When you have decent traffic in your blog, you might want to publicize it. In that case Feed Burner is a trusted and most used service from Google to show your blog readers in an accurate figure. You know this service very well because your email subscription service is already supported by it.

Another Recommended Reading: How to Permanently Block a Spammer in Wordpress Blog.

By default Feed Burner doesn’t show your reader count, you need to activate this service from there.

Logon to the www.feedburner.com and login with your Google account. It will show you the subscriber count of your blog. Now click on “Publicize” tab and then on “FeedCount” at left sidebar.

You can now get the feed count chicklet preview. Customize the chicklet by changing body and text color if needed. Finally click on “Activate” button at below to enable the service.

This is the HTML code of the chicklet with reader count of your blog. Copy the code and paste anywhere in your blog. If you’re in Wordpress, simply add it at widget section.

If you are in Blogger or Typepad, you can directly add the reader count by selecting and clicking on the “Go!” button.

Now Google Chrome offers you to publish a post to your Blogspot blog in one click while found something useful in the web anywhere. It becomes possible with a Chrome extension Blog This!.

Don’t get panicked with the duplicate content issue because I found it doesn’t publish the post in details, just the Title and the link to reach there.

Installation is so easy, click on the extension link and then on “Install” button.

It will throw you a small page to confirm about the installation. Again click on “Install” to get the Blog This! icon in your Chrome browser tab instantly.

Now just walk on the web and whenever you found something useful, click on the “Blog This!” button at right top of your Chrome browser tab . It will open the Bloggers login page. Put your username, password and hit the “Publish” button.

If your blog is personal or news related, this technique will be very useful to you but I think professional bloggers might avoid it as because they know contents should be written by their own.

Would you ever think about getting a HP mini Notebook at only 185$ or a Toshiba Mini 300 Series at 328$? Really it’s an impossible news but I found it true in Google Shopping yesterday. Yes!! Google launched its new Shopping service that shown me some attractive products in unbelievable prices. It offers you to directly add the product to your shopping cart from here.

You can see a link “Shopping” on your Google home page. Click on it and reach to Google’s new product showroom. Now type your product name in search box at top. A long list of related products will be shown in a short while with worth price at right.

The extra feature is you can set your budget by putting numerical data in the Price range boxes at left sidebar. Here I searched for Laptop and put 50-100$ in the price range box. The results are shown,

Click on your chosen result to get details on it. Once done, put your location to check for nearest vendors and shipping charges etc. It will show you up the total amount you have to spend.

I also noticed there is no shipping charges or Tax for some products. So no matter where you are. Just choice your product and step out to buy it.

But before proceed to payment, read the product and payment details thoroughly to be sure that there is no hidden charges.

It is worth saying once you have created a free blog in Blogspot, anyone can visit your blog without any password. But today I am talking about a useful feature “Blog Reader” of Blogspot that enables you to restrict your blog for all except a few those you have invited.

Another Recommended Reading: How to Edit Blogger Template without HTML/CSS Knowledge.

Only those who has been invited by you and accepted the request can visit your blog and see your content. They need to accept a request by entering their Google user and pass. The blog shows restricted for the rest.

More specifically this article is for those who is in Blogspot for a long period but don’t want to continue it anymore. This article will guide them to quickly turn their blog to a password protected profile. Just a matter of 3-4 simple steps…

I hope you have a Blogspot blog. Now login to your blog and click on the “Settings” and then on “Permissions”.

Thus you reached at the point, now look at below, there will be a section “Blog Reader”. First check the “Only these readers” option and then you can find an input text box offering you to enter the email addresses that you want to send request to view your blog. So do it with commas in between. Finally click on “INVITE” to send the requests.

Thus your job is over. Now the question is what the recipient who just received the request have to do. It’s so simple, just have to login to their Gmail account and click on the confirmation link in the request mail.

It will tour them to the login page and prompt to login to their Google account. Just after clicking on the “ACCEPT INVITATION” button, they will be able to visit your blog.

Thus now your blog is fully private and anyone who didn’t receive your request never be able to visit anymore.

After the successful integration to Wordpress, the sharing options are now in Blogspot. You can now add a “Share this” button” of the most popular social media services like Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Gmail, Blogger at below of post in your Blogspot blog.

Another Recommended Reading: How to Edit Blogger Template without HTML/CSS Knowledge.

Login to your bloggers account and click on “Design” button. It will open up the blogger backend, now click on “Edit” option of “Blog Posts” section. It will again open a new page. You can find here the sharing option at below, check the box to enable it.

I personally think it’s a great addition to blogspot and especially for the beginners in Blogspot. Because to add this feature manually, you must have to get sufficient knowledge in HTML, CSS .

It’s worth to say Google Analytics is able to track your blog visitors with deep in keywords that they typed. I am using Google Analytics for a long while for Softtricks. Really its analysis power is very impressive.

Another Recommended Reading: Create a Free Mobile Version of your Blog/Site

At the very earlier of SoftTricks I was searching for such a method that can ignore my own visits to count. But after trying several methods ultimately I became failure. I have tried the methods of Cookies, Filters, Dynamic IPs but don’t know why not a single one was working for me but I didn’t give up the topic.

And ultimately I have solved it by a simple php script. I just restricted Analytics to count my visits when I am logged-in at Wordpress. So to use this method, you must have to run on Wordpress.

Procedure is so simple. First take a look at the php script below. Replace the red color code with your own analytics tracking code and paste in footer.php.

Now save the modified and visit your own site without tension, it will not be counted.
If u r using any other technique, drop a comment at below.

Do you know YouTube is the biggest video site in the web with over 120 million videos? If you want to watch all the videos in YouTube, you need to live over 6oo years more. Near about 2 lakhs videos are uploaded to YouTube perday.

Recommended Reading: YouTube launched a Video Editor

Recently Google has added a useful feature to YouTube. It has made you possible to upload videos to your YouTube account from mobile phone. When you are staying away from your computer, you can still upload an awesome video from mobile by just sending a mail.  It will get uploaded to your YouTube account.

Let’s check the procedure…

Sign into your YouTube account and click on the “Account” option, just left of “Sign Out” link.

Well, now come back to the left sidebar and click on “Mobile Setup” option. It will show your unique YouTube uploading ID (nothing but a mail ID) in the right pane. The rest job is most easy, just send the video to that address from your mobile phone. It will automatically get uploaded.

If don’t understand, check out this video…

Don’t share the unique ID with anyone, it’s different for different users.

Okey, thus you have done the job. Now start to upload videos from your mobile but don’t forget to let me know how many videos you have uploaded yet.

Do you know that you are now able to get the particular direction in between any two places in this globe. Yes!! it becomes possible by Google Maps. Even I didn’t know it before but yesterday when I was tracing an IP location, suddenly found this feature.

And I really got wondered to see that apart from direction show, it also shows you the name of all popular locations in between these two places.

Once you have opened Google Maps, click on the “Get Directions” link at left sidebar. Two tabs A,B will appear for start and destination places respectively. Enter the two places and click on the “Get Directions” button.

The places will appear in the right side of the page in a short while with blue colored direction line. Look at the screenshot below, the starting place will be denoted by “A” and the destination by “B”. Drag the cursor at left side to get more closer view.

This feature, now I am talking about really surprised me and I just thought how is it possible. It is you will be directed in details on how long distance you have to go and on which direction. The place, you have started will be denoted by A. The terminal place is B. See the screenshot below to know more.

So why are you wasting time? Just step out and start for a unknown place.

Have you ever imagined an HTML text field would offer you to drag and drop images? Google has made it possible. Gmail official blog declared an another addition to Gmail, the “ Image Drag and Drop” Facility. Instead of uploading an image and then putting the URL, try to drag and drop it in your Gmail text field.

Just login to your Gmail account and choose “Compose Mail”. Now drag and drop an image from hard drive to the mail text field. It would get inserted. Any popular image format like PNG, JPG, GIF, TIF is acceptable.

Really this is a great feature by Google for the Gmail users to make the mailing simpler.

But still now this facility is available for the Google Chrome browser users only. Google has announced the other browser users will grab the facility within a short while but not right now.

So have fun and let your friends have fun…

Recommended Reading: Install Portable Mozilla Firefox In A Pen Drive.

You must noticed that two days back Google offered users to play Pacman on home page to celebrate 30th anniversary of the fabulous game Pacman. I had also spent a lot of time with playing it and scored 2500 as highest. This is the slightly modified mini version by Google. [Read more →]