Content creation tools
Automated daily del.icio.us postings
If you use del.icio.us as your social bookmarking tool, there is a relatively simple way to post a daily collection of new links to your blog. Here's an example.
Easy mobile blog feeds
All you have to do is know your blog's URL for this one. (example)
- Go to http://www.ifeedyou.com/
- Paste your blog's URL into the textbox on the right hand side of the page
- On the resulting page, make note of the "keyword" given in the "ABOUT" box
- To access your mobile feed, the URL will be http://www.ifeedyou.com/{yourkeyword}
Multi-bookmark submission tools
Adding submit buttons to your posts
- AddThis is a great, very simple way to add a multi-"bookmark this" icon to your site's front page or to every post. Just sign up for an account, generate the code for the widget of your choice, and add it to the appropriate place in your main or post template.
- Sociable is a more sophisticated plugin for Wordpress that also adds a row of "submit this" icons to your posts.
- Socializer is another method of doing this
- SocialSubmit is another way.
Quick tools for you to multi-submit your posts for promotion
- Onlywire -- This tool lets you easily submit any of your posts to about 20 social bookmarking sites for easy "social promotion"
- Socializer also offers a browser bookmark for multi-submissions
- SocialSubmit also offers a browser bookmark
Blog widgets
Super easy ways to add new features to your blog by tying in to social services you already use
Comic life
- Comic life -- fun tool that can be used to add speech bubbles to images as well as compose comic strips from scratch. (example, example)
- Available for Mac OS X for $24.95 with a free 30-day trial
- Available for Windows in a beta version
Make fun stuff
Add a super-search widget
- Lijit is a tool that allows you to put a search widget on your blog that will search an aggregate of your created content from your blogs, Flickr, digg, del.icio.us, etc.
- It also gives you some nice result statistics about what your users are searching for.
Easily add multimedia
- Splashcast is a great tool for making and publishing "channels" of content. In a single player you can show a series of videos, for example, or video mixed with photographs mixed with audio, or whatever aggregate combination of media you'd like your readers to see.
Sources for republishable content
Looking for images or media that you're free to use on your blog without paying expensive licensing fees?