Image Via Wikipedia

When blog­ging, three things take up most of my time. Well, they did. Spelling and gram­mar, text beau­ti­fi­ca­tion and link­ing the post to out­side sources. Let’s say you men­tion the book, The Ele­ments of Style in your post. You want to dig up the Ama­zon link so that you can pos­si­bly make some money, but you don’t know if you should men­tion it because your spelling and gram­mar are ter­ri­ble (guilty) and you hate the way every time you write the num­ber 2nd it just lays there all flat.

What to do? Well, you need a few things…

WP-Typography:

This plu­gin, sim­ply put, rules. It han­dles the dif­fi­cult task of hyphen­ation, super­scrip­tion and sub­scrip­tion of things like expo­nen­tial nota­tion and car­di­nal num­bers, and mak­ing pretty frac­tions. Even if you don’t write in a man­ner that requires any super­script or frac­tions, the hyphen­ation is priceless.

Prob­a­bly the best thing about this plu­gin is it’s set it and for­get it nature. Turn it on, do some min­i­mal con­fig­u­ra­tion and you never need to babysit it again. I install it by default on all client sites, just like the next two.

After The Dead­line:

Yet another indis­pens­able plu­gin. This one takes the generic spell check and turns it into a spelling, gram­mar and style checker. That’s right, I said style. If you use a lot of huge words or trite expres­sions, this smug lit­tle plu­gin will reign you in. It’s almost painful how much it cor­rects me. I used to think I was a good writer. Now I know I’m a hack. Read­ing other blogs con­vinces me that nearly every­one needs this plugin.

Let’s say you need to use words that aren’t stan­dard dic­tio­nary words, but that you know you spelled prop­erly. It remem­bers not to check them, and you can add a list in the con­fig­u­ra­tion before you even write. Bril­liant (although not any dif­fer­ent from a user dictionary).

Zemanta:

So, you type a bunch of stuff, you want to find out where the post enhanc­ing links you know exist might be, but you decide to make peo­ple search for them on their own. Not good, because you know peo­ple are lazy. That’s where Zemanta comes in. It reads as you type and offers images, links, Ama­zon ref­er­ences (com­plete with your affil­i­ate ID) and tag suggestions.

I can’t tell you the num­ber of times I’ve pub­lished what I thought was a great arti­cle only to remem­ber later that I didn’t tag the stu­pid thing. No more, how­ever. Inside the tag box are a num­ber of key­words which would make excel­lent tags. Just click them.

The same is true of links. Just below the edi­tor block are a num­ber (depend­ing on the con­tent of the arti­cle) of blocks. Click one and the first occur­rence of the word is linked to either a Wikipedia arti­cle, a home page, or even the Ama­zon prod­uct we men­tioned ear­lier. Time to get an Ama­zon Affil­i­ate ID if you don’t have one…

There are sev­eral more plu­g­ins I find indis­pen­si­ble, but these three are the post edit pow­er­house I use to keep things tidy and user friendly. Two of them require API keys, but all are free, like most other Word­Press related plu­g­ins. Give them a shot. I can’t blog with­out them.