Running out of space on your PC or lappy? Worry not. There is a cool service that offers you to store your audio files, videos, office documents or just about anything online, at your personal space and use them online as well, from anywhere in the world (sounds too big eh?).

You can stream the audio and video files, online and the speed and consistency is really good. I also love the drag and drop feature, it’s just like transferring the file to any other storage media on your PC. It’s a very reliable service from my experience. At a standard free registration you get 1GB of storage space, where you can store all your mp3’s, movies and stuff. Another good feature is that you can send the files to your friends, by sending them a download link. They don’t have to register at Steekr to listen to the audio or see the video. So, you no longer have to carry them around on your thumbdrive. That’s too old fashion man!

The service is Steekr and you can register here for a free 1GB storage space, and yes its personal, “The Internet too is personal again”!

Update - I just found another cool service that let’s you upload files and even allow others to have a look at it. I’m unsure if it allows you to stream, but the catch is that the service is quick to register, you don’t have to give even your email id. Just give a name, select the file and select the other users permission settings. Presto! Very good if you are in a hurry and want to share a file with your buddy. Check it out here.

Here is the list of 10 must have plugins for bloggers using windows live writer users. These tools will help your blogging experience better. They are all helpful to reduce your blogging time, reduce the number of steps before publishing a post, and reduces the number of applications you have to use to write an article.

Using these plugins to the new windows live writer will help you to do almost all your regular blogging activities from live writer itself and will save your time.

1. Screen Capture tool
   This plugin will help you to take screenshots from your PC, you suggest. Works fine like the “Print Screen” option, but more effective and manageable. Now no need to run Photoshop side by side, when you blog. This is particularly useful when you are reviewing an application and blogging side by side.
2. Screenshot/Thumbnail creator of a website
   This plugin will help you create a thumbnail of another website that you suggest. Just give the URL and it gives you the full page screenshot/thumbnail of that webpage. Now no need to take screen shots and join pieces together.
3. Insert images from Flickr
   Many of the bloggers upload images to flickr and picasa, hotlinking it from there, so that you save on bandwidth ad save from the “Digg Effect”. But it has always been a tedious task to upload the image, copy the URL etc. Now do it all from WLW. Give your user name and this plugin will show all the images from this user name, just like how flock shows it’s media window. Just drag and drop your required image and you are done!
4. Insert your BOX.net files to your post
   Just like the image insertion from flickr, this plugin allows you to insert your Box.net files form a small box to your article. Simple as a drag and drop. No issues and time waste!
5. A simple De.li.cio.us plugin
   That will help you to incorporate delicious tags to your post. A must have if you are a delicious fan.
6. Technorati plugin
   A tiny plugin that will help you to add technorati tags to your articles. Simple and easy to use, but very effective in getting relevant traffic to your blog.
7. Insert Youtube or Google Videos to your post
   Another powerful tool that saves lot of your time by helping you insert a Youtube or Google video into your post.
8. Save typing the same link over and over again
   With this teeny weeny plugin, yo can save a lot of time, as it keeps in memory your previous links and next time when you use the same anchor text, it suggests you a previous link.
9. Save on typing the same text again and again
   Just like the link saver, this plugin helps you same time by not typing the same text over and over again. For example, a subscribe to RSS feed, link or reminder text that you use at the end of every article can be stored in a template file and called up any time during the post. 
10. Picasa Image plugin
    With this plugin you can easily insert images you have in your Picasa Web Albums into your blog. You are able to upload new images into existing albums or create new albums.

So there you have it. 10 most powerful plugins for improving your your blogging efficiency. NOw, there’s one plugin I wish was available, the All in One SEO pack.

PicSquare, which provides “photo based gifts” services in India, has come up with a new feature for their users. A photo blog, where users can upload and store pictures like albums or blogs - a photo blog as they would call it.

Manish says -

To continue our effort to provide best value in online photography to Indian users we are launching a new feature at Picsquare (http://mysite.picsquare.com). The new feature – Personal Photo Site, will allow users to create their own photo website and could be described as blogs for photographs.

Some of the main features of the photo blog are:

- Personalized domain name like http://manish.picsquare.com

- Theme selection, variety of theme option available like weddings, vacation, birthday, family etc.

- Customized home page

- Permission control, user can make his site accessible to anyone or decide who can get access

Hope this tool will help users to share more and order more .

Picsquare had completed 1 million images last week.

Photo courtesy FotoRita

• Google introduces new robots.txt feature where robots.txt analysis tool is able to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls better than before.
• Track where an user clicks on your webpage - WP plugin review by Daniel, Dailyblogtips.com
• How to stop people from stealing content on your blog - Kumiko’s tip to bloggers.
• 7 tips to blogging beginners - By Nirmal TV
• Search uploaded imags in the WP admin panel - “How to” article by Shankar Ganesh
• Three Wp security tips - By Arpit Jacob
• 10 ways to increase traffic - By Sizzledcore, pretty interesting one.

Sitemaps are of two types - one for human eyes and the other for crawlers and search engines. We’ve already discussed how to create a sitemap for search engines.Now, let’s create a sitemap page in HTML for user’s visual navigation.

Sitemaps are an essential part of a blog since it helps people to get an overview on what’s your blog content without having to spend time on pages.It makes it easy for them to select what’s appropriate for them.

Here’s a cool tool - Sitemap Pro. It helps you to create a HTML sitemap with the following options.

- CSS Styled HTML page.
Either you can link the document to a local style file or an online location.The resulting HTML sitemap will be in the selected CSS styled format.

- Filenames
You can select if every link to a page should also show it’s filename or not.

- Snippets of content
You can also select if each title should show the first few lines of post from the page.

- Column structure
The sitemap can be generated in two, three column format. See examples here.

- Sort in alphabetical order
With this option, when the sitemap is generated, irrespective of your post timings, all the contents will be sorted in any fashion you require(A-Z,1-0 etc)

The tool is available for evaluation as well. I think every blog should have a HTML sitemap, as it’s important to give the user’s an option to select what they want to read.It’s easy to skim through the contents on a sitemap and select what you just need.

After running the program, all you need to do is upload the html file to your server and link it on the navigation links.

Now, upload your images to Imageshack, and post it directly to your blog through the Wordpress dashboard, while writing a post.

He did it first with the Google Sitemap plugin. Arne has brought out another plugin for wordpress that will enable you to upload the images to imageshack instead of your host. It’s an easy to use plugin currently supported by Wordpress 2.1

He says -

This plugin allows you to upload images from your WordPress post screen and to insert them with the thumbnail into your post with a few clicks.

Download the plugin here

Advantages
- Easy to use.
- Save on server space and bandwidth.
Dis Advantages
- Imageshack may be banned in some countries - so your blog images may not show up.
- Since imageshack does not provide user account(like picasa or Flickr), if you don’t save the urls, the image cannot be traced if lost.

But it is a handy plugin for bloggers who post more images in their posts. Using images extensively will eat up your bandwidth and server space.This one’s a redeemer.

I think i came across this tool very late. It was launched in 2006. But this post at Blogoscoped introduced me to this amazing online tool which is an almost online photoshop, image editing program.Yea, true it is - since its launch in Nov, 2006, the fauxto team has been introducing features like in the Adobe Photoshop like working with layers, brushes etc and the latest one zoom.You can upload images online from your local machine or give in an url.
This tool would come in handy when you are on a picnic and needs access to photoshop - goto fauxto.com and you have your own photoshop online.

Hmm yeah i know I’m talking too much about it. But hey - it’s really cool!

Today, let’s see more about sitemaps. Every webmaster must have a sitemap ready for his site and submit it to google in order to get all the pages listed on Google.Sitemaps are of two types, as you know the HTML sitemap you use to navigate a site and second the sitemap used to help crawlers crawl the pages more effectively.

Why are they necessary?

Sitemaps are not necessary.(Yep i said that) Even if you don’t have sitemaps the crawlers will crawl your pages and find the content. But, it is like letting them crawl in a dark room. What if you had a well lit room with all navigation and helpers around which will take them to each room? It will be more effective right? Sitemaps serve this purpose.

It has the site structure ready giving indication to the crawlers as to which are the folders/files that are important, which are not, which are the folders/files that are to be visited frequently, and which are the ones to be visited only once. This helps the crawlers to undersand your site more effectively.

Now, how to build a sitemap for blogger?

It’s very simple in Blogger. It only requires you to go to the Google Webmaster Central and ass your site feed and the sitemap is automatically created. You can get detail instruction on this here.Make sure that you submit your full feed and not partial one.

Which is the best sitemap generator program around?
There are lot of free online and downloadable sitemap generators.
Here’s a simplified listing of what is best.

1- Python Scipt - This is the most difficult one to install. But if you are familiar with python, then this is the best one around.It’s automated and requires no additional support.I don’t recommend it for a beginner.Requires technical knowledge.

2 - Online sitemaps - This is best for small websites. It’s easy, simple and online.Just go to this site and submit your url.Fill in some basic details like time and priority settings for the files and click go!The whole sitemap will be generated online.You will get both ROR file and the Google sitemap XML file.If you are interested only in Google, use the XML sitemap.The format is according to Google sitemap protocol and is faultless.
Best choice for beginners and small websites of less than 500 pages.

3 - Gsite Crawler - This is a downloadable application. If your website is a bit large and you have time to tweak some settings and is serious about sitemap, then i would recommend this guy for you.
It requires you to give the website url, then select the types of files to be scanned from it, priority settings are automatically detected, and you can create bot Google sitemap and Yahoo url.
It has report generation as well that will give you an idea of how many urls were crawled and broken links etc.This is very useful while handling large sites.

How to make sitemap for large sites?

If you have really large websites for instance a one million page one, then it’s really going to be tough creating a sitemap. Practically this is possible with the Python script but if you are not okay with the technical stuff then you got to depend on sitemap generator programs.(If you don’t have a really large website the follwing piece of information may not help you.)

Step 1 - Download a free sitemap generator program like Gsite crawler.
Step 2 - Use it to crawl each folder of your website as separate projects.Make sure that you create a new database each time a new project is opened.
Step 3 - Now you have separate sitemaps for each folder.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder1 has a sitemap called folder1.xml and yourdomain.com/folder2 has a sitemap called folder2.xml
Step 4 - Download this simple index generator program.
Step 5 - Copy paste all the folders (containing the sitemaps) from thh projects folder of Gsite crawler(C:program files…) and put it into one single folder.
Step 6 - Run the index generator program against this parent folder.
Step 7 - Now a sitemap index would be created with links to all the child sitemaps but one problem, since in Gsite Crawlers projects folder(C:Program Files) each crawled folder will be named with underscore replacing the forward slash.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder will be named as yourdomain.com_folder
Therefore the sitemap index produced will have the links too this way.
Step 8 - Use notepad/wordpad to open the sitemap index file. Find and replace all the underscores with forward slash.
Step 9 - Upload the child sitemaps in the respective folders online.
Ex: - yourdomain.com/folder1..folder2 etc.
Step 10 - Upload the sitemap index file to the root folder and submit it to google.

Bingo! There you go you have now created a sitemap index and child sitemaps for a large website. Now submit it trough the webmaster central window and keep waiting!

I’m writing this post using blogger in Draft an experimental feature of blogger, where you can access some cool new features that Google plans to implement on Blogger.

What’s new now?

• A video uploader that let’s you upload a video from your local machine to Google Videos.
• A blue logo

Probably, the team is adding more features to test soon, but as of now, this is it.

Here’s the official blog where you can get more updated details on Blogger Draft.

Vanessa Fox, (Product manager, Google Webmaster Central) makes a commendable effort by sorting out an issue, that was silly but interesting, since it’s been ongoing for some time.

Yesterday, I had reported the broken links on the “Sitemaps.org launch” article posted by her, at the Google Webmaster’s central blog, and suprisingly, she reacted very quickly - and the links are all in place now.

She’s also arranged(arranging) for suitable measures(.htaccess file)so that,these kind of errors are not reported again.

Here’s Vanessa’s reply -

Hi,

Funny thing! The engineer who made the change to the site sits right next to me, I just forgot about those links in the blog post. I’ve fixed them now while we work on getting an .htaccess file uploaded that’ll redirect the old URLs to the new ones. Thanks for the catch!

Vanessa Fox

A very commendable effort from Google. Much appreciated!

You can also see her reply in the comments section of this post.