Useful Web Tools

Researching on what other blogs are writing on a specific product, website or program is useful because it not only enriches your own personal knowledge but provides you with reference sources and ideas for the creation of content.

The easiest way to find out what other bloggers think about a specific website is to do a quick query for it on a blog search engine.

Typing in the website name will usually show you who are writing about the specific site. However, you might also want to examine the type of links a specific website receives from other bloggers

It’s generally easily to manipulate the ad placement on your website and tweak it for optimal performance but one should note that there are some factors outside of your control.

These include the different browser, operating system and screen resolution used by the visitors on your website. What you perceive to be a highly visible ad placement will often differ from what your visitors see.

Enter FoldSpy, a new application which allows you to determine how your site looks to your visitors, while offering an effective way to set up your ad placement scheme.

I was browsing around Sphinn when I came across across a Greasemonkey script which allows you view the actual webpage from any site within a frame in your feed.

What this means is that you’ll get to see and post comments directly to any blog from Google Reader and more importantly, read the entire article even if it is a partial or truncated feed.

I’ve just installed the script and tested it. It works beautifully and I was able to easily view the full content of some blogs running partial feeds. Here are some screen shots of the tool in action on Aaron Wall’s blog.