Orangeinks

BlogVault: Instant Backup for your WordPress Blog

Maintaining a blog is not entirely easy. Checking for bugs, updating plugins, optimizing tables, scripts and constantly checking for new features is what a blogger who uses hosted WordPress as a blog platform normally does to maintain it. Then, there’s also the constant backup in case your blog suddenly crashes. Luckily there are plugins that we can use to easily backup WordPress blogs. One of those plugins is called BlogVault.

BlogVault is a service that creates a backup of your blog. What it does is it backs up all aspects of a WordPress blog including full posts, comments, pages, images, plugins, themes and styleshees (CSS). Most WordPress blog backup plugins will copy and backup your blog to your computer harddrive. What makes BlogVault different from those plugins is that it has a service that lets you backup your blog in their servers.

Why should you backup your blog?

Servers while generally robust do tend to fail occasionally. When this happens, often all the stored data is lost. As a blogger you do not want your effort to be lost when such a catastrophe occurs.

To take advantage of BlogVault, simply sign-up for an account, download the plugin and place it in the plugins folder of your hosted WordPress in your server. Once the plugin has been activated, you can immediately begin your backup process.

Tags: backup, Blog, BlogVault, Hosted Wordpress, wordpress

Stiqr: A Code-Free Website Design Tool

Stiqr is a web editor where you can edit your website by touching only one line of code. That’s right, there’s no need for you to worry about the coding part. If you hate to code and want a rocking website to boot, then read on.

Stiqr is actually a widget for your webite. The WYSIWYG editor lets you design your site in a stick and place (drag and drop) fashion. What’s great about the service is that it works on all websites including WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.

How it Works:

Stiqr sits and works on top of your website and lets you edit your website as you see it live.

There is nothing to download, upload, or install, all you need to do is just embed our widget to your website. Once embedded, all modifications are done instantly from your website using the Stiqr interface. This eliminates the need to open up ftp connections to make changes to your site, nor do you have to learn which file to edit from complex template system, thereby, making Stiqr extremely convenient, easy, and fun to use for all people.

To begin using Stiqr, simply copy the only line of code that you will ever touch from the website and paste in on your own site right before the </body> tag on your html file and save it. The next step is to Refresh the page and press shift+F2 to activate the Stiqr interface. From there, set a password and login to your Stiqr.

Stiqr Features:

tick elements such as: texts, shapes, html, apps/widgets, and even modify background image.

Scale / resize elements on the fly on the spot

Stack elements in the order you want with built-in layers control

Browse an image from our image library or upload your own to our Amazon Cloud CDN service for free

Hosted on a Rackspace Cloud architecture platform with multi fail-over system

Stiqr automatically creates cross-browser compliant code for you out of the box. No more CSS hacking nightmares.

You can play with the demo by making the jump here.

Video Demo:

Tags: Blogspot, Drag and Drop, No-Codes, Stiqr, Tumblr, Website Design, wordpress

LinkWithin: A New Related Post Widget for Blogs

Are you looking for a blog widget to further increase your page views? One way of increasing page views on your blog is to offer related reading. This gives the readers an opportunity to have a glimpse of your other articles. You can install several scripts or plugins (depending on your blog platform) to feature your other posts.

LinkWithin is another related stories/articles widget that you can use on your blog. What makes it different from other plugins/widgets is that it comes with a photo thumbnail. The widget is minimally styled to blend in with your site design. The widget is free and ad-free. It will only take you just a couple of minutes to get the widget up and running on your blog. It works on most blogging platform such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and you will not be required to sign or register in order to use the widget.

I only get to test it on a WordPress blog and I must say that it looks great. The only thing that I am concerned with when I installed the plugin is that (as of now) it doesn’t give you any customization option. It displays 3 sets of related posts on each of my pages. It would be great if I am, as a user, is allowed to limit the number of Link Within widgets set on my blog. This will allow blog owners to target where their related posts will appear on their pages.

If ever you want to try something new on your blog, Link Within might be the widget that you’re looking for. As of now, it’s not for me. I’ll be patiently waiting for further development of its WordPress plugin. Goodluck guys.

Tags: link, Link Within, Plugin, Related Articles, Related Posts, wordpress

Heyzap: Embed over 6000 Flash Games to Your Website

Want a great way to add some fun to your websites, blogs or social pages? Try embedding games to your posts and pages through Heyzap. It’s where you can find thousands of engaging embeddable flash games that casual gamers will surely enjoy.

Heyzap currently has more than 6000 games for you to choose from. Heyzap aggregates games from all over the Internet and also allows developers to directly upload their games to the heyzap platform. Most games found on Heyzap are from Miniclip (a popular flash games portal). Embedding the games is as easy as embedding YouTube videos. Just copy the embed codes and paste them to your site.

*For WordPress bloggers: They have this awesome WordPress plugin that allows you to place a widget to your blog(s). The widget will allow users and visitors to view the games that are aggregated by Heyzap and play them without leaving your website. It’s an awesome way of adding flash fun to your WordPress blogs.

Check out the sample below.

heyzap.com – free online games

Tags: Embed Games, Flash Games, Heyzap, wordpress

Jabbify: Unobtrusive Chat Plugin for Websites

There are lots of chat client widgets/plugins for blogs and websites. Most bloggers do not use chat widgets mainly because it reduces commenting on articles and it consumes sidebar space. For sites or blogs which offers a service or a product, a chat widget is a handy tool to have.

Jabbify offers a widget that you can place on your blogs/websites which will not consume space from your site. It can sit on the bottom part of the browser so that it will not interfere with your content or waste sidebar space. The user has the power to turn it off or pop it out in a different window. What I like about Jabbify is that a user can register his name and the URL of his/her site in the chat widget. The user’s name will link to the URL he/she entered and will be available in the conversations. This way, the owner and other visitors of the site can check out the participant’s respective blogs or sites. It’s pretty much like a comment system on blogs. The only difference is that Jabbify is live.

Setting up the plugin is very easy. You can either get the java script tag which works on any site or if you are using a blogging platform like WordPress or Blogger, there is a quick how-to guide that will help you setup Jabbify easily on your blogs. After installing the plugin, all that’s left to do is to use your Jabbify to register your website.

If you are looking for an unobtrusive chat plugin for your blogs, Jabbify is worth a try. Just head over to their site and sign up.

Tags: blogger, Chat, jabbify, Plugin, wordpress

Free WordPress Blog with Adsense from IdeaFry

WordPress.com is a great free blog platform, the reason why most bloggers still prefer to use Blogspot as their free blog platform is mainly because of its monetization capabilities. The free WordPress.com blog prohibits the placement of ads. You have to acquire the hosted version from WordPress.org if you want to maximize the profits and fully customize your blog (Highly Recommended). The new blogging service that I’m going to introduce to you lets you use a free WordPress platform and make some money from Google ads.

IdeaFry is a free blog service which uses WordPress as its blogging platform. Registration is easy and like blogger, you will be given your own subdomain (e.g yourname.ideafry.com). You can choose different free themes and customize them like you do in free WP blogs. If you choose to use IdeaFry as your new blog service, you can easily import content from other blogging platforms such as Typepad, Blogger, WordPress.com, LiveJournal and many others. The selling feature of IdeaFry is the Adsense integration. You can easily monetize your blog by placing your Adsense publisher key. Although that it would probably mean that you will be sharing your profits with IdeaFry (like in blogger) it’s still a great deal for a free service which “promises” a 99.9% uptime. IdeaFry is basically WordPress.com with a different domain and Adsense integration. (Still no javascripts)

IdeaFry will give you a free space of 10MB for uploaded files. This means that if you’re going to use the service, you should probably host your images elsewhere. I’m not sure if there is a bandwidth limit for using the service. It would be safe to assume that there is none, because if there is actually a bandwidth limit, then it would probably be better to stick to blogger.

If you are a blogger who enjoys using WordPress as your blog platform and want to equip it with Adsense, IdeaFry would be a great place to start.

Tags: adsense, blogger, ideafry, typepad, wordpress, wordpress.com, wordpress.org