Have you ever uploaded an image into a blog post using blogger and wonder where it went? Well you can now access those images again in Picasa Web Album.

Each of your blogs now has its own album in Picasa Web Albums, which is exciting because you now have a photo management interface for your blog’s photos – for example you could order prints, use the fancy email this photo feature, or easily embed the album somewhere else on the web. Be careful when you delete photos though, because deletions will affect both your blog and its album. Lastly, Blogger photos are now part of Picasa Web Albums’ 1GB of free quota, which can be upgraded.

Picasa Web Album also provides a link back to the image if you ever need to reference it again.

A week and a half ago FeedBurner added the ability for users to see the amount page views their headline animator widget received. Yesterday they continued the overhaul by making it easier for users on Myspace, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress and various email programs to incorporate the headline animator into their desired framework.

They also introduced Word Wrapping into the headline animator:

Not everyone appreciates the sangfroid of a compact headline (note this post). For you and us, caution may be thrown to the wind by applying word wrap to individual post headlines.

I recently setup a blog using WordPress and I am glad I did because I didn’t realize how fantastic WordPress was up until now. I have been using Blogger for quite a while but I have to admit, I believe WordPress is a superior product.

Here are 11 things I love about WordPress (many may already know these, but I thought I’d mention them anyways):

1. Ease of Setup: I don’t have much experience with PHP or MySQL but it literally only took 5-10 min to install WordPress. Download the code from the website, upload to your website using FTP, create a MySQL database, change a few config settings for the database connection, browse to the admin page and WordPress walks you through after that.
2. Meta Tag Plug-in: This allows for custom meta tags for all posts, pages and categories. Installation is quite easy, simply download a plug-in, copy to your plug-ins folder, activate it in your admin and voila, you have custom meta tags right in your editor.
3. Templates: Check out Themes.WordPress.net for over 1,000 different WordPress Templates.
4. Support/Documentation: WordPress forums are very helpful, if you’ve got a problem someone else probably has had the same issue and now has a solution for you.
5. Customizability: If you’ve got some programming knowledge like I do, you can really take advantage of WordPress by being able to update page sections (side bar, footer, header) and add widgets
6. URL Re-writer: In the admin section you can configure how you want your blog’s URLs to appear (permalinks). Rather than the default query string structure, WordPress allows you to convert URLs so they are Search Engine Friendly. WordPress even generates code for your .htaccess file so that your URL rewriting works without any issues.
7. Editor WYSIWYG/HTML: The Blog editor comes with your standard HTML/WYSIWYG modes and I really like how you can add your posts to various categories, change post authors and upload files.
8. Clean Code: Search Spiders prefer clean coded websites and after viewing the code source of the blog I setup, I was impressed with how clean the code was. No embedded JavaScript or CSS, no extra line breaks and comments, only the necessary HTML and content.
9. CSS Style Sheet: There are often times when you have to update a CSS file and you don’t know where to begin because it’s so massive because it contains hundreds of classes and styles. The template I chose came up with a relatively small CSS file with all the classes and styles named intuitively.
10. User Management: Adding/Editing users is a breeze. WordPress also allows 5 or 6 different types of User accounts which gives administrators much flexibility. Some of the user roles include: Administrators, Editors, Contributors, Authors, and Subscribers.
11. Flickr Plug-in: I wanted to add a simple way to manage photos on the blog, so I did quick search on Google and the first result was a list of WordPress image plug-ins. One of them was a Flickr Plug-in which allows you to import your Flickr images right into your selected page.

So there you have it, as I come across more cool features I will continue to Blog about them. I will also mention downfalls I notice as well.

If you’ve started a blog in the last few months and want to gain a better understanding of how your writing/marketing efforts have done in terms of performance, there are many ways to gauge the level of your Blog’s success.

- FeedBurner Subscribers FeedBurner also does a great job in showing click throughs back to your site and podcast downloads.

- Blog Influence – A formula which takes the following metrics into account: Google PageRank, Technorati Links, Yahoo Site Explorer Back Links, and Bloglines Subscribers

- Visitors, Return Visitors, Time Spent, and Content Viewed using your Analytics.

- Google News mentions

- Technorati Rank – Are other bloggers linking to your content?

If you are not satisfied with the level of your success, here’s a few questions to ask yourself:

- Is my blog’s content engaging enough to keep visitors coming back?

- Is the content I am producing also consistently mentioned by other bloggers? If so, am I providing a unique perspective to my readers?

- Have I participated in industry forums or left useful comments at other blogs in order to get my name out there?

- Have I written anything worthy of LinkBait

- Have I used other methods of promotion:

Social Bookmarking, RSS Feeds, Press Releases, Syndicating on other sites, Inviting Guest Bloggers, Guest Blogging elsewhere, Using Podcasts, Interviews, Polls, etc…

- How have the Search Engines reacted to my blog? Is it indexed properly?

If you have any further issues you’d like to discuss fire me off an email