Each time you edit your blog post Wordpress sends a ping to the blog pinging services automatically. So if you edit the post several times after it has been published, Wordpress will send pings same number of times unnecessarily. Blog directories and blog ping services like Ping-o-Matic track those pings & based upon the frequency of those pings they may consider your blog as a potential spam & ban it from their services.

So if you update your blog posts a lot, you better have some extra protection from being marked as a spammer. There are some plugins that can prevent Wordpress autoping. One popular Wordpress plugin is MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. You just have to install it. Then you will get the options to enable and disable pinging. Even you can set the maximum number of pings at a certain time interval like one ping in 15 minutes. And from the log below the page you can find the pings that the plugin has prevented and the pings that went through. A cool plugin altogether. But for activation of this plugin you have to submit your email address and click on the confirmation link in the email. From then on, you will receive newsletters and offers from MaxBlogPress. You can unsubscribe from the mailing list any time.

But what if you get the exact same plugin without having to disclose your email address? CBNet Ping Optimizer is just a perfect alternative to MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Everything is same. You will get the exact same functionalities and same user interface and you don’t have to register your email address.

So what will you choose

So now you have a few more templates to choose from if you strictly use blog templates from Blogger’s own gallery. But what is more important, all these 15 new Blogger templates are highly customizable giving you more control over the style and look. Each of these templates come with one, two and three column layouts and you will have complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns. Then you can choose any color or make your own custom color to apply it to your new Blogger template. Not only the color, you can also change the whole background with any picture from iStockphoto. There are hundreds of images to choose from. And the best thing is that you do it without affecting your blog live online. Just select the “Template Designer” tab to have a live preview while editing.

Here is a cool and short video from Blogger that will take you through a quick tour.

This new feature is only in Blogger Draft right now. So if you want to try it to your blogspot blog you just have to login there. And why not? It is your chance to make your blogspot blog more beautiful

I have used NoDofollow add-on for Firefox for a long time now. It is actually my favourite Firefox addon, just a little one effective enough to show you dofollow and nofollow links. But as I upgraded Firefox to latest version 3.6 some days ago, I found NoDofollow is  not woking with it. So I waited and waited for the original developer to make an update to support it for latest Firefox. But it hasn’t happened yet. But today I found an unofficial version of NoDofollow that supports Firefox 3.6. You can find it in Scott Miller’s blog. I tested it personally in my Firefox 3.6 and it is working perfectly.

Have your ever checked your page load time with Google Page Speed? Perhaps you have checked the site loading time using some other speed test services. But you can do it by using Google’s own Page Speed Service. For that you need FireBug addon with Firefox web browser. But frankly speaking, I was never not too excited about it. The page speed activity looked somewhat clumsy to me. First of all, it will display all the request and response times for whole open browsing session. That means if you have more than a site opened in your Firefox then the log will get mixed up with all the service times across the domains in a single console. And the individual request time just comes and goes through the console. So when a processing is finished like a image loading or Javascript execution, those timings will vanish from console. If you want to monitor times, you have to stop Page Speed Activity in the middle of page loading. That is rather inconvenient. By the way, check this manual from Google to learn in detail how to test page load speed of a single site and monitor times in log.

But one thing that stands out is analyzing performance using Page Speed.

So it will have a thorough check-up of your page and give you a overall score out of hundred. And it will list all the problems from DNS  request, url  redirection, image loading to CSS, Javascript or caching problems. You may find out a few things that you really need to tweak.