Ann Smarty’s posts on Search Engine Journal are always worth a read, and this one is a great list of useful online tools for SEO.

Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection
All tools listed below fall under the following criteria:

1. they are all useful for SEOs;
2. they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far);
3. they are all free.

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From Search Engine Journal.

When you have nothing to say, make a list, as Wittgenstein might have said - had he been a blogger. This particular list is of some of my favourite tools for website development under Windows (XP Pro): some well known, others less so.
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“Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.”

– From Alan Jardine.

You can add Design to your toolbar or list of bookmarks in a second, then with any web page loaded use it to take measurements directly from the page with absolute accuracy.

Javascript bookmarklets have several advantages over browser plugins, not least their being cross-platform. And, as Jardine says, “you always get the most up-to-date version every time you load it”. Design is both beautiful and inspiring.

One niggle, though. The lack of IE6 support means it can’t be used to help fix the inevitable layout bugs encountered when developing for that browser. But I suspect IE6’s bugginess would make porting Design a nightmare, so it’s a forgiveable omission.

[ Edited 8th June 2008: I'm not doing it this way any more. Read this more recent post for the lowdown. ]

It’s a frequently asked question - how do you get multiple blogs from a single installation of Wordpress? And the answer is surprisingly simple, if a little technical.
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.Anyone who like me works on more than one version of the same site at the same time (at the risk of changing the wrong one accidentally, which has happened to me in the past) may appreciate ChromaTabs It assigns colours to tabs for different sites automatically.

The colour is assigned either based either on the server name (using some mysterious “random” algorithm) which seems to meet my needs, or colours in the favicon.ico, which is not so useful. The default colours are not very aesthetically pleasing but you can tweak them to some extent, and anyway, that’s not really the point.

Extra visual cues like this can help a lot especially when under time pressure and at greater risk of making errors. Simple, yet effective, like many of the best tools.