I’ve compiled a listing of resources that I’ve used to build this blog as well as additional resources that i believe might be of interest as well.
Essential Software:
Winzip
WinZip is a Windows-based program that allows you to compress files and open previously compressed files in the zip format.
FileZilla
The free FTP solution. Both a client and a server are available. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License
Hosting:
Hostgator
Host Gator provides Shared, Reseller and Dedicated web hosting solutions. With services designed for both beginners and professionals. All of their shared plans include a 99.9% uptime guarantee, 24/7 support and a 45-day money back guarantee.
Domain Registration:
Godaddy
Low cost domain names, domain transfers, web hosting, email accounts and so much more.
Wordpress Themes:
Copyblogger
Copyblogger is the theme of choice i use for my blog here.
Thesis
Thesis is literally anything you want it to be. Want a 3-column layout with your content in the middle? Done. How about a 2-column layout with content on the right? You get the idea.
WooThemes
At WooThemes you will find some of the most cutting edge WordPress templates, packed full of features, presented beautifully with clean layouts, slick colour palettes and neat typography. All our themes are available for purchase individually or you can join the theme club and have access to all our masterpieces.
One Theme
One Theme’s backend is so powerful that it requires absolutely no web design experience, which means absolutely no hacking around in files you don’t understand. Sporting an unrivalled list of features, and rock solid stability, its easy to understand why purchasing One Theme is the popular choice for professional web masters.
Wordpress Plugins:
All In One SEO Pack
Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Auto Social Poster
Submit your posts to 34+ top social bookmarking sites automatically!
CForms II
Cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!
Enforce WWW Preference
This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
FasterIM Optin
Easy add stylish optin forms to your blog.
Feedsmith
FeedBurner has a ton of fantastic options to make your feed more useful to your readers (you know, those people you’re blogging for).
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.
You will need a Google Analytics account in order to use the plugin.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin” corrects WordPress’s pinging system and solves all the problems for even the latest version of WordPress
Post Teaser
Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.
Simple CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA for your comment system to prevent unwanted spams. Prevent automated spams by bots and most important naughty peoples. It’s simple and yet secure.
Smart 404
Save your visitors from unhelpful 404 errors!
Instead of quickly giving up when a visitor reaches content that doesn’t exist, make an effort to guess what they were after in the first place. This plugin will perform a search of your posts, pages, tags and categories, using keywords from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redirect to that content instead of showing the error. If there’s more than one match, the 404 template can use some template tags to provide a list of suggestions to the visitor.
Sociofluid
SocioFluid, displaying some small icons, which grows when the mouse is moved over, similar to the mac effect. SocioFluid plugin uses jquery with icondock plugin to render the “mac effect”:
Subscribe to Comments
Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.
Trackback Validator
Simple Trackback Validation Plugin for WordPress 2.x performs simple but very effective tests on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam.
TweetMyBlog
It’s a Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter – driving massive amounts of traffic to your blog.
You will need a Twitter account for this plugin to work.
Wordpress Stats
There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.
WP Auto Tagger
This plugin uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on the post content. You have the option to automatically tags posts on save or get tag suggestions with a single click. Auto Tagger will not replace your existing tags.
Link Building
RSS Submit
RSS Submit is the most powerful RSS feed management and promotion tool available. The first of its kind for automatically submitting RSS feeds, it is the quickest and most reliable way to submit to the RSS search engines.
Directory Submitter
Submit your website to more than 2700+ directories in a semi-automated fashion.
SubmitEaze
Submit your website to more than 4000+ directories and 600+ article directories with a push of a button.
Time Management & Organization:
Rescuetime
Ridiculously easy time management software.
Remember the Milk
Online Todo List and Task Management
