Web Development Blog

• Online CSS Formatter: This CSS formatting tool tops the list of Trench Links this week because I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. This tool will format your css for readability or compression and has lots more options than just that. This is a must see for people who style with css.
• Socializer: If you can’t tell by my recent posts I’ve been learning a lot about social bookmarking and increasing site traffic. I was happy to find Socializer If you are behind the times like I am, then I’ll clue you in that Socializer is a site that aides you by creating links to all of the popular (and not so popular) social bookmarking sites.
• How to get traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites: Also in my social bookmarking reading this week, I found this post. It’s a really comprehensive look at getting traffic from social bookmarking and has some great dos and don’ts.
• Lightwave Bouncelighting with Gradients: On the graphics side of things, I’ve recently gotten back into Lightwave 3D and this forum tutorial really saved the day for me.

Websites that make it to the Trench Links list get dugg and stumbled. So if you have a site you think I’d like just send me an email at general at devtrench dot com and I’ll check it out.

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I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc are when trying to get traffic to a new web site or blog. I just wanted to post some of the things I’ve been figuring out after hearing this advice from John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker.

• Posting to any of these services is free traffic, and you are allowed to post your own stuff - just don’t spam. What does that mean? Well, it seems fairly subjective to me, but some advice I’ve heard just says “Don’t submit every blog post.”
• Using a service like Socializer or Web 2 Submitter can help you to speed up the process of submitting to these sites. Don’t be tempted to use an automated submission tool since that can/will get you banned. If you don’t know what services are out there the look at the list from Socializer.
• Trade diggs, stumbles, etc through online forums like the one on Digital Point. This will help you to increase how important your site is compared to others on these services.
• Don’t underestimate a your titles or your category. Think about what is popular that relates to what you are writing about - a popular name or thing of the moment in your title can get you lots of extra clicks. And placing your bookmark in the correct category can make or break your efforts.
• Set time aside specifically for it. I’m not going to kid you, bookmarking your posts with these services takes a good chunk of time. Make time in your day to do it, or it might be one of those things that gets put aside. I like to keep track in an excel sheet of when and what service I posted to so that I can remember and track the success of the different services.

That’s it. If you do these things you can expect to see a pretty substantial growth in traffic to your website. I’ve just been doing these things in the past few weeks and am very glad to have new people seeing my blog that wouldn’t have before. And if you came here from a social bookmarking site, hello and thanks! If you like what you’ve read then use the links below to bookmark this site…

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I’ve been reading Shoemoney.com for the past week and I’m kind of embarrassed to say I’m obsessed. Jeremy seems like a cool midwest guy, something I can relate to (we both live in Nebraska, woohoo). It feels like I have a lot of catching up to do reading wise and I wanted to read all of Jeremy’s old posts. However, it’s been hard to read his old posts since shoemoney.com doesn’t appear to have an archive. Well, I decided to make my own. This list makes it a ton easier for me to read though the entire site. I hope it is useful for others out there too. Pages are at the top, followed by posts from 2004-2007, and categories are at the bottom. I might keep updating this list if people think it’s cool, and if you want revisions, just let me know.

You’ll have to read more to see the list - it’s quite long…
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