Okay Geek Farm
Okay Geek's 5 Best secret weapons and services for blogging
Brandon Davenport
We’ve noticed that people seem to be looking at Okay Geek, wondering how we do certain things, or how we do the day to day stuff. Sure we stick to the tried and true standards of writing a blog, but we do have lots of nifty tricks up our sleve and a half dozen 3rd party apps and services that really make us rock and today we’ll be showing you 5 of these… because, it takes a village to raise a website right?
1. Cloudflare CDN for speed and security
It was nice being a tiny site for many reasons — nobody tried to hack your homepage, spam your contact forms and our site was nimble on it’s feet. Well, now we’re much bigger, heavier, and we’re surprised at how many people don’t like us, so we protect our site with Cloudflare as well as speed it up!
Cloudflare is a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) that takes everything on your site (no matter who hosts it) and replicates it around the world as well as cache it. This makes everything much faster because people can access your site from the nearest server, and everything is compressed. Cloudflare also gives you analytics, advanced hacking protection and all sorts of apps (like Typekit, VigLink, Pingdom and Google Analytics) which can all be toggled on and off. There’s so much stuff to play with, and it’s all free, so you ought to check it out!
2. iSocket for serving advertisements
One of the biggest hurdles when running a site is “how are we going to make money?” Well, what is often looked over is flexibility, and iSocket is one of the most flexible and easy to use advertising networks we’ve ever used (and we’ve pretty much used them all).
iSocket allows you to sell ads yourself, or allow potential advertisers to purchase an advertising spot on your webpage on a whim. This is maybe the only advertising network where you set all of the rules, and everything is controlled by you. You are the creative, financial guy and the sales man (if you want to be), iSocket does all the heavy lifting. You can also add custom add code (Adsense, Affiliate programs etc.) if you have special programs you already use.
3. TwitterFeed for automatically sharing articles
If you blog like we do, you understand that you don’t have time to keep up with social networks, especially if you have multiple accounts. What TwitterFeed does is it takes your blog’s RSS feed and it automatically posts it to Twitter. It’s pretty simple, but there are a slew of different options you can mess with (custom short URL, prefix, frequency etc.) and you can have multiple feeds as well.
It really is a powerfull tool when it comes to getting the word out there, and providing a steady stream of interesting stuff to your readers, but remember — nothing is more powerful than a real person behind the keyboard! Don’t forget to engage!
4. Gosquared for Real time stats and analytics
Seeing traffic stats, referrers and outgoing traffic is vital to understand if your site is performing well, and exactly which content is king. It’s easy to sit back and check out your Google Analytics, and look at your traffic stats for yesterday — but what if you could watch stuff happen… live? GoSquared is super awesome because you can see your visitors live on your site, where they are in the world, stats about their computer and where they came from. It’s also just cool to see a traffic spike in action!
5. Squarespace for hosting and content management
The first thing that comes to your head when you think “I want to start a blog” is Wordpress, and that’s an awesome platform, but what we’ve found is the best is Squarespace. This is an all-in-one, full featured and rock solid blogging platform (forums, photo galleries and more too) that really makes updating content and designing your site a breeze.
Squarespace also hosts your site and their customer support is fantastic (we know them real well ;) so you should check em’ out before jumping the gun. Okay Geek has been using Squarespace for 3 years now, and it hasn’t failed us yet. The hosting is reliable, the CMS is amazing and the design tools are out of this world.
Also, Squarespace will be launching Version 6 of their system very soon, and we imagine it’s going to blow the doors of anything we’ve ever seen — and this brings us to our last point, updates are handled by Squarespace, so you don’t have to worry about “keeping up to date”.
Did we miss something awesome?
We’re sure we’ve given you some cool stuff to play with, but there are so many more tools out there for bloggers to use. If you feel we’ve missed something, leave a comment so other’s can know about it! Thanks for reading and if you have any other questions, ask us on Twitter — @okaygeek
