What’s in My Blogging Toolkit?
Darren is looking for answers to the question, “What are Your Top 5 Blogging Tools?” I’ve posted a quick and dirty answer in the comments, but thought I’d expand on it and try to capture the tools that are found in my blogging toolkit.
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Blogging Platform: WordPress – I’ve been around the block and back in my six years of blogging. I started with Blogger, onto Greymatter, moved to Radio Userland, then to Movabletype, before settling on WP. I’m using version 2.09 on most of my blogs and testing 2.1 on one.
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Desktop Blogging Client: BlogJet – There are a lot of good desktop clients out there, but I have become most comfortable with BlogJet. Version 2 has added a number of helpful features —including auto replace and YouTube support. BlogJet does cost 40 bucks. If you’re looking for a freeware solution, Qumana makes a great product and ScribeFire is a good blogging add-in for Firefox.
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Metrics Packages: Sitemeter, 103bees, Google Analytics – I’ve had a paid Sitemeter Plus account for three or so years now. As of late, Sitemeter has been experiencing server problems and the delivery of stats has not been consistent. 103bees lets you look at traffic by: Latest search hits, Top landing pages, Top search terms, Top keywords, Search engines, Rankings, Long Tail, Latest questions, Top questions. There’s a lot of data to help you focus your content.
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Blog Promotion: Technorati, Feedburner – It’s only in the last two or three months that I have begun to focus more attention on blog promotion. Having this post show up on del.icio.us’ hot and popular lists, I have a taste of the benefits of good promotion. So far, I am consolidating my RSS feeds through Feedburner and using the ping feature of BlogJet to notify a large list of services each time I post. There’s more work to be done in this area.
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Content Sourcing Services: Google Reader — I’m not sure what Darren means by content sourcing services, but pretty much all of the link posting I do comes from the feeds I read in Google Reader. I use Google Reader’s Add Star feature to mark items for future consideration or that triggered a specific blogging idea. I keep my Bloglines account up to date, but only because I use it to dynamically generate any blogrolls I want. I have started using Gmail as a blogging-ideas database, based on some of the suggestions Steve Rubel outlined in this post.
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Browser: Firefox – While a browser may not be a blogging tool, per se, I find Firefox simplifies the blogging experience. The ability to keep a number of tabs open to links, or while researching and reading related information is helpful. I keep a number of regular bookmarks on the bookmark toolbar, which get a lot of use, along with the Google toolbar for Firefox.
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Browser add-ons: Copy Plain Text and Copy URL+ get the most workout as part of my blogging toolkit. Both add-ons place new items to the right-click context menu in Firefox. Copy Plain Text strips all the formatting out of any text selected on a web page. If I want to apply my own formatting to the text before posting, this is the quickest way to capture the plain text. Copy URL+ grabs the page URL along with the title or the selected text or both. A handy tool for adding links to a post. As an AdSense publisher, AdSense Notifier gives me my hourly earnings’ fix.
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Graphics: PhotoFiltre – Graphics and I don’t get along so well. I don’t have much of an eye for layout, design or much else visual. Most of what I want to do with an image is crop or resize. Photofiltre (pay and free versions) lets me do that easily as well as being able to play around with other graphics features.
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Odds and Ends: There are a number of tools and services that factor into my blogging, but don’t get pulled out regularly. For text editing, I use PSPad. I particularly like the ease of editing files via FTP. Filezilla is my FTP client of choice. I have been using Doteasy (aff) web hosting for about six years now and have been satisfied with the consistency and quality of service.
That’s how my blogging toolkit looks now. It has worked differently in the past and will likely change in the future. Tools are tools. Whether you’re rolling your own with Notepad, MS Paint and a LAMP server in your basement; working with Blogger; or using the latest web 2.0 widgetized version of WordPress, if there is no content, there will be no readers. Tools are just a means to an end. Content is king. A well stocked toolkit will help you get that content posted.
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Comments
I need to get one of those toolkits!! Hope it comes instructions becasue I don’t know what all those tools are!!
Great list! I particularly like your categorization. I had put together a list recently independtly of yorus and wasn’t sure what category to lump Feedburner in because it does so much.
It’s nice to be able to compare notes.
Here’s a nice list of tools as well:
http://www.kineda.com/essential-tools-every-blogger-should-have/
As a new blogger (just a week or so), I think it is so cool that you have shared your advice like this! Thanks man - am going to check out these tools now!
I used Qumana for a over a year now and I loved it. But once in while it has some kind of weird Java Script hang up and it won’t start.
I had enough 2 days ago so I did buy Blogjet - ending up not liking it because you can’t add JS like Google Adsense in the post. And reading their Forum on that toppic and finding out about their weird attitude towards their costumers who trying to make their product better.
Well, I requested my money back! They have a 30 Day Money Back Garentie.
I am posting now with Post2Blog and I love it… tons of control and my most favorite feature is, that you can ftp upload images to Photobucket for example.
Since I’m very, very, new to the scene, I like the idea of this post; it’s nice to see what the more established bloggers out there are using.
That doesn’t preclude me from writing my own list of tools though, so expect an update from me soon.
What tool is best if you want to keep track of your previous posts? Is it possible to measure or determine any traffic made by your previous post?
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Nice selection of tools and I can see that we use most of the same. I’m putting together my list and we maybe could do some comparison in usage and experience.