Blogging 101: Blogging Resources

Happy Friday! It's been a while since our last Blogging 101 post. This week I thought I would share a few resources that I have found helpful during my blogging journey. I know a good magician isn't supposed to share the secrets of his trade. However, I think a great blogger is very open about sharing things that have helped them along the way. If everyone kept everything to themselves, we wouldn't have such awesome blogging tips! 

Bitly was one of the first URL shrinking services that provided analytic tracking as well. It's a great (free) service for bloggers to track how the links they share from their blogs are being viewed. If you're a stats junkie like myself, you'll definitely appreciate Bitly's easy to use interface and detailed reports. 

As a designer and blogger, I don't always have the time to design the small details that I need for great presentations on my blog. Creative Market is an amazing market place for independent designers to share and sell their resources. There is everything from fonts and textures to templates and buttons. Usually the prices are extremely reasonable and they offer weekly freebies as well.

There are tons of free font sites out there, so why is Font Squirrel any better? When Font Squirrel was first released, I was drawn to the motto of hand-picked free fonts for commercial use. So I get the ability of a full commercial license while not having browse thousands of pages of free fonts to find the ones I am drawn to. The fonts posted on Font Squirrel are usually right up to par with my aesthetic standards.

I don't know of too many people who haven't heard of Dribbble. Freebbble is a site which lists all of the free resources designers post on Dribbble. There are extremely talented designers who post great UI/UX elements to help spruce up your blog's design. Of course there are other things including fonts, Photoshop resources, and other neat free design resources. 

Lost Type Co-Op is a neat pay-what-you-want type foundry which offers fonts from various designers. Some of my favorite fonts such as Lavanderia and Edmond Sans originate from Lost Type. It's great to see designers offering their work for what you feel it's work. 

Purty Pixels is much like Freebbble, except it's dedicated to free Photoshop resources only. So if you have a little Photoshop knowledge but don't know how to make things as awesome as you'd like, Purty Pixels is a great place to look for help. The PSDs not only offer great design options but can work as a tutorial to learn how to create the final product in the future. 

Shrink O'Matic is one of my favorite tools of the trade, so to speak. I post a lot of images on my blog and it would be a pain to have to re-size them one-by-one. (I know, I did it for about two years prior to Adobe Air's release) Shrink O-Matic is a quick image re-sizing tool where I just drag and drop my images and they come out in the size and file format that I want them to. Pretty neat!

I know Subtle Patterns is always posted on every blogging/design resource list but it's for good reason. I've always been drawn to very minimal patterns and backgrounds in my design work. Subtle Patterns is a great site loaded with pages of fun backgrounds that aren't too overwhelming.

If you couldn't tell before, I've become a very big fan of Unsplash. Unsplash offers very nice high-quality stock images photographed by several different photographers. Much like Font Squirrel, there are plenty of free stock image sites out there. However, Unsplash offers a great selection which allows me to spend less time searching and more time blogging.

What are some of your favorite blogging resources? Post about them in the blog below!