I spent my procrastination time this weekend working on a new blog layout that you will probably never see. However, it was a great learning experience and I wanted to share with you some of the sites that I think are helpful for bloggers.
1. Statcounter. This is an idiot-proof way of getting information about your visitors. A free account only gives you access to data about your last 100 visitors. If you're like me, you don't rack up the hits too quickly and you certainly don't like spending money, so 100 does the trick. What I really like about statcounter is that it shows you the city from which your visitor came (so I can guess whose been checking without commenting) and also what links they followed to get to you. For instance, this Google search shows that someone who speaks Russian, lives in Lincoln, and uses a different internet service than I do (so not Serhiy) was looking for me. I think it was a former student and that just warms my heart.
2. Browsercam. Have you ever wondered what your page looks like on different platforms with different screen resolutions? This is your site. They give a free 24 hour trial that lets you see how your page is displayed on all major web browsers on all major operating systems. After struggling to get opacity settings right in both Firefox and IE7, I was able to find out that they still looked fine in Safari, Netscape, and most legacy IEs, but were, unfortunately, still completely opaque on Opera 8 (but not 7), IE for Mac, and Konqueror. It still doesn't help with my colors scheme pet peeves though because that's dependent on monitor, not software.
3. Color Scheme Generator. I wish there were a good way to ensure your colors look good to everyone, but there just isn't. The color scheme generator is the closest I've found. It makes color theory simple, giving you a clickable color wheel with two-, three-, and four-color scheme options for different hues of the selected color. Perhaps the most "ooh" but least useful aspect is the ability to select colors as they would be seen by people with various forms of colorblindness. The colors still might appear different on other monitors, but theoretically they will look good because of the use of the color theory.
4. Blogger Help. I find it rather annoying to have to go to a seperate page to read comments. I often even forget what the post said, then I have to go back and forth. That's where "peek-a-boo comments" come in. It's just one of the marvelous things you can learn from Blogger's help pages.
5. Favicon from Pics. There are plenty of favicon generators out there. I like this one. It's easy and will verify the thing for you.
6. Tripod. You've got to host that favicon and any php scripts you use somewhere, right?
7. An HTML validator plugin for Firefox. Blogger comes with enough nonstandard html to cause every blog to have warnings, but this will help you fix the most egregious errors.
8. Finally, when you're generating multimedia content, the most useful tools I've found are The Gimp for photo editing and VirtualDub for video processing. Play with them. They're dreamy.
Feel free to add sites you find useful when designing a template. I'd love to hear about them.
