Resources
“What do you use to…” Consistently I find myself referring people to the same online resources. These are ones that make my life easier or do the job better than anything else I’ve found so far. My tools of the trade. You can find my collection below.
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Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Please understand that I have experience with all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.
Website & Blog
What makes my site run and look great.
WordPress.org: Blog publishing platform. But don’t let the word blog fool you, any website can be built off WordPress. Free and easily customizable using themes and plugins, with wonderful support. All of my sites use WordPress. Requires a hosting service, unlike WordPress.com.
HostGator: All of my websites are hosted on HostGator. Easy to use, install WordPress with 1-click, and great support with many ways to contact them.
ThemeForest: A great marketplace to find premium themes by handpicked developers and designers.
Elegant Themes: This is where On The Go, the WordPress theme this site uses, comes from. Membership provides access to the entire collection of premium themes and support.
WordPress Plugins
These are plugins I use on this site. I prefer to use plugins over trying to tweak the coding of my themes. All are free, or offer free versions. If you find any to be invaluable, be sure to donate money (even $5) to the author to encourage them to keep building and supporting.
- Akismet: Checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches.
- Broken Link Checker: Checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notifies you if any are found.
- Display Widgets: Change your sidebar content for different pages, categories, and custom taxonomies. Easy as selecting a check-box.
- Enable Media Replace: Replace a file in your media library by uploading a new file in its place. No more deleting, renaming, re-uploading files and manually replacing in your posts.
- Enhanced Media Library: Handy if you have a lot of images. Add categories to your pictures and be able to search for them using a filter.
- Login Lockdown: If more than a certain number of login attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, the login function is disabled from that range for a period of time. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.
- Revision Control: Set a site-global setting for pages/posts to enable/disable/limit the number of revisions which are saved for the page/post. Saves a lot of room on your server.
- TablePress: Enables you to create and manage sortable tables, without having to write HTML code.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast: Write better content and have a fully optimized site by simply filling in the templates at the bottom of your post.
- WP Review: Create your own review system. Choose from Stars, Percentages or Points for review scores.
- WPtouch Mobile Plugin: Provides a stylish version of your site for your mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme. If you don’t have a responsive theme, this is a must have.
Images
I try to use most of my own pictures. When I can’t, I supplement them with both purchased and creative commons images.
Dollar Photo Club: This is where I purchase royalty-free images that I use on my sites. All images, regardless of size, are $1. You do have to buy a membership but you get an equivalent amount of free images. The selection is great – millions of images from Fotolia – and you can modify them. Very liberal licensing.
Free Images: A collection of links to free images on my Pinterest board. The ones I frequently use are Flickr, Getty, and Public Domain Review. To help you understand restrictions and use images worry free, take a look at this guide from Smart Passive Income The Ultimate Guide to Finding and Using Images on Your Blog. (pic: Creative Commons Swag Contest 2007_2 by Tyler Stefanich under CC license)
Create Your Own: This is a collection of links to create your own free shareable images on my Pinterest board. Particularly useful for creating images with quotes or overlaying text on pictures. Some of my favourites are Canva, PicMonkey, and Recite This. (pic: Do-It-Yourself by Patrick Knight under CC license)
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