10 Essential Blogging Tools for Productivity

Blogging can be a frustrating activity, there’s a number of steps that you need to go through to get that perfect post from your creative mind onto your blog. It could be something as simple as coming up with the initial idea, to making uploading all the photos attached to post or ensuring that the formatting of the post is spot on before you hit the publish button.

1. Posterous

Gone are the days of logging into WordPress. Posterous makes it ridiculously simple to blog, or infact add any type of media you want to your post. Simply send an email to post@posterous.com & you’re all set to go. The beauty of Posterous is that it recognizes media within your email & automatically formats it in the post.
You can either take a Posterous subdomain (i.e. yourname.posterous.com) or use your own domain, they’ll also give you 1GB of storage for images/photos & other media.

2. ScribeFire

One of the drawbacks of using something like Posterous is that you really need to be starting your blog from scratch on it. It’s difficult to port over from another software or platform & bring the SEO benefit with you.
Many of us (just like the blog here) are using WordPress as our blogging platform. WordPress inherently has a number of flaws, the biggest of which is that you need to log in to create your post. ScribeFire almost turns your browser into Posterous (minus the pretty stuff they do with Images/Videos).

Simply install the extension/plugin then add the credentials of your blog. You will now be able to write posts from within your browser without having to log into WordPress. This is insanely useful when you start manging more than 1 blog (just select the blog you want to publish to from the dropdown).

3. Rapportive

As a Blogger one of your core activities will be connecting with people, that could be people within your blogging network or your readers. If you use GMail then Rapportive gives a beautiful social insight into the recipients social networks.

4. TextExpander

TextExpander is every Bloggers dream tool, it allows you to trigger elements of text that you might use frequently in just a few keystrokes. Use it to stop yourself from making frequent typo’s, use multiple email signatures, fill out forms or add boilerplate content into posts/documents…thx brb.

5. Evernote

Evernote is your notebook in the cloud, a great tool for Bloggers who like to keep all their sources of inspiration all in a single place. One of my favorite features is that it recognizes text within images.

6. Expandrive

Uploading images to use in posts is perhaps one of the major annoyances I have with blogging, it’s clunky & difficult. There’s a few ways around this the first being the lovely Expandrive, it simply turns your remote server into another folder on your local machine, allowing you to drag & drop images like you normally would between drives.

7. Dropbox

Dropbox does a similar thing except your images are stored on their servers (not your own). Dropbox is superb for keeping a rolling backup of all your documents & using it to sync everything across multiple machines. Imagine you’re working on a blog post with over 100 images then you need to go on the road, by keeping those images in your Dropbox you’ll have them synced to your portable machine & you can finish off the post whilst you’re away from home (using ScribeFire of course!).

8. Flickr

You may be struggling to find decent photos to use in your posts that are royalty free (i.e. you can use without paying for). By going into the Advanced Search section in Flickr you can search by Creative Commons Photos, you’re free to use these in your posts. Just make sure you pay attention to the attribution requirements, you might have to link back to the original photo or cite the source.

9. Picnik

Picnik is a rather savvy online photo editor that can pull your images from Flickr, Facebook or other sources. Perfect for those that don’t like to leave the browser or don’t have Photoshop installed.

10. Feedly

Inspiration is what keeps Bloggers motivated & since we probably read other blogs (rather than the news) it’s important to settle on an RSS Reader that you love. In this case for me it’s Feedly. It allows you to take all the feeds that you love & organize them into an Magazine like interface. Makes the important news of the day easy to digest.