Shards of Consciousness

Last November I posted about the tools I use for blogging. As with any business/craft/hobby, over time our tools change, sometimes through boredom, sometimes due to new technology, other times due to newly discovered wants. My tools have changed quite a bit in the past seven months, so I thought I would give an update. There may be something here you may find handy, or you may be able to tell me about a tool that can do a better job than what I am using. Besides, behind the scene looks are just fun. :-) Why else do they put them on dvds?

Basic Tools

Wordpress 2.2

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?

My theme is a modified version of Kubrick, the default Wordpress theme by Binary Bonsai

The theme I currently use. Simple, to the point, and easily customizable

ScribeFire by Performancing and Christopher Finke

The editing interface for Wordpress has improved, but I still don’t like to write directly into it. I’ve tried several other editing tools, but this addon for Firefox is the one I like best.

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.

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.

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.

FireFTP by Mime Cuvala.

FireFTP is an ftp addon for Firefox. It's easy to use, gets the job done, and saves having to load up yet another program.

Portable Audacity by John T Haller and the Audacity Team

Audacity is an excellent piece of software for creating podcasts. I'm still learning to use it, but it hasn't been difficult to learn what I need for a simple podcast. You do have to download the LAME encoder separately to create mp3s.

Reader Conveniences

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.

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.

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. The link given here may be dead, so you may want to use a similar plugin from someone else.

WP-dTree by Christopher Wang

This spiffy plugin 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!

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. One of these days I do have have to get around to updating to the most current version of this plugin.

Podpress by Dan Kuykendall

I started podcasting this year. This plugin is the easiest way I've found to integrate a podcast with the blog while presenting a nice interface. The only thing I don't like is it seems to have problems with formatting, and so rips your tags out of your posts when they are being fed to a rss feed. That's why I stay behind the curve on updating the plugin - it's working and I don't want to break it.

Popularity Contest by Alex King

See the snifty list of most popular posts in the sidebar? This was generated by this plugin. It's a great way to let your readers know what other readers are most interested in on your site.

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.

SEO Tools

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.

Google Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold

Google likes to have a map of your site in order to make it easier to index. This plugin automatically regenerates the sitemap whenever you make a new post. If you've ever tried to maintain one manually, you know what a godsend the automation is.

Head META Description by Kaf Oseo

This plugin generates a description metatag for your post, something that is almost impossible to do by hand give Wordpress' framework of using a template for each page. Like the sitemap plugin, this is oriented to helping the search engines rather than your readers.

Simple Tags by Broobles

This is one of the less complicated plugins to add Technorati tags to a post. Unfortunately, I don't use it as regularly as might be best, but when I do use it, it's a breeze.

An xhtml sitemap by Chris Pearson

If you click on the sitemap link at the top of the page, it takes you to my xhtml sitemap. This is based on a page template by Chris Pearson. I may use it more than readers use it, but it's a handy way to see all the posts I have in one place.

A new 404 page template by Douglas Karr

To be blunt, the basic 404 template in most Wordpress themes sucks and is extremely unhelpful. Doug Karr's code for a 404 page changes from a place to say either my blog screwed up or my reader did into a helpful resource.

Miscellaneous

DoFollow by Kimmo Suominen

As most of you know, by default Wordpress add the nofollow attribute to links in comments. This is one of several plugins that removes the nofollow attribute. It's nice because you can set it to remove nofollow only after a period of days. This gives you a chance to moderate anything that gets through your spam filters.

Portable Applications

I talked about Portable Audacity earlier, but I use many other portable applications. I work in more than half a dozen different locations every week, several of which I don't have my own computer. To make life easier, I've put the most commonly used software I need on a memory stick, so they're always available to me. For blogging purposes, these include Firefox (browser), Thunderbird (email), and Xammplite (a webserver to test site changes). I also have a portable version of my own Amibook in order to keep my schedule in order.

So there you have it, my blogging infrastructure. It isn't perfect. Nothing is. It has gotten a bit more extensive in the past year, but it works for me. These tools have helped me put together the functionality I want, and that appears to serve my readers. What are your  must-have tools for blogging?