My Top Three Blogging Tools

Deciding on which application to use for your blogging can be a tough choice. Some people like writing their posts in Microsoft Word, Mac Pages, or some similiar word processing application. Others write in the platform they are using for their website – WordPress, Joomla, etc.

I have shuffled around a lot between applications, tried lots, found some good ones (and some bad ones). Here are the ones I like best, and why.

1. Desk (http://desk.pm)

I love this app. It is very clean, easy to use, and has everything I need for writing my blog posts.

I can formnat my text, insert, resize and align images, add links, insert ordered and unordered lists, etc.

But probably the nicest thing about this app is that I can publish to my WordPress Blog directly from the application. This post was written in, and published directly from, Desk.

Here’s an image of my typical workspace when using desk, with a main window, the help functionality and the preview pane.

This app, however, only works on Macs.

2. Evernote (https://evernote.com)

I love Evernote, and often refer to it as my second brain. I use it to store information about everything. If you read my post from yesterday, you’ll know that I even use it to subscribe to newsletters. Evernote excels at letting you keeping things categorized and organized within notebooks. You can pull in images from your computer, create links, lists, fromat your font, etc.

You cannot post directly to your blog, and you will have to upload and re-insert your images, but it is a great place to store your posts, and it works on both Macs and PCs.

3. Self-Hosted WordPress (https://wordpress.org)

WordPress has become the platform of choice for most bloggers. WordPress was first launched in 2003 as a very basic writing framework. Since then is has evolved into the most popular CMS (Content Management System) with almost 75 Million websites built on the framework (see ManageWP for more statistics).

Creating your Blog post directly in WordPress is the purest form of wrtiting your blog, and it now has “Distraction Free Writing Mode”, which hides the menus and sidebars of your dashboard, for a more focused writing session.

Of course, WordPress’s full eduting suite is available, as is the ability to upoload and manage your images directly in the application.

So, there is the list of my favourite blogging applications. What is your favourite method of writing, and publishing your blog posts?