Bloggers

Have a Look at Every Tool, Service, and Plugin used to Run This Blog

Hey everyone, I know that many of you are also bloggers and that you are faced with choices every day. With so many themes, hosts, plugins, and paid services available it can get pretty confusing and I regularly get questions about the tools and services I use to power this blog. This page is intended as a bloggers resource to answer those questions. It takes a variety of tools and services to run a world class blog. And really, isn’t that what you and I, and all our fellow bloggers are after.

To answer those questions and help you sort through the confusion, I’ve decided to throw open the hood and show you EVERYTHING I use, along with a brief explanation of what it does and why I chose it. If something isn’t covered and you still have a question, just use the contact form and I will be happy to respond.

Some items on this list will have links to articles, videos, or other helpful resources. Some of them will be articles I have done; others will be off site resources. I will only list things that I actually use. If I use it, that means I like it and feel comfortable sharing it with other bloggers.

A very informative free webinar that everyone should watch

Plugins that Rock Webinar

The “Plugins That Rock” webinar presentation was delivered by the team at WishList Products to provide insight into the types of WordPress plugins that can be effectively used for building a membership site or online community.

You can watch the entire replay and download the full report in PDF

I’ll start with the big stuff and work my way down from there.

Theme: THESIS is a paid wordpress theme and quite honestly, it’s the best money I’ve ever spent. It’s a bloggers dream theme. Every free upgrade makes it even better. I seriously doubt that any theme will be able to give you the features, upgrades, support, and cutting edge technology of Thesis. It’s as SEO optimized as a theme can get and that means the kind of clean coding that the search engines love. You can totally change the look of your blog without any alterations to the internal structure. These Thesis videos are well worth watching if you want a little education on the value of a good WordPress theme. If you are serious about blogging, you should watch the videos even if you have a different favorite theme. Pricing for Thesis is $87 for the personal option and $164 for the Developers option. Both include free lifetime upgrades (about twice a year so far).

note: In conjunction with the Thesis theme, I also use the free plugin called:
Thesis Openhook. This plugin allows you to insert arbitrary content into the many
hooks used in the Thesis Theme framework (not as complicated as it sounds). If
you use Thesis, I recommend this plugin. Download it here.

SEO: Search engine optimization is extremely important if you want your blog and your articles to rank highly in google and other search engines. The problem is, SEO is just plain hard and many bloggers ignore it. Having an SEO optimized theme like Thesis is very important, but it’s equally important that your individual posts are fully optimized. To accomplish this I use an ingenious plugin/service called SCRIBE. I am so impressed with the results I get from this service that I did an article and walk-through video that shows you step-by-step how the plugin version works.  Scribe is real blessing for non SEO bloggers (like me). There is also a Web-Based version included with this service. Here is a Scribe video tour that walks you through that. There are several pricing plans depending on usage. The one I use is $27 per month.

Web Hosting. My web host of choice is HostGator. They are extremely reliable, have a huge support team, and all the latest features and tools to simplify blogging. For bloggers, make sure your web host has a Cpanel and fantastico (HostGator does). They are also extremely inexpensive starting at $4.95 per month with live, real person customer support available around the clock 24/7. You can also build a professional website in minutes, without any web hosting experience by choosing from over 4,500 templates!

Autoresponders and email service providers. If you are going to have a newsletter, or any other type of email list Aweber is the only way to go. You have probably heard that before and there is a reason. They are hands down, the best autoresponder service on the planet. Right now you can get a one month $1 Trial Account, that’s the best way to get familiar with this service. I pay $19 per month for unlimited service. Don’t even consider going with anybody else. Here’s an informative article with some really important “need to know” information about what it takes to get your emails delivered in this spam happy world we live in. It’s pure, grade A content.

Backlinks: In addition to all the normal backlinking strategies like commenting on other blogs and using social media sites, I have a secret weapon for building backlinks. I use a service called Traffic Bug to build hundreds of links to each article I write. Google pagerank is dependent on the number of links pointing back to your site, and your individual posts. Traffic Bug handles social bookmarking, submitting to the RSS directories, search engine submission, directory submission. Traffic-Bug lets you submit an unlimited number of sites to build 1,000 backlinks at a low, monthly price of $24.97. You can try Traffic Bug for 11 days absolutely free, they won’t even ask for your credit card number. Even if you don’t stay with the service you can build some serious backlinks in 11 days at zero cost.

That takes care of most of the big stuff. Next, let’s look at PLUGINS.

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.  You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”  | Visit plugin site

AntiVirus – AntiVirus for WordPress is a smart, effectively solution to protect your blog against exploits and spam injections. | Visit plugin site

BlogAudit – Audit your blogging performance. | Visit plugin site

CommentLuv – Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments. | Visit plugin site

Contextual Related Posts – Show user defined number of contextually related posts. | Visit plugin site

Cute Profiles – Cute Profiles adds all your Social Profile icons vertically on left or right side of your pages, which will remain visible all the time though the page is scrolled and without consuming the sidebar space. | Visit plugin site

Dagon Design Form Mailer – The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script. | Visit plugin site

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap that is more reader friendly than the google sitemap generator (which I also use for search engine purposes). | Visit plugin site

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. | Visit plugin site

Login LockDown – Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. | Visit plugin site

PrintFriendly – Creates PrintFriendly.com button for easy printing. | Visit plugin site

Scribe – (Not free) Quickly and easily check your content against SEO best practices utilizing the Scribe Content Optimizer. | Visit plugin site

SexyBookmarks – SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. | Visit plugin site

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. | Visit plugin site

Thesis OpenHook – This plugin allows you to insert arbitrary content into the many hooks that the Thesis Theme Framework provides. | Visit plugin site

TweetMeme Retweet Button – Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts. | Visit plugin site

Twitterlink Comments – Plugin to show a link to follow the comment author on twitter if they have entered in their username at least once in the comment form. | Visit plugin site

WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. | Visit plugin site

WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. | Visit plugin site

Ping List: Get your new posts out there.

When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the sites on your ping list.
A ping list is also called an update services. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex.

Most people use Ping-o-Matic which, with just one “ping” from you, will let many other services know that you’ve updated your blog. Ping-o-Matic is a good service, but is by no means complete. I have added many other services to my ping list and you can do the same in about one minute.

In your Wordpress dashboard, go to => settings => writing. Then scroll to the very bottom of the page where it says: Update Services. That box is your ping list. You can add the following services with a simple copy and paste.

Make sure there are no duplicate entries, and that you separate each multiple service URL with line break. When you are done, save your changes.

My Ping List:

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.shareapost.com/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://rpc.copygator.com/ping/

http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/