Hello, everyone! Since I get a lot of questions about starting a blog and what I use, today I'm sharing a list of my favorite blogging widgets and plugins. Bonus points because they're all free, so there's no risk involved. Obviously this is by no means a how-to guide or the holy grail of tools— this is just what I have discovered works best for me. As usual, these are one million percent my unpaid opinions, I am simply passing on what I've learned so far. And of course, if you have other suggestions or resources feel free to leave them in the comments so everyone can benefit!
One last note: this post turned out longer than I expected, so I'm adding a page jump to save homepage visitors from eternal scrolling— please don't hate me. Now without further ado, my favorites are:
1. nRelate: give your readers more of what they're looking for
nRelate is one of many "related content" plugins available these days. Once installed, it will display a gallery of previous, relevant content under each blog post. I chose nRelate because it's simple, customizable, and beautiful. I did use LinkWithin for a long time, but I found the functionality clunky and its aesthetic never really fit with my blog. While looking for an alternative, I found this article and decided to make the switch. My favorite part is that you can customize the thumbnail size and how many posts display so that it fills the width of your blog nicely. Here's a little before/after comparing the two:
With NRelate, you also have the option to choose how deep into your archives you want the related posts to go. So if you only wanna show content from the last 6 months (say, if you had a recent rebrand or something), you totally can. You also have the option to incorporate ads, but I don't have any experience with that.
So far I've been really pleased with the switch. I will be honest though— it is a little disorienting to initially navigate their site. They have that super trendy single page website thing going on (which is fine— it looks clean and modern) but once you figure out where to go it's like you're taken into a time machine to an older version of their site. . . But full disclosure: I also just might be a terrible user?
Anyway, you can see all the theme options here, and if you're interested in switching then let me just save you the trouble and link directly to their registration page— everything after I found that page was easy as pie and took less than 10 minutes.
2. Disqus: the blog comment service known as "The Web's Community of Communities"
Disqus (pronounced "discuss") is a popular commenting system that I have had a love/hate relationship with until recently. I think the hate part stemmed from my initial discomfort with newness (don't lie, we all hate dealing with that inaugural learning curve of anything) but Disqus allowed me to leave comments on my favorite websites by signing in with Twitter (yay— no new account creation!) so I warmed up slightly. Then I noticed whenever I would ask a blogger a question or revisit my beloved sites, Disqus would give me little notifications that people were actually talking to me. No emails, no subscribing to anything— just a polite little response next time I visited. And that's when it became a love/love relationship.So after using twitter to create a full blown Disqus account, I added the entire commenting system to my site. This is actually my first post with it in place, so if you feel like something is different, then you're right! I'm actually in love with it so far but if that changes I'll be sure to give an update.
3. Foxyform: free & simple contact form
I recently created an email form on my contact page in about 2 minutes using Foxyform. It's a great option if you don't want your email address floating around (or if you feel like your email address doesn't sound "professional" enough— no one has to see it). I just thought I'd save readers the clicking/copy+paste time and add it right there on my page. Foxyform is not the fanciest, but it is free and you don't have to create an account, so that's why I recommend it. It also saved me from another "Hey Nick can you blah blah blah to my blog" conversation since heaven knows there have been and will be enough of those.
The above is a screenshot of my contact form— no frills, it just gets the job done.
4. Flickr: you know— the photo hosting site
Everyone needs a photo hosting site, so why not use the one with the most free space? I used Photobucket for a long time but once I had a couple of posts get the tiniest amount of popularity then all my bandwidth was gone and my pictures were replaced with these guys. Not fun. I ended up paying for an upgrade (a few bucks?) and then switched to Flickr since they had recently upped their free storage.Besides the fact that I use it daily, Flickr is mostly on here is because I don't use that little landscape button to upload my photos directly into my posts. I suggest uploading pictures to a photo hosting site and then manually adding them to your blog posts. This way, you can control the size (I like my photos to be the width of my blog) and add keyword descriptions while you're at it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just read this post because Kaelah is who I learned this from. Also, you could use a different photo hosting site, Flickr is just the one I chose because I already had an account (through Gmail)— which is apparently a reoccuring theme in this post. . . And now y'all know how lazy/password forgetful I am. I will never ever create new accounts if I can help it.
5. Zootool: a visual bookmarking site. Mine looks like this:
I use Zootool to organize helpful articles, recipes, photography tutorials, videos, and anything else I want to remember. I use it to keep my actual bookmarks to a minimum and to have fast, at a glance access to neat things that I wanna link to in The Cat's Meow posts. I suppose Pinterest could be an alternative, but I just don't much care for it (too many unsourced links). I personally only need something to keep track of useful things that I want to reference or share later, so I don't perpetually have five million tabs open. So if you're like me and don't care about re-pins (or wanna avoid mindless time sucks) then I suggest Zootool for quick bookmarking.
6. MailChimp: email marketing service
Wanna start a beautiful newsletter but don't know where to start? Mailchimp is all you need to know. If you grow your subscriber list over 2,000 people then it's no longer free, but also congratulations for having 2,000 people that want your news in their inbox. My online shop is in development now, but I simply added a newsletter signup form to the page so that interested parties will be notified when it launches. It's super easy and straightforward to create lists and campaigns, so don't be afraid to branch out and try it.
I'd also just like to say that newsletters don't have to be for your blog or business only. They can be a great way to keep close friends and family updated on your life. If you're not a huge fan of social media/putting your personal life on the internet, but you also don't have time to call your 50 closest family and friends when good things (or bad things) strike, then think about asking them to join in on your personal "newsletter" list— you might even end up using it more than you thought or having more meaningful interactions than you expected.
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Lastly, for those wondering, I use blogger/blogspot because it's free to edit so I can make it look like whatever I want. There are tons of platform options to look into, but I'm a bit of a control freak so that was pretty much the deciding factor for me. I love talking about this kind of stuff, so if your list looks different then please feel free to share it. And let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, like I said— I am no expert, but I'd love to help out however I can!
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