Celebrating 3 Years of Blogging 🎉 Sharing my favorite blogging resources

Hello fellow bookworms 🎉 I cannot believe it’s time to celebrate my Blogversary again! I have to admit that I almost forgot about it with all the preparations for my Master Course going on, but I knew I wanted to do a post! I’m happy that I started book blogging in 2016 (I have been a blogger for an additional year on another platform) because it brought me amazing people to talk to and an opportunity to express my opinions on all things bookish Today, I want to share my favorite blogging resources with you, as I figured it would be nice to show you what has helped me in my blogging life so far 💕 I also included some helpful links by some fellow bloggers!

Now comes the part in every Blogversary Post where I thank YOU, the reader for sticking around and supporting my content. Even after 3 years I’m in awe of how friendly and welcoming the community is and how much love goes into supporting each other’s content. It means the world to me that you guys are reading my posts, taking enough time out of your day to leave a nice content or otherwise boost my blog  Whenever someone gets excited about my posts or leaves encouraging messages for me I get all warm and fuzzy inside, melting for you!! I guess what I’m saying is that I love you guys!! Thank you for sticking by my side and making my blogging a fantastic journey that allows me to share my passion and connect with other readers!! It sounds cliche but it is true: you’re the reason I carry on 

Some statistics for my 3 years of blogging 🥰💗

Feedly (for Blog Hopping)

I use Feedly exclusively for Blog Hopping ➽ I used to rely on the WordPress Reader for my blog hopping or create bookmarks for the posts I wanted to read. However, using Feedly has proven to be so much more efficient and easy! Feedly is a website that lets you add webpages for easier reading (including any blogs of course) and organize them. You can assign the pages you follow to a certain category, which I find super helpful for the blogs that I read. You can also mark the posts you have checked out/commented on or that you’re just not interested in as Read and then they’ll disappear from your feed. I have three categories sorted with the priority of the posts in mind: Favorite Blogs, Priority, and Low Priority Blogs. I can prioritize blogs more easily this way (though I try to get to every blog) but also try out new blogs which I usually assign to Low Priority as I don’t know their content that well at the beginning 📝

Further Information

• Why I Switched to Feedly for Bloghopping (Kal @ readervoracious)
• Efficiently Blog Hopping | How (not) to use Feedly (Lauren & Bec @ northernplunder)

Canva (for Graphics)

I make all my blog images in Canva! ➽ I used several other programs in the past (a very old photoshop version and iPiccy) but Canva is the one that worked the best for me. It’s got a free version that honestly has everything I personally need to make my graphics. I like that there are many free backgrounds, images, and elements to choose from, so I don’t need to download any vectors from other sides anyone, which is super convenient. You can also upload your own images though. I appreciate that you can always edit your graphics in Canva and you keep all of your designs when you sign up for an account, so I never have to worry about losing one of my headers 👍 It’s also possible to easily duplicate your designs if you want to create a new one (I do that for every one of my graphics) but you can also have multiple images in one design, which is helpful if you’re making several graphics for one blog post!

Further Information

• Blog Graphics Tutorial For The Thrifty: Canva & Freepik (Aentee @ readatmidnight)
• A Tutorial on HTML for Book Bloggers (Jai @ anovelidea)
• Basic HTML Tutorial that can be helpful for bloggers (Karlita @ taleoutloud)
• Blogiful Design Event with lots of helpful tips (Kat @ novelsandwaffles)
• Using Canva to Pretty Up Your Blog Design (+ FREE RESOURCES!!!) (Lauren @ wonderlessreviews)
• A Few of My Not-so-Secret WordPress Tips & Tricks (May @ foreverandeverly)

Unsplash (for Graphics)

If you’re searching for high-quality pictures Unsplash is for you! ➽ It’s a site full of freely usable images and the amazing thing is that they all have a fantastic resolution. You can search for a specific word and get dozens of nice pictures! It’s good form though to provide the source of the photo in your footer or the post itself (when you download a picture it shows the source which you can easily copy to your clipboard). I use Unsplash a lot for background photos when I’m making Readathon TBR images and have also started incorporating more pictures into my header images 🥰 I definitely recommend you check out Unsplash if you’re searching for good images to use for your blog!

Notion (for Organization)

Like so many others I’ve succumbed to Notion ➽ I’d been eyeing it for a while before I finally signed up and was happy to see so many fellow bloggers use it! It’s a program dedicated to organizing your life and offers many amazing features, like to-do lists, calendars, and databases. I have to admit that it takes some research and time getting used to, but there are so many free templates that you can copy, which really helps if you’re searching for a starting point. I recommend searching the for #notiontwt on Twitter and using Notion’s own template gallery 🥰 For my blogging life, I use my Blogging Schedule the most, as it’s a calendar with all my upcoming content and its status (to prewrite, formatted, scheduled), I also have a page dedicated to posting ideas and the status of my unwritten Reviews/Arcs! In addition, I also started to organize my reading life in Notion, tracking my reading challenges, Readathons, Book Haul, and my Monthly TBR 📚 I’d definitely recommend Notion if you want a program to organize your life with a lot of features built-in!

Further Information

• Notion Template I use for my homepage
• Other Notion homepage Template I like
• Notion Template I use for my weekly planner
• Notion Template I use for my monthly overview

Grammarly (for Spellcheck)

WP still has no spellcheck, so I use Grammarly ➽ It’s a super useful extension that you can use in your web browser to spellcheck everything you write for you. There’s a free version that honestly has everything I want, but if you’re looking for more in-depth text analysis and suggestions you can also get the pro version. I use Grammarly to check my posts, comments, and Tweets, making sure that I haven’t spelled anything wrong, as I still worry about that. Sadly, Grammarly no longer works with the Block Editor, making it harder to check my writing, as it worked fine in the old Classic Editor. I usually copy the HTML version of the post when I’m done and paste it into Google Docs or Grammarly itself to check for any mistakes!

What are your favorite blogging resources? Do we use some of the same ones? 📚