Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

Several readers and friends have asked me for tips and suggestions on how they can improve their blog or how to start  a blog. I thought it would make sense to list what powers this blog.

• Hosting service – I host this domain on BlueHost.com were I get much more that what I used to get from my previous crappy provider. I get more space (disk space, # of domains, email accounts etc), better tools, good CS support and a good price.

• Blogging platform - I use Wordpress.org (self hosted). In my opinion this open source blogging platform is the best. It keeps evolving, improving and it provides a large variety of themes and plug-ins which extends ever further the platform’s capabilities. I have tried using other platforms such as Typepad, Vox, Blogger and the hosted Wordpress.com and none come close to the capabilities of a self hosted Wordpress.org blog.

• Wordpress Plug-ins - One of the great things about Wordpress is the variety of themes and plug-ins. The control panel inside Wordpress makes it very easy to activate/deactivate plug-ins or switch themes. Here are the ones that are currently installed:
  • SnapShots – The product I am very proud to be one of its creators, provides a better user experience and an entirely new source of ad inventory for every web site owners.
  • Akisment – eliminate blog comments spam
  • Wordpress Blog stats
  • All In One SEO pack
  • iWPhone – A plug-in that automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone.
  • AddThis – social bookmarking & sharing made easy
  • Wordpress Database backup
  • Current theme installed is ISM – this might change in the future

• Other Sidebar widgets
  • Lijit – Search tools for a blog
  • MyBlogLog
  • Feedburner for content syndication (don’t forget to offer a “Subscribe By Email” option)
  • Site Analytics done by Google Analytics, SiteMeter with help from Lijit and MyBlogLog (all services show different stats for some reason…)

• Desktop blogging application – Windows Live Writer makes blogging very easy. I wrote in the past a detailed post, followed by another one, about it.

I hope it helps those who are currently blogging or about to start blogging.