Blogging Tools

Todd Ziegler of the Bivings Group has posted about his top 5 blogging tools. What is number 1? You guessed it: Wordpress.

Says Ziegler:

Wordpress is the best blogging platform for my money because it is easy to use, full featured and completely open source (free!).  Make sure to install Akismet to help with comment spam and WP-Cache to help deal with the Slashdot/Digg/Fark affect.  Do those two things and you are golden.

This is right in line with what Steve saw in the Google Trends report about Wordpress surging in terms of queries and popularity.

I’m also right in line with Todd when it comes to Feedburner and MyBlogLog. Both tools are great for improving service to your community.

I guess I’ll have to check out some of the other services he recommends as well. Has anyone played with Clicky? What do you think about it?

Steve Rubel posted on Monday about the faliure of many “Web 2.0″ sites to provide users with lists of relevant content. Why would you do this? Primarily because you want to keep your readers on your blog longer instead of sending them elsewhere on the Web.

Lorelle on Wordpress has a great rundown of plugins that will provide services like this for Wordpress users.

For Movable Type users, Adam Kalsey has a plugin that will provide related content by relying on MySQL fulltext search behavior.

I’m going to start tinkering with these plugins over the next few days to see whether or not they’ll work for our purposes. I’ll definitely be implementing a function like this on my personal blog.

What other plugins have you discovered or used that do a good job of giving your readers more interesting stuff to read?

Just for the fun of it, I decided to play with Google Trends and see how searches for blog engine terms were trending over time. I was surprised to see how much more often WordPress was appearing compared to the past. This is likely due to WordPress.com, and how people are using Google simply to navigate to the site where they can update their blogs. That being the case, I assumed that Typepad would be way up there too. I often enter “typepad” into Google to navigate to my login page.

The phrase “vox” is used in so may other ways than 6A’s service that I attempted to normalize the chart by moving the Vox line down to where it would have originated at service launch if the term was unique.

Scoble’s got a post up about the Sentinel software from Blogwerx that monitors your content to see if it’s being republished anywhere else.

Some of Robert’s commenters are actually calling the software “vaporware” since the interface is incredibly buggy and doesn’t appear to actually do anything at the moment.

I recorded myself using the interface on both Safari and Firefox, and even though you can’t hear anything I’m saying, it’s pretty easy to see that the interface is damn buggy at present:

I really hope they fix whatever bug is going on, because this sounds like a really cool first step into shutting down sploggers. The software touts itself as a repository of information for blog hosts so that they can shut down blogs that are reproducing others’ content. This is fantastic and will hopefully cut back on the splog problem. But what about the average blogger on the street? What can he do about a site that’s reproducing content other than get royally pissed off?

Apparently, the most effective solutions rely on communities to police themselves through the use of services like Sentinel. A number of services have emerged that rely on people to report these blogs. This appears to be an expansion on this basic philosophy, but it’s not really enabling bloggers to do anything new…

FeedBurner could offer an awesome solution. If you burn your feed, it tracks “nontraditional uses” to help you discover re-bloggers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could track down those “nontraditional users” and block them from getting your feed? There has to be some way to do this, and it would actually give individual bloggers a weapon in the war against unauthorized repurposing.

I wanted to thank Simone at SNCDestinations’ blog for her nice post about our perspective on the Starbucks/Forbidden City situation. But her blog is in “Emergency Comment Blockage Mode.”

I Googled the term and found out that it allows you to disable commenting for your whole blog when under heavy spam attack.

Now, we have a lot of blogs here at Blog Business Summit. A lot of blogs means that we get a LOT of comment spam. But on the blogs that run WordPress we use Akismet, which is frankly the only spam blocking software I’ve ever been 100% happy with.

I’ve become pretty anal about making sure my HTML validates. So when something throws my code out of alignment, it irritates me.

As many people have mentioned before, clean code is one of the top reasons why blogs do better than traditional websites in the great race to the top of the search engine results page. When a search engine crawls your blog, it will note whether or not all your code elements were easy to understand. That counts both for search engine rankings and for the content that shows up in search results.

I recently checked the code on my personal blog, only to find 18 errors. Almost all of them were due to the three embedded YouTube videos on my blog’s front page. I don’t understand why so many cool services produce code that ticks off the W3 code validator. I don’t want to have to choose between incorporating cool elements like embedded YouTube videos and clean code.

If you’re starting a service that caters to bloggers or relies on bloggers to spread the word, pretty please with sugar on top make sure your widgets don’t mess up my code.

Kevin O’Keefe, one of the legal eagles at our last conference has posted about the new Blogger beta from Google. He says that it’s not professional enough for law firms.

I agree, and I’m prepared to go even further. Blogger is great for personal blogs. I used to use it for my personal blog long ago before I learned the joys of installing Wordpress on my own servers. But I would never, ever use it for any kind of professional blog.

Why? Because like every other hosted blogging service under the sun, the folks at blogger reserve the right to take down my blog anytime for any reason. It’s simply not worth the risk just to get a service for free.

I recently learned how to configure a tag archive for my personal blog similar to the one we use here at Blog Business Summit using Ultimate Tag Warrior for Wordpress.

After installing the plugin, you can use its extended template tag structure to add keyword tags to your index.php file and create a page template to display the tag cloud.

In a nutshell, this plugin leverages Wordpress’ almost endlessly extensibility to the fullest. I was particularly excited to learn about customizable page templates, which can be used for practically anything imaginable, just so long as there is a template tag to represent the function.

I just had a great Skype chat/LiveMeeting demo with George Athannassov of Blogtronix. He walked me through the cool new features that he spent all last week hinting about.

The new Blogtronix does some very interesting things with custom RSS, both for the blogger and the reader.

Most blogging platforms worth their salt already allow you to subscribe to comments for a specific post or the writings of one specific author, but Blogtronix goes a step further. In the new version, readers can also subscribe to all the comments written by just one person. They can also generate a custom RSS feed that syndicates only a specific category or a specific keyword.

On the blogger end, the new Blogtronix does some pretty cool things with RSS and reposting. You can subscribe to any blog you want, filter for categories and keywords, and then either either automatically re-post them, or queue them up for your approval.

Also, Blogtronix makes it easy to credit back to the original source. You can automatically set up some text to run on each post imported from a particular source with the name of the author and a template tag that gets the permalink of the original post. This text attaches itself to each post from a particular source, just like your sig file does on your e-mail.

Obviously, this feature has the potential for abuse. But used properly, it could also provide some truly amazing regurgitorial. I would love to have a feature like that for this blog so that I could easily import and quote whoever was saying the most interesting stuff instead of bopping back and forth between my RSS reader and my blog editor.

During our conference this October, I was lucky enough to spend copious amounts of time with George Athannassov of Blogtronix. He walked me through all the features of his software, which I found incredibly cool. As a psych geek who spent a lot of time doing content analysis for my thesis, I was particularly excited about the sophisticated data mining tools that are built right into the system. I had a little geekgasm when I found out that I could do statistics.

Tomorrow, George assures me that we’ll be seeing some really interesting developments within Blogtronix–which integrates blogs, wikis, social networks and RSS into one badass bloggy confection. Apparently, they’ll be offering some new features that makes filtering and republishing from your RSS feeds a snap. Unfortunately, that sneak wouldn’t tell me any more. I guess I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow with the rest of you.