If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
I have been using some new blogging tools that have made life much easier. They are Performancing, Newshutch, and Visistat.
I have discontinued Visistats because after a 7-day trial, it required me to pay almost $120 per year for service continuation. Regardless of how addicted you are to blogging, that kind of money is not justifiable purely for blog stats although the interface is quite cool and extremely user friendly (screen shots after the jump). But if you are a serious blogger earning the big bucks, you could probably do with subscribing to Visistats. They tried offering me a reduced-price deal but anything other than free was out of the question for my little blog. Especially when Google Analytics is free and now is accessible to all those with a GMail account.
The other service is Performancing. Vulturo, who often doubles up as DesiPundit’s tech support guy recommended this tool and I have been hooked ever since. If you are using FireFox like any sensible blogger should, then Performancing is a welcome addition to your browser taskbar. You can download a quick-to-install FireFox plugin. The tool rests silently on the taskbar and pops up in an instant to let you write a quick post. Set up your blogs, if you have more than one and you are good to go. You can compose your posts in WYSIWYG format and save them as notes if you are offline and publish them later. The best part was Technorati tags that I could add on the fly. Definitely recommended for high frequency bloggers. Microsoft’s Live Writer is a neat tool as well but I am sticking to Performancing until they add features like tabs and tagging plugins. Oops, it seems like the tags plugin has already been developed. The requirement for .NET framework sucks though.
I have shifted away from Bloglines (again) and this time, the move might be permanent. Newshutch is an AJAX-powered online feed reader that lets you import your Bloglines feeds in an instant. I like the minimalist interface and ‘vanishing’ feeds once you are done reading them. After featuring on LifeHacker, Newhutch drastically improved their features and moved certain important buttons around. The ‘Add Feed’ button features right at the top of the screen. One hitch is that, it doesn’t detect a duplicate feed and adds the second one anyway. Also, the feeds may not be displayed at once, like Bloglines does once you fire up Newshutch but you aren’t gonna read all feeds at once anyway. As you continue down your feeds list, they eventually show up.
Now in the seven days of my Visistats trial, I managed to unearth some interesting stats for my blog. Mind you, these may only be valid for those seven days, especially the search terms [click to view the larger version]:
The Visistat Toolbar
Page Views
Popular pages
Visitors by states and cities
Visitors by Country (I was really surprised to see India as a distant second)
Heavy FireFox usage among my readers although Macs still are a minority
OK! who has the 1920×1200 resolution monitor?
So it just wasn’t me who was tracking the would-be-but-never-was Hurricane Chris.The TVU player post still remains a hot favorite.Technorati Tags: visistats, performancing, newshutch, blogging tools, web statistics, firefox
by Patrix | on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 8:32 pm | 
Weblogs . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
August 16th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
It is always nice to have some new toys. :)
August 17th, 2006 at 5:53 am
I started using Performancing since last week - I agree it is very convenient. But I notice that my posts are formatted slightly wierd in Wordpress once I post them - different paragraphs come out in slightly different shades of grey and wierd line breaks appear in the blockquote statements. Have to figure out whats going wrong.
August 17th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Dude999, you know what they say about men and their toys, right? Get more expensive as they grow up.
Bongo, I have noticed the line breaks in the quotes too. Sometimes you should check for the HTML tags before posting them.
August 17th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Blogging Tools…
Patrix has a list of tools he uses for blogging. Once upon a time I used to use w.bloggar for composing my entries, but after starting to use multiple computers I gave up on installed software like Performancing. If……
August 17th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
[...] Patrix brings to light some useful new blogging tools including an RSS aggregator, a couple of blogging clients and a very detailed statistics services (paid one, albeit) [...]
August 18th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Patrix,
newshutch.com
you misguided me, man :-)
August 18th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Have you tried flock (www.flock.com)
It is the browser that has been built with blogging in mind .
Try it.
August 18th, 2006 at 6:34 am
Performancing is a nice FOSS tool to blog. If you are not very crazy about FOSS then you can try Quamana which is one of the best desktop blogging tool. They are giving free download now with Lycos ads try it.
http://lycos.qumana.com/overview.htm
August 18th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Yep. Flock is pretty handy.
Cheers,
HP
August 18th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Blogger has released a new beta tool and they are phasing the roll out. Did u get a chance to try that?
August 18th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Raaj, Sorry. Corrected it. You wouldn’t have been lost if you had clicked on the link at the top.
Megarajan, thanks I will. For now, Firefox serves me well.
Thejesh, thanks. Will take a look at it.
Spock, I did take a look at it. But I don’t use Blogger.
August 19th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Patrix,
I would also like to add that flock has been built on Firefox code and all the Firefox extensions are supposed to work by default in flock also.
So you wont miss Firefox(except look and feel) to an extent when you move to Flock.
August 19th, 2006 at 10:02 am
the visistats link is not working
August 19th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
I have been using performancing for quite while. Thanks of newshutch.com I really liked it I might ditch bloglines as well
August 20th, 2006 at 11:31 am
The problem I have with browser plugins such as performancing is that you have got to be in front of a Firefox browser with the plugin installed. It isn’t always the case, let us not kid ourselves by saying that we don’t blog from work or the library. We do. This is where a tool like writely comes in. Writely is essentially a poor man’s content management system which allows collaborative editing. But that is not what bloogers can use it for anyway.
One can blog from a word processor like editor to our blogs. Some functions are yet to be improved upon but this is the way to go.
Does performancing allow you to apply any number of tags you want? I have been using Deepest Sender because it is very light weight and simple. Performancing was kinda heavy as a plugin. Deepest Sender however forgets all the tags you type and allows just the one mentioned as category as a tag.