Today's reading includes my list of the top 10 blogging tools. I'm sure many of you already use many of these, but hopefully I'll introduce a couple tools to the newbies and even pros that they weren't already aware of. Everybody likes lists right? Order is determined by how often I use them. Here goes.
- feedburner.com - How many times have you heard that RSS doesn't scale or that your feed is broken. Headache? Give your headaches to FeedBurner. Let them manage your feed, so you can focus on blogging. FeedBurner lets you slice, dice and chop your feed at the click of a button and have free stats that I find invaluable.
- Google Reader - This is my favorite RSS reader. I've got three requirements in a reader; Fast, Web and River of News. I have no desire to reader RSS offline. When I'm offline, I'm offline. The only thing I don't like about Google Reader is that it hangs IE7. Would you fix that already?
- del.icio.us - I'm a tagging freak. Just check out my link blog at Wordpress. I splice links into all my feeds using FeedBurner. My del.icio.us account is randymorin and every month I give away a free book at Amazon to the person who sends me the best link via the for:randymorin tag.
- Google Blog Search and IceRocket - This is how I find stuff. I can never figure out why people continue to use Technorati, PubSub and Feedster, which IMHO are severaly broken. Just tell me who is linking to me (Google and IceRocket). Thanks!
- imageshack.us - I don't like to hosts a lot of images on my websites. Images are simply another bandwidth hog. Instead, I host the vast majority of my images on imageshack.us.
- youtube.com - I certainly don't hosts video (total bandwidth nightmare) and there's lots of great video on YouTube that you can freely blog.
- spellcheck.net - I have no need to install Word beyond it's spellchecking abilities and certainly I'm not gonna install it solely for that spellchecker. I sometimes use the Google Toolbar for spellchecking, but quite often, I'll just pop open spellcheck.net to get the job done withut having to install anything.
- video.google.com - Not as good as YouTube, but there's still lots of good videos there.
- flickr.com - I post my personal pictures on Flickr because the organizer makes things really easy.
- W3C validators; HTML and RSS - You gotta validate. I'm not saying your HTML or your RSS has to validate, even I've got over 1000 errors in my HTML and a few warnings on my RSS. I'm saying that you should run the validator, from time to time, try to improve and become more valid. Total validation is only for geekoids.
Please feel free to add your own favorite tools in the comments so that other readers can grow their own toolsets.
Yes, if you validate, then I am calling you a geekoid. I would love 100% validation, but it's really difficult for most people and requires too much effort for even me.
Randy