If you are using a blog as a developer diary, to promote knowledge related to your business, or simply to serve up affiliate links within your content, you know how time consuming they are to maintain daily. While each of the free online blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger and others do offer their own tools and widgets, there are also many free blog tools available that you can customize for use on your own blog.
From e-mail lists to Web-based chat services, here are five free blog tools that we tried and liked because of their features and ease-of-use. Along with the details on how to customize and use them on your own blog, we also overview the tools' features and which blogging platform the tool was designed to work on.
BlogBackupOnline
Currently in beta, and free during the beta testing phase, BlogBackupOnline provides registered users with 50MB of storage space for archiving your blog. In addition to providing the free space, the service will do a full back up every day to save each blog entry. Once your blog has been backed up, you can also use the service to export blogs, in RSS format, to another server or directly to your own computer. One feature I really liked is that once the blog has been backed up you can restore the blog to the same or a different blog platform, which is an excellent feature for those who are interested in switching their blog to another service. BlogBackupOnline currently supports Blogger, WordPress, Friendster, LiveJournal, TypePad, Serendipity, Windows Live Spaces, Movable Type, Terapad, Vox and Multiply.
FeedBurner E-mail
FeedBurner is an e-mail service that lets blog publishers deliver their feeds to e-mail subscribers. Once you create an account with FeedBurner, you get the code you need to copy and paste on your own blog. This will provide your readers with a place to enter their e-mail address to subscribe to your news. Once subscribed, your readers will get a daily digest of the new content posted on your blog.
Setting up your FeedBurner E-mail subscription is easy: start by choosing a language preference and then copy and paste the provided code onto your blog. If you use Blogger or TypePad you can opt to get the code as a widget that will work on these specific blogs. While setting up your e-mail subscription you can preview the subscription link and also how the e-mails that get sent out will look.
Other options include customizing the From Address that delivers the subscription e-mails, the e-mail subject line and the text content for the confirmation e-mail to subscribers. You can also brand your e-mails by adding a logo and different font styles and colors. Finally, you select the two-hour window for when you want your e-mails delivered and you can opt to receive a notification when a user chooses to unsubscribe from your list. (Continue to Page 2 for details on Mad Kast, Fresh Badge and meebo me.) 
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