The following are some cool websites with some cool website and blog tools for you to check out and make use of:

Nexodyne Email Image Generator: I love the web! Have I said that before? It’s good to have recognizable icons to lead your site visitors by the hand around your website or blog. This nifty tool by Nexodyne lets you create personalize email buttons that you can place on your website or blog.

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So I was working on a client’s blog recently and was having the most frustrating time trying to embed video onto the site. I recall also having the same trouble on my Film Tops blog. I went to WordPress’s Plugins page and low and behold, I found a solution with a simple plugin.

EasyTube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to embed a YouTube or Google Video in your blog post without WordPress assigning p tags where they don’t belong making your published posts and those below them screwy looking. Anyway, the cool thing about EasyTube is that the code you have to put in your post is soooooo simple: [youtube: URL] or [googlevideo:URL], that’s it! “URL” should be replaced with the actual URL where the YouTube or Google Video is found. You can also assign width and height: [googlevideo:URL width height] Fabulous, ain’t it!

I decided to start a new post series called “Cool Tools for Your Blog”. Here’s the first out of many posts of cool tools for your blog:

Buttonmaker : With this buttonmaker, you can create your own antipixel buttons.

Local Biz Blogs : LocalBizBlogs is an easy way to connect with customers and build your business’s reputation on the web, even if you already have a website.

OneSite : OneSite is the leading provider of online community and social media solutions.

BlogHoster : BlogHoster is a PHP-based software product which allows you to provide a blog hosting service on your website. The blog hosting that you give your users with BlogHoster is comparable to popular third-party blog hosting services blogger and wordpress.com.

20 Analytics Tools For Blogs : A list of great analytics tools mostly blog specific.

Found this cool new WordPress plugin I think many bloggers may find useful especially for those who have blogs posts that have geographical significance. PostMapper.com hopes to be the biggest, baddest blog post mashup. PostMapper is a geographically orientated blog post directory. It’s part API, and part Mashup, and they even have a WordPress plugin that does all the work, save writing the post & entering an address. Allow bloggers to geocode their posts, and mash them up on a central post map. All travel blogs, photo blogs, and any blog with posts that concern locations can come together in one place. Check out the WordPress PostMapper plugin. If anyone uses this plugin, please let me know what you think.

How does one go about blogging? Well, first read Poles Apart Design’s article What is a Blog? Why Should I Blog? Who Blogs? This article should especially help you in deciding if you should blog and why. Now that you’ve decided to blog, you want to know how to go about it. Well, here’s a somewhat comprehensive list on how to blog:
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So you’ve decided to transfer your free WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog and you have no idea which web host is needed for your blog. Well, picking a web host for your WordPress blog is like picking your web host for a regular website in most ways. You just have to know how much space you need, what kind of scripts and tools you’ll need and so forth for your WordPress blog to work. Now, you’re probably asking, “How am I supposed to know what I need for my blog?” Well, there are only three requirements for self-hosting your WordPress blog:

• PHP version 4.2 or greater
• MySQL version 4.0 or greater
• The latest version of WordPress.org to install on your web host’s server downloadable here

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Here are a few WordPress plugins you may find helpful in giving your WordPress blog some added functionality:

RelatedPosts provides a variety of options for displaying posts that are related through tags.

TextMe sends a carbon-copy of all admin emails sent via SMS to your cell phone.

Video Embedder makes it easy to embed videos from various sources, such as YouTube and Google Video.

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When I think about marketing my blog, I don’t think of PR. But, blogging is a unique business requiring unique and numerous channels of marketing. There are the usual word of mouth, article submission sites like ezinearticles.com, getting well known guest bloggers to write an article or two on your blog, and so forth. But, PR, really? Well, Poles Apart Design is ready to announce a new partnership with an email marketing company, Constant Contact, and we’re looking to get the news out there quick, fast and hard. But, we’re still a new and small company.

I checked out a couple of PR sites like PR Newswire and Business Wire. Then I checked out PR Web and was quite impressed with what they had to offer, but more so with how they presented it to me. Check out this smart, creative way PR Web used video to market their PR services:
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