Blogging Tools I Love (and My Wishlist)

Blogging tools have evolved so much since I started doing this back in the dark ages of 2005.  Here are some tools that make my life better and some I wish existed.

Ultimate Book Blogger

This is the big one that makes formatting book reviews simple.  It is a paid plugin so it must be good if I have it since I am cheap.  There is a learning curve for this one because it can do so much but there is great support.  I also have add ons for this:

• Automatically send my published reviews to Goodreads.  (I like that this gives an option to send an edited review to Goodreads if I get too rambling here.)
• Reading challenges add on makes the little bars on the right side of the screen that track categories of reviews.  My only complaint is that I write a lot of reviews with multiple books and you can’t track each one.
• I just downloaded a multiple rating report that I may use for audiobooks to separately rate the narration and story and any other category I want to make up.

My UBB wishlist:

• The ability to host cover images on a third party site
• Automatically sending reviews to Amazon or other sites

Featured Image from URL

My theme has the big picture at the top of the post.  I love the look of that but I didn’t like having to host all those images on my site.  This plug in lets you host pictures on Flickr and then use them as a featured image.  I love, love, love this one!  Find it by searching on your Add Plugins page.

Pixabay

Where do all those stock photos come from?  Pixabay is my favorite free stock photo site.  I can usually always find a great image that ties into whatever I’m writing about.

Duplicate Post

If you write a lot of posts that follow the same format, this is a time saver.  I use it for my Monday posts.  I click on last week’s and it copies the post to a new draft.  I change out the galleries of the books I am reading but my headings and featured picture are all preset.  I use this for monthly wrap ups too where I am updating information on challenges.  I don’t have to look up and link to the challenges again.  It just gets copied over. Find it by searching on your Add Plugins page.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

I love being able to move posts around on my calendar.  I write down title names when I get an idea and if I don’t get around to writing it or if I want to change when it is posted, I just drag and drop.  It is so much better than working off a list. Find it by searching on your Add Plugins page.

Later

I use Later.com to schedule tweets, instagram posts, and pinterest posts.  When I write a review, I send the cover photo here and then write the tweet to go out once in the morning and once at night.  It is easy to use the same picture for Pinterest but it isn’t as easy to pin to multiple boards as Tailwind is.

What Blogging Tools are your favorites?