Blogging tools I use

My Flavors.me page 

I started this blog in August, so about 6 months ago. In this short time, Blogger stats recorded well over 10.000 page views here, which I consider very good for a blog with a somewhat obscure topic. I originally started this blog as an extension of my website on the art of medieval Hungary, essentially in order to replace the News section of the website (which I rarely updated). That website has been up and running for almost 15 years, and received many, many visitors. Today, the website and the blog are closely linked - all this works automatically thanks to a little tool called Feed Informer, which lists most recent content of this blog on the website. This is very neat, as now I never have to edit the news page - yet the content keeps refreshing.

In order to help readers find my blog - realizing that not everyone uses RSS feeds or Google Reader - I got a number of smart tools to work, which share all new content on social networks. First I registered at NetworkedBlogs - this service automatically posts updates to Facebook and Twitter. Oh yes, I also started a Twitter account, which proved to be one of the most important sources of traffic to my blog. As all these services were linking directly to individual posts, I also installed a LinkWithin widget, which helps readers get to other posts as well.

There are two more services I use, both of which required a few minutes to set up, and now work on their own. First is a very nice platform for creating personal websites, called Flavors.me. The website aggregates my blog and Twitter feeds, and also photos I uploaded to Picasa web albums and Flickr. Worth a try. The other service is a very interesting tool, called Paper.li. It automatically creates an online newspaper from Twitter posts I selected, so I set up a list following Twitter accounts focusing on medieval art - thus the Medieval Art Weekly was created.

Well, there was not much about medieval art in today's post - but if you follow some of the links above, you will get to a few interesting sites, and I hope that you keep following and reading the Medieval Hungary blog.