make ski vacations easier and a lot more fun? Make reservations with Ski Butlers - Park City Utah’s premiere ski shop, delivering snowboard and ski rentals to Utah ski resorts, including Deer Valley, Park City and The Canyons - and leave the rest to them. Ski Butlers has come a long since they were founded in Park City, Utah in 2004.

As featured in The Wall Street Journal, SKI and Outside Magazines, anyone will love the convenience of the preferred Deer Valley and Park City ski rental delivery service. Deer Valley and Park City ski rental expert technicians’ custom fit all of your snowboard and ski rental needs in the comfort of your own living room. What is more, they bring all the sizes you need including extra boots to ensure that perfect fit. They also bring ski accessories so you are ready to hit the slopes first thing in the morning. Why stand in a rental line? We offer the best ski rental equipment at the same or lower prices than many of the local Park City ski rental shops and Deer Valley ski rental shops.

Have a look at the neatly laid out site and see what they are offering and how. Better still, you can book during off season on lesser rates and save on what everyone will be over charging during peak season.

Let us assume that you have a blog on a platform (software) of your choice. You define your goals; your target, audience and the content you will be writing. Your next aim is to pick the right blogging tools that work for you.

In addition to the integration of blogging tools, and free and premium blogging software, new blogging tools and services are being released every day to help blog masters add new features to their blog. This becomes quite overwhelming to choose from and to choose the best from among a number of blog promotion tools and add-ons. It all depends on your goals, your expertise, and the time you are consuming for it. Here are a few common solutions for different situations:

Any serious blogger needs to read a lot of other blogs to know what is going on in the ever expanding blogsphere. Technorati alone in its October 2006 report claims to track 57 million blogs. One of the marvels of technology is that you can have new post from every blog. It is delivered directly to you via “Really Simple Syndication”(RSS). Bloglines is a good online choice to start feed reading. And there are so many others.

Similarly, you can make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. “RSS is a protocol, an application of XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) that provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. By using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your Website. Users can have a constant updated content from websites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds”, reads a Web definition. One of the ways to do this is to go to Feed Burner and burn your own RSS feed there and use the tools they provide to set up to automatic subscriber links so that even people who want to use Bloglines, Google Reader, My Yahoo or Pluck can subscribe to it. And it also can be figured out without the buttons but why not have a prominently visible button? It creates an option for people to subscribe by giving an email address so that they can receive your blog posts like an email message. Feed Burner offers this service for free.

Feed Burner also offers automatic pinging but in case you want to use a separate service for pinging, try Ping Goat and Ping O Matic. Most blog software these days ping each post automatically.

As readers search from blog to blog, they may find interesting sites that they want to point out to their readers. Online bookmark managers allow readers to collect bookmark and categorise blog pages and all other interesting stuff found on the Web. I use del.icio.us but Blink List does a fine job as well.

Then there are statistics produced by analysing the access logs for a blog which are very useful for the success of blogs, while boosting the webmaster. The number of hits also determines a click-through rate for those who have subscribed to Google AdSense or other similar affiliate programs. There are countless technologies, making it possible to track statistics in real-time to show what other web users may be visiting or still linking to you or posting about your blog.

In almost all blog software, you must go online and can post using a set of tools provided. Many bloggers like to use a desktop application like “w.blogger”, “Performancing and Qumana” to create and publish their posts as it gives them some extra help and allows them to integrate content and files more easily on their computer. Maybe it looks like they are far more tech-savvy folks but there is no harm in trying and learning in the process.

There is also a blogger’s display, automatically changing daily quotes or cartoons on the sidebar of their blog for their own interest or for their readers. I am not counting different revenue-generating blog affiliates (Google AdSense, Amazon) that turn in content-related ads on any blog.

The choice is endless and users can have anything on their blogs from blogchat to blogmap; time, temperature and weather display of any area or a nifty new blogbar (blogbar.com) that allows them to search from 12 search engines from single search box. On one blog, I clicked on an array of symmetrically stacked colourful buttons and found “email icon generator”, “official seal generator”. The good thing about the blogger community is that they share anything new that is announced. Thus, it gets moving fast in the blogsphere.

Since 2003 when I started blogging, I have been using many blog tools. The fact is that whenever any new blog tool was announced, I would try it. But over time, I have settled for site metre (statcounter.com), analytical tools (Google Analytics), news aggregators, news sourcing tools (Technorati and Blogpulse), polls (blogpolls.com), email subscription and newsletter service (feedblitz.com). And there are some others like Pingoat, Audiobloger, Blogrolling and Flickr.

When my daily blogging time starts, I first go to my invisible site metre to find out who has been reading my blogs. Then I read my feeds and know what has been happening on blogs of my interest since I last went offline, bookmarking items. In the meantime, I plan to write and post entries and start pinging. In the end, I read the feedback and find some burning replies but it doesn’t make any difference to me. In fact, it keeps me going.

Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blog Tools

In addition to search station like Google, Bing, Wikipedia, answers come and many more search engines, have a look at the following and see if they can answer your quires better:

1. Mahalo Answers
2. Yahoo! Answers
3. Answerbag
4. Twitter
5. Countless Forums