Seven ways to get free news for your website

A news based blog can be a great way to get good traffic and improve SEO visibility. But the problem is the constant effort required from your part to get the fresh news flowing through your blog. Well there are lots of sources like BBC and CNN. But they have strict copyright laws attached. So where do you get some free news that can shown in your blog? Here are some of it:

1) Wikinews All the news articles from this site is free for your use. Sometimes they may use pictures from other sources but often their content is free. You can edit and paste all the content provided you give proper attribution to the source. The copyright notice should also be included in the artilce.

2) voanews: Articles from Voice of America is also free for use in websites provided you provide adequate info regarding the source.

3)newsnorthamerica and newscanada. These two sister sites have a relaxed copyright statement. Their copyright notice reads:

Articles are provided free of charge. Credit of usage must be attributed to News North America with (NNA) at beginning of an article or – News North America at the end. Any source/sponsor of the information quoted in the text must also be identified as presented. Images are only to be used with corresponding editorial copy. Usage of News North America articles constitutes your acceptance of these terms and an agreement between you and News North America.

4)Another great free source for new sites are press releases. Many of these press releases are plain advertisements and many others are just not newsworthy. Moreover, it is a good idea to rewrite a press release before putting it up in your website.

5)Press Information Bureaus of government and large corporations offer good quality news along with photographs. Although many of their news items are highly twisted.

6)Many official government websites also do not have a copyright tags attached to them. Moreover, many of them just don't bother about such issues.

7)Besides these, there are many sites that offer syndicated content, or news tickers. Remember that these sites are not keen on incresing traffic to your blog/website. They are more interested in building traffic to their own sites. So avoid syndicated content from most of these sites.

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Online Screen-Resolution and Cross Browser Compatibility Tools

So you have finished creating a website and is ready to show it to the world. Wait a minute. The site may look cool to you, but can you be sure that the site looks exactly like that in a different browser or with a different screen resolution? You cannot, and that is why you need to check up your site in different browsers and screen resolutions. But its very difficult for you to view a website in different conditions manually. And that is where the following online tools and websites come into play. While this can surely, help you a lot to correct problems with your websites, please do not entirely depend upon them. Go to a net cafe and check it up just to be doubly sure.

Ipinfo, allows you to view your website in different versions of Internet Explorer: IE 8, 7, 6, 5.5 etc. They do not show the full page of the site, just the part that is seen ‘above the fold’. You can also see the difference between the two versions (IE 7 and 6) with a cool feature that juxtaposes the two renderings on the same page, allowing you to easily note the differences. Unlike many other similar online tools their result is almost instant. But this site does not allow cross browser testing, you can only get the result for Internet Explorer.



Browsercam contains many options with a wide range of browsers and resolutions. They also allow you to render your site according to the way websites are handled in different types of PDA’s and iphone. Their services are paid ones. But the free trial, after registration will enable you to use their services for one day.


Browsrcamp allows for testing in Mac computers and its browsers. Images are obtained using Safari 3 version. You can obtain images of the website in different screen width and then download the screenshots as jpg or png files.


Litmusapp allows you to do the same at lightning speed. You can test sites in a wide range of browsers like Explorer 8.0, Explorer 7.0, Explorer 6.0, Explorer 5.5, Explorer 5.0, Firefox 3.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 1.0, Flock 2.0 Flock 1.2, Google Chrome 2.0, Netscape 9.0, Opera 10.0, Opera 9.6, Safari 4.0, Sea Monkey 1.1, Mac OS X browsers and many other obscure browsers. They require a free registration. The clarity of images obtained are of average clarity. It requires free registration.


Browsershots is the best of its kind. It Supports almost all major browser and screen resolutions from 640px to 1680px width. Another feature is its support of screen color depth which ranges from 8bits/pixel to 32 bits. Users can see screen shots in a variety of environment, not just the operating system but also factors like the disabling of JavaScript, Java and Flash. According to the website, the screen shots are taken from real computers set in different configurations. The only problem is the slow turn around. Once you submit your website, it might take up to 30 minutes to see the screen shots. The wait is worth it!


Webmaster Cavern allows you to see your website in different screen resolutions. You get to see the website with the screen resolutions: 640X480, 800X600, 1024 X768, 1152 X 864, and 1280 X 1024. The whole page is rendered completely. The screen is highly accurate, but full view is hindered by the floating ads and the navigation menu of the website. Another good thing is that you can click the urls given in the screenshots and proceed to the next page so you dont have to type the urls of the inner pages.


Besides this Adobe has come up with a webmaster's solution called Meer Meer which uses adobe flashes to show multiple browser shots side by side. The screenshots can also be superimposed one on top of another. But, I could not test it, since, it requires adobe, flash player10 and I am having some trouble in installing it.

Smush It!

One of my websites were taking long time to load. So, I wanted to increase its loading speed by decreasing the size of the image files. I tried using MS paint but it usually crunches the images too much and so the resulting images was blurred. Then I have irfan view and GIMP.Irfan view is good for batch resizing. But I was looking for a software that could automate the process of reducing JPEG file sizes. Something that is meant exclusively for web pictures.

Now after some nosing around, I came up with smush_it. Smush is really easy to use. You can either upload photos manually, or just enter the url of the image (ideal for shrinking already existing websites. It also has a firefox plug in just for this purpose. Using smush_it, you can crunch the file size without tinkering with any of the variables. Just upload images and get the result. Just like that. And the great thing is that there is hardly any reduction in the clarity of the image.

I tried the same thing, with animated gifs, and it still works! (you can't do that same thing with MS paint). My animated gif image shrunk by almost 60% and there was no noticeable difference between the real image and the compressed image. As of now the service is completely free with no file size limit.