If you didn’t know, today is Blog Backup Day. The 13th of every month is the one day that you should take a few minutes and backup your blog posts in case something bad happens. What if the database server decides to crash tomorrow? Then what?!

I started Blog Backup Day in hopes to encourage other blog authors to save their data. You never know when a hosting error or hacker will pop up. There is nothing worse for a blogger than realizing that your past year (or more) worth of blog posts are simply gone.

Wanted: A few brave soles to test out the new Social Bookmark Wordpress Plugin. It’s an upgrade of my current version and includes an admin screen for selecting the options you want to show.

I had more issues with this one than expected as it kept hooking into my Chicklet Creator plugin and editing that. However, I think that’s all fixed.

If you’d like to test it leave a comment below. The only thing I ask is that if you install it, try it out and get back to me in a few days so I can fix any bugs and get it released to the general public next week.

Announcing updates to the Chicklet Creator and the Social Bookmark Creator.

The updated blog tools include a new layout, more buttons and a few added features. One of the big additions is the drop down menus. You can now create a CSS drop down menu to hold all your feed buttons, or you can create a social bookmark pop-up menu just like the one above.

There is an amazing feature available for hosted Wordpress.com blogs called Feed Stats. It tells you how many people have viewed your feed and what feed readers were used. The bad part? It’s only for Wordpress.com blogs.

See a great review of Feed Stats.

I’m hoping that the feed stats feature makes it into all Wordpress blogs. The only other option seems to be Feedburner. Personally, I like having my feed URL be part of my site and I don’t want to pay for any additional features.

There are some great blog search engines out there today like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Sphere. However, they all have the same flaw; they don’t block spam blogs.

Not one of the three blog search engines listed above do a very good job, if any job at all, of blocking blog spam. Do a search for some sports gear, like “wrestling shoes”, and there is a great probability that more than a few results in the top ten are spam blogs.

As always, I’m considering changes to the design of my site/blog. I’m not sure what I want to do exactly but I have lots of ideas. As soon as I work them in though, I’m not a big fan.

One thing I’d love to do is pull the entire site into Wordpress. Doubt that’s going to happen though. I also really want to do something with the sidebar. It’s just to plain to me. I want my site to stand out and not look like the average blog.

If you have ideas, or sites you think are cool, feel free to share them. I’ll take all ideas.

My Social Bookmark Link Creator is now in testing mode. Just select the links you’d like to add to your blog posts, create the code and copy it into your blogs template. Quick and Easy.

The Social Bookmark Link Creator is a spawn of the Chicklet Creator as they both use the same underlying code to generate the output. This time, I created it for social bookmarking as it’s getting more popular by the day.

Social bookmarking is the idea that you keep all your bookmarks in one online place. Much like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, your information is always accessible no matter where you are.

I’ve been working on a few updates to the Chicklet Creator.

I started to add support for the pLog blogging software, but I seem to be stuck. I actually only got one variable of one button done. The code has been sent back to my pLog tester and hopefully he’ll say it works. But, for now, pLog support is in alpha mode.

MovableType support however is in beta mode! Basically I just need someone to test it and let me know that it works. I don’t have MovableType so I can’t test it. However, I’m optimistic it works fine.