Here’s a good question that strike me thinking for some moment there, a question asked by Daren Rowse – If you had to choose 5 blogging tools that were the only ones you could use for the next 12 months what would they be and why?

Blog Platform

I started off blogging in blogger.com, was quite satisfied with it for 1 week or two until I know I need more control. Recommended to migrate to Wordpress by a friend, stick to Wordpress for 3-4weeks; experimented Movable Type and almost changed to MT but drop the idea and stick back with Wordpress. Main reason is because Wordpress community, tools and plug-ins are way larger than MT although I find MT gives me more control of the platform.

Desktop Publisher

I’ve tried tones of desktop publishers; ecto, blogjet, wbloggar, flock, etc but none were close. Application I like best of blog desktop publishing is Performancing for Firefox. It supports technorati pings, trackbacks, FTP and few good functions but I am still blogging on Wordpress backend as I’m writing this entry. If you are looking some suggestions on desktop blog publisher, here’s a good comparison entry.

Metrics Package

Metrics is something I cannot live without, I’m a stats freak. I’m monitoring my site and several other using Google Analytics (favourite), 103bees for webstats and Feedburners for feed reader stats . Read my reviews on 103bees and some functions to get the most out of your Google Analytics. There are several other good ones out there that deserve a talk. Sitemeter for instance, not forgetting Mint and Reinvigorate too. They have good interfaces.

Promotional Tools

How you promote your site? Typical Malaysians will tell you we will ping Petaling Streets to give our entry a little buzz. My promotion varies, sometimes I don’t and while I do it will depend on my content. I recommend Digg.com, Technorati.com, Del.icio.us. My experience tells me if the content is good other readers will promote themselves; and if its really good the content will promotes itself and evolves. Say it got digged, gizmodo will featured it, then goes tailrank, etc. One way or another.

Content Sourcing Services

I’d say Netvibes though majority are using Bloglines and Google Reader. I was Google Reader before but once feeds get more its getting hard to control. Netvibes gives me more control, tabbing, categorizing, etc.

Designing Tools

I’m a web designer myself. Almost no entries go online without little work with my Photoshop CS2. Sometimes I’ll fire up Dreamweaver to tweak the HTML a little here and there but that’s about it. Writing blog entries should be as tedious as writing HTML pages.

Apart from that for file upload/download, I recommend CuteFTP. It has the easiest interface I’ve seen on FTP application. The above are purely software and methods of my favor. You might agree or might not, but I would really love to hear your personal recommendations.