Yoast plugin, social sharing buttons, smushit and pinterest and bloglovin and google…these are few of my favourite things…

OK Sarah, be serious no more songs…Just be serious.

Fine I am serious.

Now read this in a robotic techy voice. I didn’t think I would be speaking techy but techy seems to be taking over (shit I love the rhythm, I just love playing around with words but I need to get serious).

So as you all already know. I have been blogging for some time now. And it was just about time for me to find some of the amazing plug-ins and other blogging essentials that make blogging fun for me 🙂 .

Although you should know I went for everything that was recommended and failed at using some of it. I ended up figuring out what worked best for me.

So here are the things that have worked well for me starting with plug-ins amongst other things.

Plug-ins

Zen Cache

If you are a fastnova, have a knack for first things like most millenials and you care about the speed of your blog, ZenCache is one of those plug-ins that you absolutely must have installed.

Image teleporter

I share a lot of images in my stories and I guess you’ve noticed all of them are not mine. So this plugin waves a magic wand and turns images that are hosted elsewhere (like on google, pinterest or on another website) and turns them into my own by adding the code of my website into them making them automatically mine (that doesn’t make me a thief, does it?).

So when I try to share on facebook or on any other social media platform it doesn’t stop the picture from displaying because it is recognized by( I don’t know who that nosey person is) and it doesn’t display 😉 .

Yoast Plug-in

Yoast is the best SEO plug-in to use, hands down! This plug-in makes SEO easy by basically “green lighting” your posts when the SEO is strong and by giving you the steps to maximizing a page or post’s SEO. Think of it as SEO for Dummies where you simply fill in the information Yoast requests and the plug in does the rest and the dummy, of course the dummy remains with a smile like a Pro 🙂

WP Smush Plugin

This here was a life saver when my blog started slowing down because I use a lot of images so I employed this plug-in to minimizes the file size of images I upload to help keep my blog moving fast ( I told you I have employees, I guess now you believe me).

Mentionable

This plugin brings the power of the twitter @mention inside your blog and gives you the power to share your older posts or related posts with your readers.

The best part about it is, if you use the WordPress platform it comes in handy because unlike Joomla, WordPress doesn’t have the add article option so mentionable works well for people using WordPress.

You can check out the two stories I used it with 26 blog stories that you loved reading and 30 blog posts I enjoyed writing. And I just used it just right there 🙂 feeling smart.

YouTube embed plug-in

What is blogging if you can’t share a video here and there with your readers? It is boring. Yes!! You got it right, it is boring that is why I added this plug-in to cater for my need to share with you helpful videos I come across and it turns out you loved the idea too because you seemed to love the videos I shared.

Like this video

That is why I love this plug-in, plus it provides a spectrum of basic and advanced features of the YouTube embedded player and will have you posting videos in seconds after installing it.

Social sharing Buttons

I know this is obvious but it one of my favourite blogging resources because it helps me reach out to my readers on social media and get me new readers off social media.

Photo editing software

I started with Picasa but as you know sometimes it’s just inevitable to cheat and I swear I didn’t mean it but Photoscape became an alternative to all my photo-editing woes. It has given me a lot of peace using it to embed pictures, retouch pictures, sharpen them ( let’s face it, what is a good blog without sharp pictures).

It is free software that acts like a knock off of photoshop but again it works well for dummies 😉

Pinterest

First and foremost pinterest is my favourite place for amazing blog pictures, backgrounds and shocker on this one— blogging resource. Yes it’s true, the cat is out of the bag and the beans are baking in the oven but all you need to do is go to pinterest and type in the words—blogging resources and you’ll be good to go.

Your blogging woes will be annihilated and it is an amazing source of beautiful quotes and flawless pictures. The best part about being a genius is— knowing where to steal from and from whom.

Bloglovin

*wink*wink* I feel like a star but this is the American version of www.storipot.com (our Ugandan home of all the exquisite bloggers in Uganda, make sure you check it out and catch this stori…pun intended). Now why bloglovin? Well this here I use it as my blogspiration, every time I am buzzed and starving for content ideas, blog styling, picture ideas or just looking for blog eye candy I head over to bloglovin.com and ogle at all the beautiful ideas that have been crafted well together.

I study the most used titles and why they are in a lot of recycled mode. After all of that I head back to my word document and start crafting different ideas around the recycled titles and later find out whether you love them and I have never been disappointed. That is why I heart it.

Google

Finally Google, yeah I get it…you’re wondering why. But google is where I test any blog titles before using them for my stories. This is a habit I learned way late so don’t envy me, I am still an amateur at it but besides that, google is my best source for blog pictures. All the above mentioned are good for blog pictures but google is my biggest source for blog pictures.

All I do is adding a blog topic into google, click search and alas, my cover picture is born or my sub picture is born. Pinterest and bloglovin disappoint sometimes but google never disappoints that is why it is one of my best blogging resources.

So yeah that is it with blog resources I use, I might have forgotten some but if I remember I will keep updating this story.

Meanwhile tomorrow look forward to the blogs and sites I look up to, you never know yours might be amongst them. For now you can appreciate or share with me your favourite blog resources.

Love

N.sarah