How to optimize your blog for code samples plus some cool widgets/tools

Recently I have been posting more and more code samples in my blog and wanted to optimize my blog for code snippets . After some searching I found following widgets/tools very useful. And almost all these widgets/tools are related to blogger expect ones like statcounter and PinPoll-n-Ping.

Blogger Syntax Highlighter
This a nice widget that can be used to highlight syntax of the code you post in the blog.Languages supported at the moment are Java, C#, C++, PHP, Javascript, Python, Ruby, VB, Delphi, Sql, CSS and XML/HTML. You can very easily install this widget to your blog from here.

Changing the width of the blog
When you are posting code on your blog, it is nice if the width of the blog suits the code.You can find how to change the width of your blog here.

How to post an image in its original size to your blog
When you want to post screen shots of the products/tools you are using, 400 pixels may not be the best size for your images specially if you have already increased the width of your blog. You can find how to post an image in its original size here.

These information are not related to adding code snippets, but was very useful.

Adding Tag cloud
Nice way for let your readers to read the posts that interests them. If you want to add a tag cloud to your blog, you can find how to do it here

Social bookmarking links
If you want to add social bookmarking links to blogger to all your posts, you can find how to do it here. This widget includes links to Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, reddit, Facebook, newsvine, Google, Yahoo and Technorati.

Pinging search engines with PinPoll-n-Ping
PinPoll-n-Ping is a Multi-Pinging service that will ping blog directories and blog search engines when you make a blog post. It constantly monitors your blog and the RSS/Atom feed for changes, when a change is detected it will ping all the downstream services that you have selected to notify. The services it can ping includes Blog People, Blog Update, BlogFlux, Blogdigger, Bloglines, BulkFeeds, FeedBurner, Feedsky, Google, Ice Rocket, Moreover, NewsGator, Ping-o-Matic!, Syndic8, Technorati, WeBlogALot, Weblogs.com, Yahoo and blo.gs. You can register free for PinPoll-n-Ping from here.

DZone widget
Most of us submit our posts to Dzone. This DZone widget allows us to easily add our posts to DZone and also allows visitors to vote for them through this widget.

Tracking the visitors
Previously I used Google analytics to track visitors to my blog but then I found out statcounter has lot of cool features compared to Google analytics. You can find a live demo of statcounter here. Some of it's features are Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity, Recent Came From, Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Recent Visitor Map, Country/State/City/ISP, Browser and lot more.

And that's all that comes to my mind right now and I will update this post if I have forgotten any.

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