Today’s tool isn’t so much one tool as it is a set of tools. A few months back while I was scouring the blogosphere for blog directories to post a link on, I found a website called Blogflux. Not only is there a directory on this site, but they also offer a pinger, polls, PR checker, blog themes, and more. All of their free services are listed right on the home page.

PR Checker

With as much credence as the online world gives PageRank, it’s important to be able to easily check your page rank. This PR checker is easy to use and works for more than just blogs. I can use it to see that, sadly, I have a PR 0 or to see that PsPrint has a PR 5. It’s quick and accurate, which is all it needs to be.

Polls

The polls feature works great and super easy. They are somewhat limited in how many answers a respondent can choose from, but for a free service that’s not bad. You can use the Blogflux interface to keep track of various polls and the results. Here’s a quick example:

<a href=”http://polls.blogflux.com/poll-22599.html”>Take the poll</a><br /><br /><a href=”http://polls.blogflux.com/”>Free Poll by Blog Flux</a>Pinger

Any business professional, regardless of industry, would be lying if they said they wouldn’t jump at a chance to save time & increase their efficiency in their daily routine. A blog ping service does just that. Instead of visiting dozens of websites one by one to let them know you’ve written a new blog post, the Blogflux ping service can notify 17 different services from one page and show you the status of the ping, which is a nifty feature. Last October the pinger was listed on Mashable among 19 other blog ping services. It may not be able to ping the highest number of services, but with the added convenience of all the other services that Blogflux offers, the efficiency is definitely increased.

Themes
One of the easiest tools in any blogger’s arsenal is their site design, commonly referred to as a theme. A unique theme is your most immediate way to stand out from the repetitive noise of the blogosphere and stock templates. The Blogflux Themes area lets you browse and search for some less common themes to download and use for your blog. While it’s not a unique theme that visitors will only see on your blog, it will stand out amongst the extremely repetitive stock templates.

Commentful
Now this is one of their neatest features. Commentful keeps track on comments, blog follow ups, and all sorts of handy tracking without having to go to your blog and Digg and a million other sites to keep track. It’s a handy extension for Firefox with a bookmarklet that you just click to add. You subscribe to the RSS feed to keep updated.

Of course, these are just the more exciting features of Blogflux, but there are a few more. Go over and see what you’ve been missing!

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