Five essential tools make blogging fun and easy

Time is short and there’s lots of inter­est­ing things to blog about these days, so why make it harder on your­self than you have to? I’m all about tak­ing the easy way, but unfor­tu­nately as I’ve been learn­ing, TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), and to learn the easy things, I’ve had to work through the hard ones. What I’m about to dis­cuss are the essential.

Fear not, gentle reader, in this missive, I’ll skip the hard and reveal only the easy…at least, they were easy for me. Your mileage may vary.

5) Word­Press
At min­imum, your bloghost should offer you this most-excellent blog­ging plat­form. It’s the most pop­u­lar for all the right reas­ons; easy, flex­ible, robust, sup­por­ted, and has a huge developer base. It’s also free.

4) Fire­fox
Every good blog deserves to be viewed through a good browser. Fire­fox wins my vote for the same reas­ons that Word­Press does; easy, flex­ible, robust, sup­por­ted, and has a huge developer base. It’s also free.

Word­Press and Fire­fox both sup­port plu­gins — 3^rd party addi­tions that extend the func­tion­al­ity of the software…which is import­ant because that’s where I’m going next.

3) Scri­be­Fire
A plu­gin for Fire­fox, Scri­be­Fire grew out of the Per­form­an­cing blog-writing tool. Quite simply, Scri­be­Fire allows you to edit your blog while you’re surf­ing, drag­ging and drop­ping items dir­ectly from your source webpages, news­feeds or whatever. It con­nects dir­ectly to most pop­u­lar blog­ging soft­ware and seam­lessly posts your post.

2) Word­Press plu­gins
There’s too many to cover them all but I’ll briefly list the ones that make blog admin­is­tra­tion simple:

• Akismet and Spam Karma 2 — both com­ment spam man­age­ment tools. Essen­tial unless you have a lot of time to delete com­ments that have noth­ing to do with your writ­ing, and everything to do with Viagra.
• Word­Press Data­base Backup — essen­tial, should your bloghost have issues. It’s saved my butt occa­sion­ally
• Word­Press Mobile Edi­tion — Con­verts your blog to be read by road­war­ri­ors with PDA and cell­phone browsers

Finally, the Big Kahuna. The one essen­tial thing that really makes blog­ging fun and easy.

1) Google Any­thing
Yep, pretty much any­thing by Google can be con­sidered essen­tial for fun and easy blogging.

• Google Reader is the essen­tial feed-reading and man­age­ment tool.
• Google’s Gmail is fast, simple, and with almost 3GB of space, huge.
• Google Ana­lyt­ics — ah yes, this is the one tool that really brings it all together. How do you know if your audi­ence is engaged, what they’re read­ing and when they’re vis­it­ing? Google Ana­lyt­ics meas­ures that, and presents it in simple, friendly reports that have an aston­ish­ing amount of detail.
• Google News — stay on top of the news with live rss alerts.

And there you have it. My five essen­tial tools (ok, more actu­ally) that really make blog­ging a fun activ­ity. Ima­gine what blog­ging would be like if we didn’t have these gems.

Got a few of your own? Add to the con­ver­sa­tion by post­ing them in the comments!

Tech­nor­ati Tags: Five Essen­tial Tools, blog­ging, blog, fire­fox, scri­be­fire, google, word­press, writ­ing, tech­no­logy