It is funny how things work. I’ve been blogging for well over a year now, but I went crazy yesterday trying to figure out how to do the simplest thing to my new blog. I wanted to change the feed output from summary to full text, but for the life of me couldn’t figure out how. I looked online for almost an hour, but without success. After going back into my control panel, I had that aha moment, fixed it, and then kicked myself for being so oblivious.

Changing feed results from Summary to Full Text
This is a really easy process:

1. Log in to your WordPress administration page
2. Go to Options
3. Go to the sub-menu Reading
4. Under “Syndication Feeds” go to “For each article, show:” and select Full Text
5. Click on Update Options and you’re done!

Why make the change?
Now that I subscribe to well over 100 blog feeds, I don’t have as much time to read them all. While some claim that using a summary may be an incentive for people to actually visit the blog itself instead of the feed, I find that unless the article REALLY catches my eye, I’m going to move on. I’m more likely to go to and read an article that has a full text feed, because I can quickly scan it on my reader - there may be some interesting material that doesn’t make it to the summary that is a cause for reading the post.

One of the most time consuming activities I undertake when working on a blog post (other then writing the post itself) is image manipulation. I found a great web-based tool that will resize any image file on your computer called ResizR.

I actually used it to resize the screenshot above. This thing is fast and easy and worth a look.

Looking to consolidate all your feed traffic to Feedburner, but aren’t sure how? Steve at OrderedList.com just released his new Wordpress FeedBurner Plugin v2.1. It redirects all traffic from your various feeds to the FeedBurner feed to help you track all subscribers.

I saw a 100% increase in my subscriber count on another blog after installing this plugin! This should be a very helpful plugin for the rest of you who know you’ve got more feed traffic then that little counter says.

I figured that there is no more fitting way to kick off this site, Time For Blogging, then to share with you my favorite Webmaster & SEO Tools. Every webmaster has his own toolbox and these are some of my favorites:

Color Wizard
What better way to design your website then to color coordinate it. The color wizard will suggest tints, shades, and color schemes based on an initial color of your choosing.

Convert Hostname to IP Address
Returns IP address of any given site. Useful when you’re figuring out referrals from your log files.

CopyScape
Find out if someone is plagiarizing your site’s content. If this happens to you, contact their host and notify them of the copyright infringement. They should handle it for you fairly quickly.

CrazyEgg
Lets you evaluate what your users are clicking on when visiting your site. Creates a really cool heatmap showing a visual overlay of where people click most on your site.

DynamicDrive’s Favicon Generator
Turns any image or logo into a favicon.

Keyword Optimization Test
Rank and makes recommendations on how well your site is optimized for yoru keywords.

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
Reveals the number of times certain keywords are searched; also suggests additional relevant keywords.

SEO Strength Tool
According to SEOmoz, creator of the tool, “The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.” There is debate in the SEO community how useful the tool actually is, but it is a good start to find how relevant your site is.

Scrutinize This
171 different tools covering SEO, design, validation, accessability, and more.

Site Report Card
Creates website analysis, optimization and promotion reports.

Whois
Find out who the owner of a website is. Very useful when someone is stealing your site’s content. Use this information to find the site’s host and report them.