Shards of Consciousness

Like any other craft/hobby/business, bloggers are interested in each other's tools. There are a lot of them out there, and each of us will find a different combination that meets our needs. I like to keep things as simple as possible. After all, if it isn't there, it can't break. Some things are essential, though, and some things make life for me and you enough easier that they're worth using. These are the tools I use.

Wordpress 2.0

My basic blogging platform. Easy to use, fairly regularly update, easily customizable, lots of plugins for different tasks, thousands of themes for those of us who aren't visual designers. Who could ask for more?

WP-Andreas09 by Andreas Viklund and Ainslie Johnson

The theme I use. Three columns with the middle column fluid. It's easy to use and easy on the eyes. It adds an option to change colors to the Wordpress administration pages, so you can change colors to suit your mood if you want to.

Thingamablog by Bob Tantlinger

I don't like to write directly into Wordpress. I've tried several other editing tools, but haven't found one I liked. Thingamablog is a desktop blogging platform. With something like Haloscan for comments, you can host your blog from your desktop. This and Blogger are what I used before finding Wordpress. For several reasons I didn't like it for actual blogging, but it's still super for writing posts. I just copy and paste into the Wordpress editor when I'm ready to publish.

Feedburner

There are a lot of different rss readers out there. Displaying a chicklet to make it easy all of them to subscribe to your feed takes up real estate and can ruin the look you want from your theme. Feedburner lets you put up just one icon and your readers can still choose what rss reader they want to use. I also use Feedburner for email subscriptions for everyone who doesn't want to use rss, and get the stats on my subscribers that I want.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is a full-featured, free stats package for your blog or static website. I've tried other packages, but Google does what I need and does it without slowing down my site.

Landing Sites by Thomas Silkjær

I get a lot of traffic from search engines. Often the page the searcher finds isn't exactly what they want. Landing sites displays a list of related posts that may contain what they're looking for.

Feedburner Feed Replacement by Steve Smith

I use Feedburner for rss. This plugin redirects your Wordpress feed to it.

Related Posts by (I believe) Alexader Malov

People often come to your blog with specific interests. This plugin tells them about posts in the area of interest.

Spam Karma 2 by Dr. Dave

I found out quickly that spammers will take advantage of your comment box. I didn't want to have to get a key for Aksimet. This plugin has filled the bill perfectly for dealing with comment spam so far.

Subscribe to Comments by Jennifer - the Scriptygoddess

I like to follow conversations where I've commented, so I assume other people do too. This plugin makes it easy for them to do by emailing them followups to their comment. They don't have to worry about remembering to check back.

WP-dTree by Christopher Wang

I just found this spiffy plugin. It creates a tree of your archives and categories, so people can see exactly what you've posted and when. It's much easier to use than the archive pages built into Wordpress, and looks nice too!

Random Quotes by Dustin

This plugin shows the quotes you see at the top of the page. It's easy to integrate, and easy to add quotes to the database.

WP Database Backup by Skippy

Built in to Wordpress, if you don't use it you're asking to lose all your work. Murphy rules.

Contact Form ][ by Chip Cuccio

This contact form makes it easy for people to contact you without publishing your email. While it works, I still haven't been able to get it look quite right with my theme in Internet Explorer 6. It's fine in Firefox and IE 7.

Yes WWW by Gilad Gafni

This plugin redirects all non-www urls to the www version. It helps keep Google from thinking I have duplicate content.

So there you have it, my blogging infrastructure. There a still a couple of things I want to add and change, but these tools have helped me put together the basic functionality I want. If you know of any tools that do the same things as these simpler or faster, let me know. Do you have any must-haves for your blog?