Jason Murphy

Daily Scoring and Other Tools

Aug 16, 2007 Blog General, Search and SEO

In my efforts to stay motivated about blogging for 30 days straight, I’m running into several useful tools that are helping me keep on keeping on.

The first one that makes total sense to me is simply a homebrew scoring system by bloggers. This concept was originally mentioned by Jason Parker in a comment on Problogger.net. Basically, you develop a scoring system that works for you and keep track of what tasks/habits you perform on a daily basis. For example, Jason mentions you could earn 10 points for a long blog post, 5 points for a short one, points for replying to comments and points for commenting on other sites, etc. Ben Cook says this is a great way to set daily blogging goals and avoid becoming another abandoned blog. He then encourages people to share their comments, because “…after all you’ll earn up to 5 points!”. Brilliant!

I love the idea of keeping score. Now only if there was a plugin or widget that would allow you to enter your daily scores, your goals, and perhaps relevant URLs for each days scores, then I’d be set. I’ll use a spreadsheet for now, but I’d really love to see a dynamic chart online that I could check from both work and home. That would be an uber-cool tool.

Speaking of uber-cool tools, mashable dropped this whopper on us: 30+ Tools For Working With Wordpress Posts! I would claim that this post was originally going to be something like what they did, but I’d be lying. They put a lot more research and time in their list than I ever would and it’s definitely worthy of a thorough reading.

So if I couldn’t live without one plugin, which would it be? Geez, that’s an easy question. Akismet for sure. But deciding on the runner-up would be much tougher. It would be a toss-up between Simplepie and All in One SEO Pack just for the functionality and flexibility they provide.

But the most powerful tools that I use aren’t plugins, and they don’t run on my site at all (well, sorta). The first one is Netvibes. I read all my RSS feeds there and also keep a ton of notes. It’s a great place to generate ideas from other posts then jot down your ideas in the same location. There’s a ton of other cool features that Netvibes brings to the table, but I’ll have to reserve that for an “Why I love Netvibes” post.

The next tool is ping-o-matic. What they do is simple, but very necessary. Basically POM lets you ping all the major news servers and let them know that your RSS feed has been updated. It’s an all-in-one service. Wordpress makes it even easier on you by removing the need to manually submit your site to PM each time it’s updated. You just simple select an option in your blog settings and it does the work for you, automatically! As the Beaver would say “Gee Wordpress, that’s swell!”.

• Today is Day 8 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.