My Static Blog Toolkit

As I continue to tinker with my Octopress blog, I have found that there are some complimentary tools “necessary” to make things even better. I’m sure this list will evolve, but so far here’s what I’ve got:

FeedPress

With feedburner all but abandoned by Google, I’ve been on the hunt for something a little more reliable. At some point, I came across FeedPress as a viable alternative.

I had a long standing issue to convert my feedburner feeds over and finally took the plunge. While I wish the stats were real-time, I otherwise have no complaints whatsoever paying a few dollars a month to have reliable feed analytics with some neat features.

Here’s my feedpress affiliate link if you’re interested in checking them out.

Buffer

One thing I quickly noticed with my new FeedPress account: RSS is dead. My subscriber account is way down. What? No, of course that has nothing to do with not posting for a few years.

All the kids these days are are on the social networks. If I want people to read what I write, that’s where I need to be. Buffer makes this easy with scheduling and some additional analytics.

As a bonus, you can have FeedPress automatically post new articles to a connected Buffer account. Now that’s automagical!

Atom

No, not the feed format. Feeds are dead. I’m talking about the hot new text editor from the lovely folks at Github. What makes it great for my Octopress blog? It has built-in live markdown preview that even renders YAML front matter.

This is getting pretty efficient. I may look around for free/open alternatives to FeedPress and Buffer, but for now the seamless integration seems worth it.

Am I missing anything?