Blogging Toolkit is a set of tools and and softwares that a blogger uses to manage, publicize, monetize and optimize his blog. A blogging toolkit is needed by a blogger for generating traffic, gaining popularity and running a full featured blog.

Nirmal has tagged me to reveal my blogging toolkit and here I shall write about my blogging kit.

1. Blogging Platform

Wordpress is my blogging platform. I shifted from blogger last August. Wordpress has been amazing in terms of flexibility it has offered. Blogger stands no where in front of wordpress when it comes to themes, plugins and RSS feeds. The coolest thing about wordpress is the RSS feed. You can create RSS feeds for any category or even search terms

a. RSS feed for category satire of this blog- http://www.shaarique.com/category/satire/feed

RSS feed for search string doesn’t work on my blog because of feedburner replacement plugin. The usual feed address would be http://www.shaarique.com/feed/rss2/?s=wordpress for search string ‘wordpress’.

The search engine optimization is awesome in wordpress.

2. Blogging Client

I use Windows live writer. I am somehow not comfortable with the wordpress post editor. But after proxy authentication was introduced in our campus, which meant only IE and Firefox were granted permission to connect, I had to shift to the wordpress. The auto save feature is great. I have had lot of trouble with this editor as it used to mess my blog. Any open code would effect the whole page and its not possible to add HTML codes of videos directly here (which is possible in live writer). The editor is one thing I adored about blogger, it used to accept any damn HTML or javascript! Everything has its limitation :smile:

3. Statistics Software

Google Analytics and shortstats. Google analytics is great in terms of insight it offers of visitors, page views, time spent by each visitor, geographical location, goal conversion and much more. Shortstats offers a wide range of features like search string, referral, browser and country log.

4. Blog Promotion and Feeds

I use feedburner for the feed of this blog. Nothing much on the blog promotion part  :wink:

5. Browser

Firefox and IE 7. I love firefox but the memory leak problem is a big pain, which is surprisingly absent in IE 7.

6. Graphics and Images

Adobe photoshop, Microsoft paint (the coolest image editor software ever to be made) and coral Photo.

I tag eches , Garry, Madhur & Thilak.