What are some of your favorite blogging tools, plug-ins or applications?

[Ashley K. Edwards]

New blog tools, plug-ins and applications are popping-up everyday. It's difficult to know which ones are useful or beneficial; sometimes it helps to hear about ones other bloggers are using.

Are there any in particular you like?

[Robert Dempsey]

WordPress. Hands down the best blogging platform with a million plugins to make it sing and dance.

[Ashley K. Edwards]

I'm on Wordpress with one of my blogs. Haven't spent too terribly much time playing with all the features, but it's good to know they're there.

[Tara Lamberson]

I just started using Tumblr and think it's super cool if you have a lot of social media to aggregate!

[Michelle Snow]

I use Wordpress for blogging. Twitter and Friend Feed for social media networking (among others, but these are my daily ones). For Firefox extensions, I use Sage for reading my RSS feeds and Scrapbook for saving notes from web pages to blog about later.

[John Ranaudo]

I use WordPress for many of my projects. It's very flexible, robust and easy to customize. The beauty of It is it can be used for practically any application such as blogging, CMS or even social networking sites.

Here a some of plug-ins I recommend:
* 404 notifier - This plugin emails 404 errors that need attention. (http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress)

* Redirection - If your migrating or changing existing posts/pages this plugins redirects pages and notifies the search engines on the redirect type. (http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/)

* All in One SEO Pack - Add meta data to your posts and pages. Excellent for SEO. (http://semperfiwebdesign.com/)

* Better Comments Manager - Help organize comments especially helpful for replying to comments. http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/better-comments-manager-wordpress-plugin-release.html

* Breadcrumb Navigation XT - Adds the breadcrumb navigation to your site. Excellent for usability and navigation. http://mtekk.weblogs.us/code/breadcrumb-nav-xt/

* Get Recent Comments - Add recent comments anywhere on your site. http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/

*Google XML Sitemaps - Sitemap generator for all search engines, a must have! http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/

* Limit Posts - limit the amount of words a feature post could display. http://labitacora.net/comunBlog/limit-post.phps

* Popularity contest - Show the most popular posts anywhere your site. http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

* Subscribe to Comments - Allows readers to receive email notifications to a particular post entry. http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

* Sociable - Add social networking news and booking icons to your posts. http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/

*Twitter tools - choose how to send new posts to your twitter account. http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

* User Photo - Create an authors page and snippet for posts. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-photo/

*WP 2.3 Related Posts - generate a related posts list of articles. Adds stickiness to your articles. http://fairyfish.net/2007/09/12/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/

* WP-Print - formats your posts so they are printer friendly. http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

Have fun!
John

[Dave Lair]

Wow, thanks John, it'll take me a couple centuries, but I'll eventually get through that list! It looks like there's some pretty good stuff there.

There's a wordpress plugin called commentluv that's pretty good, If the person leaving a comment on your site has a wordpress blog, it'll post their comment and within the comment it'll reference their most recent blog post.

Here's an example

It doesn't do too much for you directly, but if folks start seeing that by commenting on your posts, it'll also advertise their site, they might be more inclined to do so :)

[Ashley K. Edwards]

I've seen this on one or two blogs. I like the idea; I've been considering adding it to my Wordpress blog.