Translation On-The-Fly

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According to InternetWorldStats.com

in their "Top 10 Languages Used in the Web" survey, English is number one but less than 32%. Therefore unless you translate your postings you are missing alot of potential readers (in the order of 100's of millions!).
The auto translation services have come along way in the last few years and there are several out there which are free and realtively easy to use. For example Google's Translate ( see related tutorial).

In an effort to make it even easier still for non-English speakers to read my postings I wanted to have translation links automatically embeded right into the posting itself, as I had noticed this in another blog. Sure enough I did a search for "translate" in Blogger.com help and came up with this.

If you have just clicked on one of those links to read this article and feel that the translation is poor, then please leave a comment and I will try and find a better solution.

NOTE: If you are interested in language related statistics see the following links:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3
http://www.nationmaster.com

Trackbacks, Statistics and Tags

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This is a very comprehensive service that Google is providing, however there are a few features they don't support at present :-(. Fortunately there're are some very generous people out there who provide free services that fill in the gaps :-).

Trackbacks
Where would any blog be without this feature which takes advantage of the web by enabling blogs to reference each other in a dynamic way. Blogger.com have Backlinks but they are not as powerful as the real thing and can affect the performance of your blog adversely according to the following blog.
However HaloScancame to the rescue. Also see trackback tutorial.

Statistics
This is a more sophisticated feature but invaluable if you want to be able to determine if your blog is getting any readers at all, by tracking where they are coming from and what browsers and topics are the most popular etc.. Yahoo recently released a related service which I have yet to take for a test run, called SiteExplorer of course as I understand this can only analyse sites that have been indexed by their searchbots. I reviewed a few free (of course!) statistics services and settled on StatCounter as I like the look of it and their policies and attitude (I hope they don't let me down).

Tags
Technorati provide a great service whereby you can put tags in your postings and then ping Technorati, after sometime a reference to your posting will be added to their database thus hopefully directing some traffic to your blog.

For example to insert the tag "Customer Service" you would insert the following HTML:

< a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Customer+Service" rel="tag"> Customer Service</a>

Then do the ping after posting or here.