IT|Redux has been live for two months now, and several readers have expressed their desire to start a blog of their own. If you are one of those, here is a list of tools that I have been using and have mostly good things to say about.

Blog Publishing: WordPress
I initially started with TypePad, but quickly migrated to WordPress, with hosting provided by Yahoo! Small Business. WordPress is extremely powerful, yet fairly simple to use. The extensive collections of plugins is one of the things that make WordPress such an attractive blogging platform. Also, because it’s entirely implemented in PHP, customization is a relatively easy exercise if you’re among the 3 million PHP coders out there. WordPress offers free hosting under the wordpress.com domain name, while a blog on Yahoo! under your own domain name will cost you $8.01 a month.

Feed Management: FeedBurner
Once your blog is online, you will want people to subscribe to it through some kind of feed. You can let WordPress do the work for you, but using a feed management service such as FeedBurner will let you track how many people subscribe to your feeds, the feed readers they use, and all kinds of other useful statistics. It produces a subscription page which doubles as a generic feed that can be processed by most readers and let people subscribe with a single mouse click. The basic account is free and provides more than I have needed so far.

Email Subscription Service: FeedBlitz
The problem with Atom or RSS feeds is that they require a dedicated reader or a specific configuration of your email client in order to subscribe to them. If you’re reading this blog, I would expect that you’re savvy enough to overcome this challenge, but if your mom is anything like mine, feed subscription is yet an other technology to learn, and for some moms, it might be one too many. In order to simplify things, it’s a good idea to offer email subscriptions as well. An easy way to set this up is by using a service such as FeedBlitz, which hooks up to your feed in order to produce digests of your blog’s posts at regular intervals. The basic service is free but comes at the cost of a terribly bad looking email template, so if you’re like me and want things to look good, you will have to shell out $4.95 per feed and per month for the Pro account.

Feed Processing: FeedDigest
Most blog authors like to syndicate the content of other blogs, or display some information that is published through public feeds, such as bookmarks, calendar events, or pictures. When you need to process such feeds for creating digests, re-ordering entries, or generating a snipet of JavaScript code that will display on your blog the content you’re getting from others, a service such as FeedDigest becomes very useful. It can also be used for cascading multiple services without having to write any code. A free account lets you produce five digest, but it will cost you $49.99 a year if you need up to 50.

Blog Searching: Technorati
When blogging about something, it’s not a bad idea to know what others have written on the subject before you. And when you want to know what people are saying about what you wrote, but did not bother to trackback your posts, there is a more efficient blog search engine than Google. It’s called Technorati, it’s free, and it’s mightily powerful. In order to use it, all you have to do is claim your blog and define some keywords for it. Then, you will want to let Technorati know about the new posts you published on your blog. There are two main ways of doing this: you can either do it manually by requesting Technorati to ping your blog, or you can let your blog ping Technorati everytime you publish a new post. WordPress lets you do that easily by simply adding a URL in the ‘Update Services’ of the ‘Writing Options’. Technorati then generate a list of sites that link to your blog and ranks it based on the number of links and sites.

Event Publishing: CalendarHub
A blog is not only a place where you can write about something, it’s also a good venue to tell others where they can meet you for example. For this, online calendaring services such as CalendarHub make it very easy to record events and publish them on your blog through JavaScript badges, as described in this past article. CalendarHub is free and sports a fairly good user interface, but the new game in town is 30 Boxes, and it went live today. One word: superb!

Bookmark Publishing: del.icio.us
Beside posts, a blog usually displays lists of things such as bookmarks or other blogs of interest—also known as blogroll. For managing such lists, you can use your social bookmarking tool of choice, be it del.icio.us, Diigo or Simpy. I started with del.icio.us, upgraded to Simpy, then recently moved back to del.icio.us, which seems to have the most streamlined user interface and allows me to publish bookmarks through JavaScript Linkrolls, without having to use FeedDigest in between. If you decide to use del.icio.us, just keep in mind that it works in batch mode, and that your Linkrolls might take up to 24 hours to be operative.

Web Analytics: Google Analytics
Once everything has been setup and your blog is starting to generate some traffic, it’s always good to know what this traffic is made of, where readers come from, whether they are new visitors or returning ones, and what posts are the most popular. For this, the most advanced tool currently available on the market is Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin. The service is free, assuming that you managed to get an account early enough. If not, you will have to register yourself onto a waiting list until Google adds capacity to fulfill the demand of an exploding user base. Google Analytics is a very sophisticated tool, but getting started could not be any simpler: all you have to do is register your website and copy and paste five lines of JavaScript code at the bottom of each HTML page you want to collect analytics for. If you are using WordPress, most templates have a footer.php which lets you do just that. And if you cannot wait for Google Analytics to give you an account, take a look at Mint, which features one of the most beautiful Web 2.0 user interfaces I have seen in a long time.