Cut and paste any part of your screen with Snippy (freeware)

• This tiny little freeware utility lets you cut and paste any part of your screen
• You can cut rectangle/squares, or do freehand cut and pasting
• You can cut with/without borders and define border thickness + colour
• V Cool

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Share big files with a ‘Box.net’ widget

• WordPress have just joined forces with Box.net to give us a cool widget to let people download big files
• You can see an example and learn more here

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! - you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO - there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” - this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Blog marketing - get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Freeware recommendations from those in the know

Majorgeeks.com have a list of ‘must have’ freeware for a whole bunch of uses. They highlight their picks based on whether they’re suitable novices, intermediates, or ‘Majorgeeks’ - very helpful

Blogging for beginners

I just found a great series of free lessons by a professional blogger on blogging for newbies.

Feed the hungry with a click

At the hunger site you click to send 1.1 cups of staple food to the hungry (click the yellow “Help Feed The Hungry” button.) The food is paid for by advertisers/sponsors.

* The site’s been going since June 1999
* They get an “average of over 220,000 individuals from around the world… each day”
* “To date, more than 200 million visitors have given more than 300 million cups of staple food.”

Check out the tabs at the top of the screen for similar schemes on breast cancer, child health and more.

Make money through your blog

Blogitive and similar sites let you earn money by making blog entries for advertisers. I’ve never tried this but it does look interesting, so any hints/tips, do’s/don’ts, recommendations, general comments etc would be greatly appreciated. From a quick scout around though, there seem to be mixed opinions about making money this way (i.e. is this just another form of spam!)

For a list of similar companies check out supermom’s page (a page or so down.) There are loads of other web-based money making systems/ideas etc, as well.