ImgRed Image Redirection Service

Wow, I saw this on Lifehacker and it looks like an awesome service -- image redirection! It's must faster and easier than saving an image to your hard drive then uploading to your server or a free image hosting service.

With ImgRed, when I add an image to a web page, blog, or forum post, I just add the ImgRed URL to the code, and ImgRed automatically fetches the image, stores it on their servers, and even makes a thumbnail that I can use as well.

Sweet!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogtools, imgred

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Posting With ScribeFire

You might've noticed the "Powered by ScribeFire" link in my last post. It's there because I just downloaded and installed the ScribeFire blog editing extension for Firefox.



Which means when I visit a page I want to blog about, I can right-click and select "Blog this page" from the Scribefire contextual menu, and the the browser window is split, so that I can type my blog post in the bottom half, and still see the page I'm blogging about in the top half. Very handy!



In addition to a blog post editor, there's also some pretty cool tools instantly available at the click of a button. "Page Tools" gives you Technorati-related info about the page you're blogging (like which other blogs have linked to the page, etc.), and "Bookmarks" lets you add del.icio.us tags. And clicking on "Publishing Options" lets you do a bunch of different things -- post as a draft, add Technorati tags, bookmark the post at del.icio.us using the same tags, and adding any TrackBack URLs you want to ping. Oh, and you don't even have to use it to create a blog post; you can also use it to take notes, which is great if you see something that you want to blog about later.



Setting it up to work with Blogger was no problem, and it says it also works with Wordpress, Drupal, MoveableType, TextPattern, Roller, LiveJournal, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing and Jeeran. Or it can be manually configured to work with other blog platforms.



They got a bit more work to do on it, but so far I'm liking it a lot.



If you want to try it, you can download it from Mozilla's Firefox Add-ons site.

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FCS Blog, Now with Hot New Technorati Tags

Now that I've switched this blog to the new version of Blogger, I can include "labels", Blogger's version of categories, for each post. And I've also added a Greasemonkey script from A Consuming Experience that lets me add Technorati tags as well. Maybe a little redundant, but I'll give it a shot and see if I like it.

I've also just discovered that Blogger hasn't been pinging Technorati when I post, like it says it does. I checked my Blogger settings and they're ok, so I'm going to have to figure out what's going on, or maybe add some Technorati ping code into the blog myself.

Tags: blogtools, blogging

Free Website Stats

Pat McCarthy at ConversionRater.com has written the Complete Guide to Web Analytics 2007, and if you're interested in adding web stats to your blog or website, you really ought to go read it. His list is extensive, and his comments about each package are very helpful.

At this point, I'm not looking to pay for stats, so the ones I'm most interested in include:

• Clicky
• Google Analytics
• PHPMyVisites
• TraceWatch
• FeedBurner
• MyBlogLog

I already use Feedburner to get stats on my feed, but otherwise I rely on the Webalyzer stats provided by my host.