I decided that I would start rounding up interesting links each day and pass them along to my readers. I will still be publishing my own articles, but find that I don’t have as much time to get them out as often as I would like. So expect a semi-daily round up of cool links and once a week an article that I will write.

Today we’ll start with an article from Ar-bent-ing on places to submit your articles. The author correctly states that many of the main stream sites for social traffic really aren’t that great for niche blogs. I have personally seen that stumbleupon drives a few hundred visitors on the days that I get stumbled but there is not an increase of subcriptions to my feed and the bounce rate is high. I test submitted an article yesterday and saw about 15 people hit the site and around 3 new subscriptions. I would go through the list and start submitting your articles to some new sites.

Second up is a post that presents a new plugin for WordPress called the Homepage Excerpts Plugin. It really just gives you more control over how the content is displayed on you your homepage but can also make things easier for people that land on your homepage. I will probably install this over the weekend and start to make use of it to clean up my homepage.

I know for most of us Photoshop is the end all in photo editing but there are some pretty good Open Source tools out there as well. The most popular is the GIMP. Over at Noupe there is a post linking to 30 great GIMP tutorials.

Finally today is a post on usability (funny enough it on the usability post blog). The post details 7 usability mistakes often found on websites. A good read for anyone in web design cause if you’ve fallen into bad usability habits now is the time to break them.