The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Tools

That’s the last post from the series The First 6 Months Of Blogging and it will be about tools I use when I blog. Every activity is enhanced by tools and blogging is no exception to this. Today’s post will be rather technical or at least strictly focused on the technical part of the whole blogging process. If you came here directly, you may want to have a look at the previous posts of this series:

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing
The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Promotion
The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Money

Without further ado, let’s start.

iBlueSky

iBlueSky is a mind mapping application for iPhone. I already wrote a review for iBlueSky, so if you’re curious you can go directly to that page. I’m often stroke by some idea or thought in the middle of something: while I walk, while I exercise or while I’m reading something. Most of the time I have my phone with me and I use it to quickly capture that idea. Mind mapping is sometimes faster than linear writing and it let me empty my mind pretty quick. I guess around 30-40% of my blog posts are ideas sketched using iBlueSky.

Evernote

Another fantastic application I use for capturing ideas is Evernote. Evernote lets you capture text, audio or photos using your iPhone (or anything else if you’re using the desktop client). One neat thing about photos is that Evernote process them for writing recognition and made them searchable, which is extremely useful. Evernote is well deserving a post on itself, but until then, I will just emphasize on its versatility as a capture tool. The notes are stored remotely on Evernote dedicated servers and can be accessed with the Evernote desktop client for further tweaking. Most of the time I record voice notes using Evernote client for iPhone which I process every 2-3 days on my laptop.

MacJournal

I do all my writing using MacJournal. I already extensively wrote about MacJournal here, and if you’re interested in more details you can always check the post about power blogging with macjournal, GTS style. I use MacJournal not only for blogging but also for writing ebooks. There is a post which details my ebook writing setup, if you’re curious. MacJournal is also offered with a significant discount to DragosRoua.com users, so feel free to check the monthly MacJournal promotion.

Woopra

When it comes to analytics software, Woopra is one of my favorites. I’m a veteran of Google Analytics and although I highly appreciate the reports in Analytics, Woopra has several things that make it stand out. One of the most important would be real time alerts: you can set up as many visitor alerts as you can, based on a countless choice of parameters, and Woopra will alert you in real time whenever the criteria are met. I can see in real time my visitors from StumbleUpon, Twitter or Digg, for instance. There’s a 50.000 monthly impressions limits to any Woopra account right now, but even with 50.000 impressions is enough to get an idea about your blog traffic.

Thesis

I use thesis, a commercial framework for WordPress, or, in plain English, a commercial WordPress theme. The main reason for using thesis is its flexibility. Thesis features a hooks system  by which you can greatly enhance your blog theme without compromising future upgrades. I already wrote about how you can customize thesis with some simple hooks for Twitter, Digg or StumbleUpon. Thesis also features an affiliate program for those of you who are interested in promoting it, you can sign up here.

Blog Audit

This is a wordpress plugin I wrote several months ago in order to assess my blogging progress. This plugin lets you create blogging goals like the number of posts you intend to write per day, per week or per month, the expected number of comments per post or per day and the expected number of pingbacks per post. After setting up your goals, you can asssess your pogress by checking up Blog Audit main screen and see if you met or not your goals. Blog Audit is in a very early stage, at the version 0.1 beta, this is the reason why I haven’t yet officially launched, but it can be downloaded if you want to play with it from a separate page dedicated to blog audit.

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Those are my main 6 tools I used in my first 6 months of blogging. There were of course some other plugins or experiments in using other tools but none of them lasted more than several weeks.

Interesting enough, when I intended to write this post, I wanted a short list of applications, nothing complicated. Call it synchronicity, but today’s assignment at the “31 days to build a better blog challenge” is exactly that: write a list post.

I guess I just did

Thesis Hooks for Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit

I love my wordpress theme, I really do. In case you haven’t noticed so far, this is thesis, one of the best commercial themes for wordpress. I don’t like it only for the crisp appearance and nice layout, you can get that nowadays from any decent free wordpress theme. What I like it for is the unparalleled flexibility of the backend. Not only it has 2 different admin pages full of options but it comes with one of the best features in the PHP frameworks: hooks.

Now it’s time to take a break and announce to our precious reader that this post will be a moderately technical one (yes, I know PHP pretty well, among other different skills ) and it will involve some coding. Now, let’s explain what this is all about.

Take Care Of Your Users

I use several social networking sites these days: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and of course, Twitter. During the last few months I managed to attract a fairly amount of traffic from those services. To be honest, this traffic exceeds by far anything I get from search engines. And what I really appreciate at this type of traffic is its “human” touch. I might get some huge impact from a lot of bots that are searching for “iPhone 3g applications” (btw: I rank pretty well for that) but in the end what counts are the real persons who are seeing my posts promoted on the social networking services.

So, I thought it would be courteous for me to let those people know that I know from where they are coming and to start a little bit of interaction with them. I decided to have this interaction on two very hot spots in the wordpress territory: just before the post and just after the post. Sidebars, header and footer are not so hot when it comes to user action, the content rules. So, I wanted to have a simple line that would say hi to the visitor and tell him I’m on that specific social network too and a little reminder to help him promote the post, and another simple line in the end, letting him know how he can befriend me on those networks.

Pretty simple, of course. I know you can get tons of social networking features packed in a number of very specialized plugins but I didn’t wanted to use another plugin for that. I wanted to keep it extremely simple and easy to control. So, here’s how I did it (don’t worry now for the technical part, all the source code is packed and ready to download at the end of the post). (more…)

New blog theme, alltop featured and more

Well, it’s been a busy week-end for some of us, and yes my friend, that includes me. There were some important changes on this blog, some of them quite visible, some of them just starting to bloom. But the bottom line is that we are moving in the right direction.

First of all, as you may already noticed, there is a new layout for eDragonu.ro. I felt that it was the moment to make the step toward a professional implementation of a wordpress template. After searching the net several days, I finally decided to stay with thesis, a highly customizable, yet surprisingly stable wordpress theme. Installing it was a little bit time consuming, but in the end it really paid the time. I am satisfied with the new look, and, as I already told you, you are only seeing the top of the iceberg. There are more subtle options that I really like at this theme, and I plan to write a more detailed description of them in a couple of days. Oh, and when I said “professional”, I said also “commercial”, thesis is a paid theme and it is on the highest scale amongst the paid template systems.

OK, so now you wonder why I paid for a wordpress theme. The answer is really simple: because I want to focus on writing, not on customizing my blog theme every week. And because with this one I have more than a theme, I really have like a small publishing system. For instance, the picture you see on the right of the page, well, that multimedia box is a highly customizable content placeholder. I can assign to it a fixed image, a video box or custom code (like advertising, of course), and I can do that globally, for each post, or for each page. I already assigned to the pages top posts and downloads special images, just do a quick click to test. And I can do all of this from within wordpress dashboard, without digging through code, how about that?

(more…)