Slides from the "Blogging Tools" panel at IZEAfest. If you're like me, you don't blog for a living, but you're trying to blog while you're living. I need tools and features that simplify my life and make it easy for me to be more effective as I'm doing the day-to-day things that actually run my life. That means I mainly want tools to work in the background, or I want a system coordinated in such a way as to make the work I have to do a lot easier and streamlined. So, it's a little bit about making things easier and being productive while going about it. My next consideration is how cluttered additional items make the site look. Your mileage may vary - and it will depending upon your readership, but I like to keep my sidebar clean. Not empty, but with items that are relevant. So, I'm extremely careful about adding a new sidebar item. For me, this rule also applies to the posts themselves, so I'm careful not to add too much before or after the main text as well.