Dear Blogger

Finally Published! The Dear Blogger Toolbox

Greg Narayan

dear_blogger_toolbox

As you know, I regularly recommend products, to provide answers, both at the blog and on social media. For a while now I had been thinking of creating a “toolbox” that you could return to again and again for the sake of convenience. But like so many things in life, I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Well when a reader wrote in asking “what exactly should I install after I start a blog?” I figured the time had come.

So I present you with the complete (and short) list of tools used at Dear Blogger. Feel free to shop around for your own blog, and remember, just because I’m old-fashioned, doesn’t mean I don’t have a few tricks up my sleeve.

p.s. If you have any suggestions of your own, I bet everyone would really enjoy hearing from you! I’ll make this post into a page soon and link it in our menu above, so any comments should give you some good long-lasting visibility!

WordPress Plugins

We’ll kick off this list with the free plugins powering Dear Blogger, then move on to the more robust, paid software.

Always Edit in HTML – If you prefer editing blog posts in the Text tab as opposed to the Visual tab, then this plugin is for you. Visual tab sure is a nice option (especially with the new TinyMCE update for 3.9) but it can remove things like JavaScipt and create weird formatting on lists and images.

Dynamic Widgets – You may want to only show a widget on certain posts or pages. This plugin does exactly that.

Easy Spoiler – Just another cool way you can hide information, which I used in the blog’s early days.

[spoiler title=”Who hid the treasure?”]Jack did.[/spoiler]

Google XML Sitemaps – An absolute must, this plugin sends your new content express overnight delivery to the search engines so you can get indexed and ranked quicker.

Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin – Helps you redirect your readers away from or to a new post or page when they visit a link.

Subscribe to Comments – Want more comments? Here’s a simple, non-spammy way to prompt readers to join in for follow-up comments. Highly old-fashioned, made before any of this Comment-Luv jazz 🙂

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – Useful for your tutorial posts, this plugin displays code within a post inside of “html” tags instead of rendering it.

Bull’s Eye: One of the first logos* we tested out in 2012.

TF Social Share – Let the discussions on the “best social media share plugin” ensue, because my vote is in! TF social share gives you lots of social media buttons, a few styleouts, and less interruption on your other plugins.

WordPress SEO! – Yoast’s golden child, this plugin has tons of free SEO options my favorite being how you can set exactly how posts show up in the search results with titles, snippets and more.

WP-Click-Tracker – This old-time plugin will track which links on your blog get the most clicks from the moment you install it. It definitely surprises me at times!

WP Hide Post – Very useful for hiding posts or pages, like your eBook landing page, on the blog, in search results, and everywhere else!

WP Post Views – Count postviews in your backend, display them publicly. Updates all on it’s own.

Sure, we’ve all downloaded that one plugin fingers crossed hoping it saves us on the issue at hand. But if you don’t want to go out on a limb anymore, I recommend bookmarking this page to make use of the research I’ve already done here.

Moving on now…

*The simple circles used to form “Bull’s Eye” were also used to design the coffee cup logo used on the blog from 2012 – present.

Basic Software

Here’s the (short) list of the software I use and recommend. As always, the links to HostGator, Aweber and Theme-Junkie are of the affiliate nature.

To show you this page is truly just meant for resources there are no affiliate links here. We’re doing it differently, which shouldn’t surprise you. 🙂

Neither this blog would nor the community I’ve built would exist without these tools, and I only recommend those which I honestly can’t live without.

I’ve also linked the best resource posts to help you out if you’re a new user, and will always keep the comments open on these posts.

WordPress – Known for its elegance, and ease of use, used by nearly 20% of the whole Web. WordPress makes it easy to run a blog or professional business website and the best part is they make it fun.

If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, and join our ongoing chats, please visit these WordPress resources:

(Note: a lot of our posts here help you navigate some specific area of your WordPress)

HostGator – The web’s largest, friendliest host for WordPress self-hosted blogs and websites. 45 day money back guarantee for the never-spenders (like me).

If you’d like to learn more about HostGator, and join our ongoing chats, please visit these HostGator resources:

Aweber – Email marketing management made (almost too) easy. Deliver eBooks, create newsletters, add gorgeous forms then track and improve your performance.

If you’d like to learn more about Aweber, and join our ongoing chats, please visit these Aweber resources:

Theme-Junkie – The “little guy” in premium WordPress themes, Theme-Junkie offers the “Daily” theme which was customized to make Dear Blogger. Now offering responsive designs with LayerSlider WP.

If you’d like to learn more about Theme-Junkie, and join our ongoing chats, please visit these Theme-Junkie resources:

What about you?

As you can see, there’s not much going on here in terms of technology. My mission since day 1 of simplicity has really tricked through to all corners of the blog.

What really makes this blog is the discussion – that’s you!

So what do are you using? What’s in your toolbox?

Drop a comment with your favorite plugin or a question on what to use for anything and thanks for stopping by!

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