Since our first post about BlogExplosion I’ve noticed some pretty radical improvements on their site lately. The most noticeable being a complete face-lift of the entire site. I’ve got high expectations for BlogExplosion and apparently, so do they:

BlogExplosion is continually upgrading features and making improvements on a daily basis. Please excuse the non-stop work in progress and watch as we build BlogExplosion into one of the leading blogging resources on the internet.

I couldn’t agree more.

If you have a web company and you need to send your customers invoices, consider Blinksale.

With Blinksale, it’s a breeze to…

• Send elegantly formatted invoices to your customers’ email
• Send payment reminders when an invoice is past-due
• Send thank-you messages when an invoice is closed
• Track open, past-due, and closed invoices
• Add PayPal payment links to your invoices
• Customize the look and feel of your invoices with CSS
• Subscribe to your invoices with iCal & RSS

So forget those sub-par invoices you’ve been sending your customers. With Blinksale make them feel that paying you is a good experience. Everybody wins.

Did you know that if you have a Yahoo account, you also have a free blogging account with Yahoo called Yahoo! 360°? Similarly, did you know that if you had a Microsoft Hotmail account, you also already had a free blogging account with Microsoft called MSN Spaces?

Both sites allow you to post with editors that help you post pictures and change fonts for your posts. With Yahoo 360°, you get a domain name like http://360.yahoo.com/username , where “username” is your Yahoo user id. With MSN Spaces, you get a domain name like http://spaces.msn.com/members/yourname, where “yourname” can be anything that is available and that you wish, even if it is different than your MSN username. MSN Spaces is also integrated into MSN Messenger. MSN allows you to update your blog through the online interface or through your mobile phone. Yahoo allows you to post your entries through the online interface, mobile phone, and also through the Yahoo Messenger.

To see an example of what can be achieved with Yahoo 360°, you can visit the Yahoo 360° blog page. You can do the same, to see some examples of a MSN Spaces blog, at the MSN Spaces directory.

A few days ago Google announced Blogger for Word, an add-in that lets you post directly from Microsoft Word to your Blogger Account.

Blogger for Word installs as a simple toolbar that lets you open an existing post, and save or publish your current document. After typing out a post, Blogger for Word prompts for your account and password and then loads the post quickly and correctly. If you’re a Blogger user and you own a copy of Microsoft Word, you might want to look into this free download. Blogger for Word is compatible with versions of Windows XP/2000 and Microsoft Word 2000 and up.

Link via LifeHacker.

Blogger.com have decided to take a stand against splog, blogs that are simply promoting spam, considered illegal, objectionable or downright offensive. People browsing blogs over at blogger.com will have the option to report blogs with the blogger bar flag button.

This feature is called “Flag As Objectionable” and it’s accessible via the Blogger Navbar. The “Flag?” button allows the blogging community to easily note questionable content, which in turn helps us take action when needed. So we’re relying on you, the users, to be our eyes on the web, and to let us know of potential issues that are important to you.

Well done blogger.com, we salute you in your fight against splog!

Users of Wordpress version 1.5.1.3 should upgrade to version 1.5.2 as soon as possible. A security exploit exists on servers with register_globals=on set in their php configuration, the exploit may allow an attacker to execute code on the victims account.

If you are using a version below 1.5.1.3, then upgrade to this version before patching it with Wordpress version 1.5.2 which also fixes other bugs and adds a few enhancements.

One thing that most blogging software lacks the most is an in-built spellchecker. I for one admit to not being a great speller, especially when typing quicker than my brain can keep up with. So you can imagine my sheer delight when I discovered the SpellCheck feature that comes with Google Toolbar. Type any text into any form then click the SpellCheck icon to correct all those (if any) embarrassing spelling mistakes. Other cool features available in Google Toolbar are: Word translator, popup blocker, auto-fill (for forms) and much more.

Bloggers beware. Poor spelling and grammar in your blog entries puts people off from visiting regularly. So get yourself a copy of Google Toolbar or consider using wBlogger reviewed in an earlier post by Bes.

If you write content regularly for any site, you may already be aware of how important a writing tool is for you. Whether you use Notepad to write your articles or something else, you know that revising your content and analyzing it a few times before publishing it is better than writing it directly into a page and then publishing it without any revisions. If have a blog, sometimes you may need something more advanced than simply typing your content. Sometimes you may need an editor designed specifically for blogging. One of the most popular blog post editors out there is wBloggar, available in many different languages.

wBloggar comes with many useful features, such as font changing capabilities, preview option to preview your final content before publishing it, a spell checker, and more. It is compatible with dozens of CMS [Content Management Systems] systems out there, including WordPress. You can post new articles, save drafts, or edit already existing articles on your site. The tool offers the options to upload your post along with images, so that you don’t have to upload the images related to your articles separately.

The tool is also a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] editor, so working with or without the knowledge of html is almost the same, and you can achieve the same results in both cases for your articles. On top of that, the program allows you to ping weblogs.com anytime you post or update an article. The program is free to download and use, and currently runs on all Windows platforms.

Have a little fun with the Wayback Machine from the owners of the Internet Archive web site. Look back at over 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. Type in any web site address and you should get a list of dates when the site was archived, to view how the site looked on a particular date just click on the month link.

Of course the Wayback machine has its practical uses as well. Let’s say for example that you want to start a blog on a specific subject and let’s presume that you’ve already thought of a domain name for your blog. Rather than jumping straight in and registering your domain, why not use the Wayback machine to check whether the domain hasn’t already been used before and if so, for what purpose. You don’t want to register a domain name that was used for illegal or unethical purposes, if the domain was used before for spamming for example then you may find it has been blacklisted by ISPs all over the globe.

An extremely handy tool for any webmaster or fellow blogger.

A blogging tool for blogger.com members with a mobile device.

AvantBlog is a very simple tool that allows you to post to your blog from your Palm or WinCE device. This version of AvantBlog only works with Blogger.com, the author says that future versions will have support for other blogging systems. We’ll hold him to his word for you

If anyone else knows of any other Palm based blogging utilities please drop me an email with details.