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What’s in My Blogging Toolkit?

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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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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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