Top Ten Blogging Tools

Wordpress

First and foremost is the blogging software itself, and we love Wordpress! Of the blogging software we’ve played with, Wordpress is the quickest to set up (either on Wordpress.com or your own server), the easiest to use, has the best plugin support and is the easiest to configure. They’re not kidding about their “Famous 5-Minute Install” either; we reckon we did it in significantly less!

User polls

There are lots of user-polling tools that will sit nicely in your blog sidebar or on a static web page but we like the Democracy Poll best. This is a great plugin for Wordpress that allows you to put user polls inside blog posts; it’s really easy to set up and to change the look and feel to match that of your site.

Email

Held up on a train? Lounging by the pool? Or laid up in hospital? Well, you can still submit posts to your blog simply by sending an email from your laptop or PatientLine™ terminal. This feature is built in to most blogs, including Wordpress, but we’ve picked it out for inclusion here as we feel it’s one of the best tools to have in your blogging arsenal.

Clipmarks

Clipmarks is a fantastic tool that you can install as a Firefox extension. Using the button it adds to your toolbar, you can ‘clip’ the best parts of web pages and publish them directly to your blog, adding your own comments if you like. Great for doing short, quickfire blog posts while browsing the web.

Weblog clients

Many desktop applications exist which allow you to write posts off-line, save drafts, format posts, add photos, and categorise and tag posts before you submit them to the live blog. There are literally hundreds of commercial and free desktop weblog clients out there, but we particularly rate Blogdesk, Blogjet, Qumana and Windows Live Writer.

RSS Aggregator

A blogger needs to keep up with what’s happening in the blogosphere, particularly in specialist communities such as e-learning. An RSS aggregator will allow you to bookmark your favourite blogs just like you already bookmark websites in your browser. The aggregator then downloads the blog feeds in RSS format so you can view them all in one place, merged together into one big feed if you wish, without actually visiting the blogs themselves. There are web versions and desktop versions; we rate RSSOwl and FeedReader for the desktop, and Bloglines on the web, Pluck for Internet Explorer and Live Bookmarks for Firefox.

Google Analytics

What website wouldn’t be complete without Google Analytics? This excellent tool is provided free by Google and allows you to find out how your users arrived, interacted with, and departed from your site. Sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics/ to get your Google identifier and then download the Google Analyticator plugin for Wordpress to implement it on your blog.

Technorati

Technorati is to blogging as Google is to web search. Their simple search allows you to search in tags, posts and the directory, plus you can refine searches to limit by subject area and how much authority the blog has (‘a little’, ‘some’ or ‘a lot’). If you run a blog, you’ll find their ranking stats useful and they do a bunch of their own tools and widgets to improve your blogging experience.

De.licio.us

If you run a shared bookmarks account on del.icio.us then the people behind this excellent service have some cool tools to integrate with your blog. If you are part of a del.icio.us network with colleagues or friends then you can post your network badge to your blog; you can also post your linkroll (list of bookmarks) to a blog page/sidebar; and you can post your del.icio.us tag cloud to your blog too. And to fully integrate the two, you can now set up your del.icio.us account to automatically generate a daily post on your blog with details of new del.icio.us bookmarks you have added that day. Marvellous stuff, and that’s just what’s on offer at del.icio.us. There are also Wordpress plugins galore.

Spell-checker

Content is still king, and there is nothing more annoying to users than blogs littered with basic typos. Any good blogging software will have spell-checkers available; Wordpress.com users already have one and it will hopefully be in the 2.1 release for those of us running Wordpress with a separate spell-checker plugin on our own servers.