What’s in My Blogging Toolkit? I read this post from Ian via Problogger and since I am always interested in finding new tools and applications, I wanted to ask my readers on what they use to make their lives easier. Of course, a post such as this is incomplete without my own input. Here is a small subset of what is on my computer and my primary tools for blogging. WordPress, of course: Quintissential, versatile blogging and CMS platform. Firefox, latest: ALL of my browsing is done via this browser. I carry a USB key with portable apps Foxmarks, latest: Synchronize my bookmarks across computers Bloglines: Read and read some more Statcounter: Almost all my stats needs Feedburner: Feed stats Google Alerts: Versatile email alerts Google News Search: Highly versatile news search, I love the search by date feature Techmeme: Hot tech news aggregator. Though this blog has never had […]

34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog: Darren had asked the question, Why do readers unsubscribe from your blog’s feed? and he tabulated the answers in the comments. Much of the answers are unsurprising but the top two reasons are too many posts and too few posts respectively. So the answer there might be to post just enough entries to keep people coming back and just few enough to keep from overwhelming them. I have found proof of that hypothesis in that the daily updates of plugins and themes on weblogtoolscollection.com works best in single consolidated posts. Other important factors included off topic posts, partial feeds and finally good content. I love Scoble’s comment on that post. There is a lot to be said for “do what you love, put stuff up you’d love to read, and the rest will fall into place.”

I love FeedBurner and I have been using their service for quite some time. I love their statistics and though I do not pay for the “Secret HallPass and Handshake” I really benefit from understanding subscription and and click patterns. However, Feedburner and consequently the FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin suffers from a major flaw that has become quite irritating of late. The feed replacement plugin and Feedburner have very little granularity, a flaw that WordPress does not suffer from. As a matter of fact, WordPress’ feed versatility is one of the best in the industry and though the system is not without its weaknesses, it provides some of the most useful and varied options to distribute feeds. When I use Feedburner, I completely lose that versatility. Unless I can come up with a pain free method of re-instating the versatility (and it does not look good), I feel that the […]