My Blogging Tools

For those who blog or care about the technology side of blogging, here’s a quick rundown of the tools I use to work on the blogs on which I post (here, here, here, and there’s another anonymous one).

• In order to write, one has to read. I use FeedDemon as my aggregator and read a variety of sources, from personal blogs, industry leaders, news sites, and niche blogs of interest. When I want to find stuff in the blogosphere, I usually use either Technorati or IceRocket.
• Firefox serves to bring together a few tools which I use, as well as being a great, secure, functional web browser.
• I use del.icio.us to manage my links… I no longer use bookmarks.
• As I find interesting material which might serve as sources or inspiration for a blog post, I use Google Notebook to keep track of the links and record initial thoughts. It lets me view my notes from any location and makes it easy to collect things for future use.
• For this site and Dogcaught, I compose most blog posts in the built-in editor in WordPress. For my anonymous blog which is mostly very short posts, I use Performancing for Firefox.
• I view and analyze my blog stats using Mint, a commercial ($30) statistics package which provides all sorts of info about how folks are finding me, what posts they visit, and where they are going once they leave.

Those are the big pieces of technology I use. Some more than others, but each plays a role in how I manage to collect, aggregate, compose, and share the information on this blog and others.