Here are 10 free tools I use almost daily for my blog.



1. Picasa







Via my brother Kris, I learned the benefits of Picasa, a free download from Google. Picasa lets you store all pictures on your hard drive in a library and perform basic editing like cropping, tone adjustment and watermarking. But I use it the most to compress pictures in size and quality before posting them on my blog so the download speed is reduced.

Picasa also allows you to synchronize all your pictures with your online library.





2. Flickr







I store all my picture on Flickr a free online service by Yahoo. They have a small tool which lets you right-click on any picture to add it to an upload batch. Pictures are organised in folders and refered to by an URL. Flickr provides basic online editing with Picnik. You can publish pictures for the whole Flickr community allowing comments, grouping,...





3. Google Analytics







There are many free web statistics tools available, but the most well-featured is probably Google Analytics. It provides deep analysis of your blog visitors, top content, referral sites, search keywords, etc.. All data can be displayed in a wide array of graphs and can be exported in a spreadsheet or PDF.





3. Woopra







For a different flavour of web activity monitoring, try Woopra. While still running in Beta, this tool monitors activity on your blog or website in real time. It consists of a small script on your page and a downloaded tool for your PC.

Woopra shows your visitors as they come in (with all usual details such as browser, country, referral site, etc..) and navigate through your site, tracing the visited pages.

More than a curiosity or a 'big brother' tool, Woopra comes in handy e.g. to check which of your posts propagate visitors through your site rather than have them bounce off after the first read.

Woopra also offers the standard summarized and graphed page visits, referrals, user characteristics,.. but in real time. Handy comes in the user tagging tool, alerting you when a particular user comes in. Allows you to catch the spammers.





4. A menu bar generator







The drop down menu bar you see atop this blog, is made with the CSS Menu Generator by WonderWebWare. Through an interactive freeware, you customize your menu layout, style and its links, after which it generates the HTML/CSS code, which you can cut and paste into your template.



One tip: While the Menu Generator lets you save your menu for later changes, it does not store the styling of your menu, only the structure. I work around it, by saving the HTML in a text file, and when I do updates, I cut and paste the part of the structure only.





5. Feedburner





6. Backlink searches and page ranking

7. Manipulating RSS feeds

8. Gadgets and widgets

9. Google and Yahoo webmaster tools.

10. Buttons, icons and badges