Using Google Web Search:

Google provides a search filter known as “link”. It is basically designed to show the sites in google index that link to your site. A example link query is shown below:

Query: link:www.lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:www.lifebaker.com

You can even create a Google Alert so that you get informed every time a new update is added to Google’s index.

But this method yields very few results, so I gave other queries a try and found the following one to work quite good for detecting latest in-links to your blog. It shows the latest links being indexed by Google which have back-links to your site.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*%20-site:lifebaker.com&tbs=rltm:1

Using Google Blog Search:

This is a very common method in use by many blogger but its accuracy has reduced over time. The in-links you find in WordPress panel are also found using Blog Search RSS feed.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=link:http://lifebaker.com

Feed Link: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=link:http://lifebaker.com&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

Using Yahoo:

Yahoo’s Site Explorer is another goog method for tracking in-links to your blog.

Query: link:http://lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.lifebaker.com&bwm=i

Using Bing:

We can use the same query as we used above for Google to search inlinks using Bing. Bing even provides a rss feed for your queries if you add &format=rss at the end of the query.

Query: http://lifebaker.com/* -site:lifebaker.com

Sample Link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com

Feed Link – http://www.bing.com/search?q=http://www.lifebaker.com/*+-site:lifebaker.com&format=rss

Using Technorati:

Technorati is one of the oldest service to provide in-links but its accuracy has decreased over time. You can find in-links to your blog from other blogs indexed by Technorati.

Conclusion:

There are a bunch of more services which offer the same. But mainly I prefer using Google Blog Search, Google Latest Web Search and Bing to track the links. Note: LifeBaker is a new blog. We have limited posts as of now, thus above link might not yield much results. Try it on some popular blogs and you will be able to note the difference. Image via Flickr.

Blog is a beast which continuously demands more & more food for its growth. It is a common problem with all the authors, no matter big or small to get out of topics for writing. Its basically a human nature to get tired of doing same thing every day. So with my experience and after meeting some of the popular A-grade bloggers, I have concluded this post to help the blogging community. Check out some of the popular techniques of getting out of this un-creative trauma.

Hang Out!

Bloggers work non-stop at their PC’s. Having a habit of continuously staring at their monitors, it is normal with a human being to get bored or feel stressful. At this point of time brain is not in a condition of manipulating new ideas for blogging. The intial step to get rid of such situation is to take some rest or hangout with your friends.

While hanging out with family members or your friends would actually generate new ideas like while sitting with your friends you notice one of your friend is facing problems in performing a function on a PC or Mobile. Consider your friend’s problem and ask him why is he facing such problem. When you get back to your desk think about the probable solutions to it and do some research on it. This usually helps in gathering a lot of topics for blogging from people around you, which finally serve up as fodder for your blog.

Did you know, your blog has fodder for itself?

After hanging out a for a day, if you still don’t got any snack for your blog, don’t get depressed. Also I know the RSS feeds sometimes just annoys as we see the same story is being published on multiple sites. You might be thinking I’m joking that you blog can feed itself but seriously it can do and the fodder is in your blog’s comment section. Sometimes comments from your readers gets you back in business with a new idea. There are many “How do I ……”, “What is ……”, “Please help me with ……”, etc. such type of comments. Do some homework on their queries and you will get a lot of new idea’s from them.

Google Alerts can save your day!

If you still don’t know about Google Alerts, let me tell you my friend you are missing a great part of the Blogging Tools. Google Alerts is basically a service from Google which creates a feed of new link being added to its index on a particular topic. All you have to do is just visit Google Alerts type in a Keyword, and subscribe to the feed.

You have to be little careful while entering the keywords like if you have a blog related to food, creating an alert with “food” will mess you up, Instead you can type “recipe” or particular keywords so that the unwanted stuff would not get in your feed. For example if Google captured a blog post of a person who wrote “I like so and so food” might get included in you Alert feed if you must have subscribed to keyword food but as you chose recipe if a person updates “I need the recipe and procedure of so and so” By this you will come to know that what is missing on Internet as well as If some one posts a new recipe it would inform you about it.

Entrance and Exit Keywords

The trick I am going to tell you now is used by many of the A-Grade Bloggers. If you use any tracking service for your blog like Google Analytics, StatCounter or any other, you might be knowing that these sites provide entrance keyword which tells that what users were searching for when they entered your site via search engine. If you run custom search at your blog, filtering out the exit queries can also let you check which queries made the user exit from your blog.  This is a great tool know about what’s missing over your site and if you do a bit research on these queries, It could serve as new drinks for your blog.

Don’t forget the Forums

For bloggers forums could act as a great source of food for your blogs. Many people post their different sort of problems in forums which are also categorized by the forum moderators. Thus you can easily for queries which are related to topics of your blog. All you have to do is search for a forum of your niche of blogging and subscribe to the particular categories feed. Any new post in forum will hit up your RSS reader right away.

Social Networks!

Well I agree to the fact that Social Networks many a times distract bloggers from their work, but if you look at the Social Networks in a different way it could serve you in feeding you blog heavily. Like when you are on Facebook, try to discover official pages that are related to your niche of blogging. By participating in the discussion there, it will let you think of new ideas.

Twitter is another great place to generate new ideas. If you are following a good community there, it could get trucks of topics for you. The other networks and communities include Digg, Xmarks, Technorati, StubmbleUpon, and many more.

Google Trends

Most of us know about the Google Trends, a service by Google that lets you view the most popular queries made for the day on its very popular Google Search. Google Trends also let you see the most popular queries, country-wise. Google Trends gives you the idea about what’s hot over the world or in your country.

Mom is the last rescue!

If nothing works among all of the above solutions, get someone from your family who does not have any or low knowledge about computers to sit around you while you do your work. This might be sounding funny to you but it actually works. Tell him to ask questions about things while you work or simply let him work on your system and monitor his/her activities. Try to observe what all problem he faces while surfing, show him a cool new service related to your niche of blogging, tell about its functionality and ask his/her thoughts on it.

If you have got some more ideas, we all would love to hear them. Drop in your comments below. Image Source: Life As Art, Cinderellasg.

WordPress 2.7 Side Navigation

Your WordPress might be reminding you about upgrading to WordPress 2.6.2 but its not the right time to do the heavy time-taking job as WordPress 2.7 is scheduled on 10th November 2008. The upcoming version of WordPress will be having some exciting new features like side navigation system, ability to hide columns, Remote comment moderation, etc which will maintain the “World’s Leading Self Hosted Blogging Platform” award for it.

The new navigation system will be vertical and will have the capability to hide itself with the column. Other main feature will be XMLRPC comment moderation from iPhone and your favorite blogging tool like Windows Live Writer.

Amit shows us some proofs of the scheduled WordPress 2.7 launch date. Here is the WordPress Roadmap showing the release date for WordPress 2.7, also an ‘unofficial party’ has been scheduled for the launch of WordPress 2.7

Key features of the upcoming release of WordPress are:

• Ability to hide columns on the content index pages.
• Sticky Notes.
• Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages.
• Reply to the comments from the admin panel itself.
• Comments XMLRPC API.
• Side Navigation System.
• Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser.
• Automatic upgrade of WordPress.
• Keyboard Shortcuts for comment management.
• And many more..

As usual the WordPress guys keep thinking of new creative ideas on “How to make the world’s leading self-hosted blogging platform much more better?” and for the answer will be soon out in the form of WordPress 2.7.