Here's a quick list of five plugins that are great for bloggers.

1. Search Status: I started using Search Status on the urging of Everton from Connected Internet. The plugin, essentially the Firefox equivalent of the Alexa Toolbar, gives you a look at your page (and everyone elses) Google pagerank and Alexa rank quickly and easily. Search Status also gives you a look at some of the more subtle SEO related aspects of each site. Since installing it my Alexa Rank has gone from around 420k to 360k - I've also seen my traffic nearly double.
2. AdSense Notifier: If you're a Google AdSense addict this ad-on is absolutely essential. Once installed and configured you get a small entry on your status bar that can display up-to-date info from your AdSense account. Mine currently shares my current Pageviews, Clicks, eCPM, CTR, and Revenue for the day.
3. HTML Validator: The HTML Validator is mostly for anyone doing theme design. The ad-on gives you a sense of how "valid" your site is which is essential. Having a site that is designed cleanly makes it easier for spiders and bots to crawl your content. Keeping an eye on how well your site validates is a good way to keep manage this
4. Stumble Upon: Bloggers make the mistake of thinking that Digg is the king of driving visitors to your site. The problem, though, is that there are plenty of folks on digg who bury things for no really good reason. StumbleUpon is a bit more forgiving of some posts and can drive traffic in a very powerful way. Using the StumbleUpon plugin you can drive traffic to your blog and also locate items you'd like to post about.
5. Del.icio.us: The Del.icio.us ad-on I use doesn't have many bells and whistles. Its beauty is its simplicity. After installing the plugin you get two buttons, one sends you to your Del.icio.us bookmarks while the other basically acts as a Del.icio.us bookmarklet. I use Del.icio.us for two things - I use it to bookmark items I for my "hotlinking" posts and to keep track of posts I want to write about later. If you're trying to promote your site this can also be a great tool.

One of my favorite Windows tweaks involves the creation of a windows shutdown button. It's one button you can click to shutdown your workspace ASAP. Besides being a dead simple shutdown - it's dead simple to setup.

Here's how it works:

1. Right Click your desktop and select 'New -> Shortcut'
2. When the 'Create Shortcut' dialog appears type "shutdown -s -t 0"
3. You'll then be asked to name the shortcut, "Shutdown" should work nicely. This finishes the Create Shortcut dialog.

Read the Rest of this post

March has been one of my best months revenue wise here at Bill2me dot Com. I've also seen some significant traffic growth and, best of all, some great new commenters! Along the way I also managed to rebuild my template, update my diggIntegrator plugin, and more. Of course it hasn't all been good. Along the way I've made a few mistakes and learned a few lessons.

While the month isn't over yet, I thought I'd take a moment to share my blogging regrets from the last few weeks. Feel free to jump in if you think I missed something.

1. Rushing Things: By far my biggest regret this month was rushing the release of the digg Integrator plugin. While it appeared to be working on my test site and my live site it ultimately wasn't. The first few people who downloaded it probably got copies that weren't working which is never a good thing.
2. Not Checking Facts: I goofed a couple times this month with people's names and Blog names. I tried my best to correct all those mistakes but I shouldn't have made them in the first place. From now on before I post or respond to a comment I'm going to be sure to quadruple check URLs, Names, and Titles for everything.
3. Concentrating too Much on Revenue: When I first re-launched this template I had WAY too many ads on the page. I've always hated browsing into a site that has more too many CPC ads 'above the fold.' Then I went ahead and built a theme with tons. Right now I think I've found a happy medium - What do you think?
4. Not being Diverse Enough: I spent a lot of time posting about Blog Design this month. While I hope to continue authoring good design related content I'd like to get back to some more fun stuff.
5. Not Finishing Things: I've posted a couple things that were intended to be muli-part posts only to not follow up on them. This week I'm going to go back and review those posts to update them. I'm also going to make sure to finish any "series" posts I start.

There are definitely a few more things I'd like to do differently starting in April - these are just the top of my list. Anyone think I missed something?

About a month back I wrote a short post about creating a more functional 404 page. At the conclusion of that post I hinted at the fact that I'd be writing again about a special addition to the 404 page that might make it a bit more functional. I thought now would be a good time to fulfill the promise I made back then.

Occasionally visitors come looking for content that's not where it used to be. Maybe it was deleted, maybe it was moved, maybe it was lost - who knows. As I mentioned in the previous post it sometimes helps to add things like a tag cloud, a more pronounced search bar or even a plugin like Landing Sites to treat your users to another way of locating content on your site.

Recently I added something new that I thought I'd share. While it's nice to be able to find content on your current site, if you've removed content (for whatever reason) it may pay to direct your users to the Google Cache. Read the Rest of this post

Awhile back I read an article about building pagerank through the use of linkbacks from your profiles. The article suggested that links from site's like MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr and Digg profiles could be used to raise pagerank and even traffic.

Now - I'm not totally sure that this is true but I think it's probably good practice to somehow link your blog with your profiles. While you could certainly go crazy building template page's that collect pictures, Diggs, and other things, many bloggers would probably find a widget easier to manage.

Enter ShowYourself.

Using a very simple interface ShowYourself allows you to build a small widget that can include links to all the popular social web apps. From MySpace to Virb, Last.fm to Del.icio.us it's all covered. If you don't see what you're looking for you can also add your own links pretty easily. To get a look at it in action check out my sidebar.

I'm hoping to play around with it a bit and get it loaded into my about page soon - that may be a better place for it.