Alright.... Embarking from platform 4, a blog services survey with a difference. We've all seen surveys that ask you to name the tools that are critical to your blogging. I'm asking that too, but with a Freshblog spin. What are the tools that are critical to your blogging and how do they work?

I'm looking for the names of your favorite search services, tagging tools, social bookmarking engines, photo-managers, traffic counters, firefox extensions, browsers, cocktails... whatever those tools are that make your blogging easier. With the core Freshblog audience of blog developers and extenders in mind, though, I'd like to see how-to's, intro posts, and walkthroughs to go with your recommendations. If you've written a post like that yourself, by all means link to it. If you want to recommend a great intro by someone else, that's great too. If you're feeling remarkably gung-ho & want to take on & compare a set of similar tools (or if you already did that), then please give me a heads-up.

My goal is to develop a set of links to quality intro materials for the best & most frequently used blogging tools, so that a single post can serve as a launch point for all those "What does **** do?" questions.

To start the ball rolling, here's the Freshblog take on a couple of services, as well as some other information introducing some of the most frequently discussed services:

• Blogging - Introduced and explained at codex.wordpress.org
  
• CoComment - reviewed by the Blog Herald
  
• Del.icio.us - broken down by Beelerspace, explored w/ screencaps by Andreas Solberg
• Desktop Blog Editors - introduced by Problogger and Lifehacker
• Feedburner - Evaluated and found to be Slightly Remarkable
  
• Greasemonkey - by Mark Pilgrim on the O'Reilly Network
• Haloscan Trackback - by Freshblog
• Haloscan Commenting and Trackback - by Improbulus
  
• How to Flickr - by Ben Bishop
• RSS - explored and explained, w/ some recommended feed readers, by Paul Stamatiou
• Sitemeter - Installation & setup explained by Sheila Coggins. Other counters are also listed at About.com
  
• Technorati Tags - by Improbulus
• Ten Technorati Hacks - from Micro Persuasion
  

If you find other great explanatory posts, leave a comment with a link. What do these services do for you? Which ones can't you live without?

Filed In: blogging blogtech webtech