The modern blogging tools you'll need in 2020

Trello

Trello is an organization tool that is famous for it's simplicity. You can easily create small notes (aka cards) on boards to keep a track of ideas or process of your content. You can keep this as a record of your progress of content that is in the pipeline or is being published. Trello easily integrates with services like zapier which makes it very easy to use and keep a good track of what is happening on your blog. Especially, when you have multiple authors working and collaborating together on articles or posts.

Google Docs

Google docs is like an online version of Microsoft Word. You're always welcome to keep drafts on your publication software but sometimes, it's just handy to prepare notes or draft the publication elsewhere, that's where google docs comes in action. You can use docs to make notes on your phone or laptop or anything that has a modern browser capabile of loading modern websites. In our use case, docs is used to store most of the research work and notes that don't quiet fit in trello but the content isn't definitive of being publication worthy. If you may, it's like a rough book that we maintain before preparing our final assignment.

Ghost

Let's talk about the star of the show, Ghost is a simple yet powerful publication software built on nodejs. It's power lies in it's simplicity. You get everything you need to publish content and unmatched performance in terms of load times and resource utilization. One more key advantage is that ghosts comes with inbuilt support for Zapier, Slack and Google's AMP to make your blog onboard smoothly. There aren't much bells & whistles to the CMS itself but you can look at it's solid integrations library to see how powerful it gets using 3rd party tools and services without clogging the performance of your publication.

Zapier

We very recently started using zapier (makes us happier!). Oh Boy! it changed our perception towards service upside down. A lot of our manual work was automated using their zaps this includes posting to social media (facebook/twitter/instagram etc) along with marking entries as done on our trello board so that we know we've covered a topic before just creating duplicates of same content. This also helps us manage some internal functions to ensure that everyone is notified and the content is delivered smooth. It took so much load off our shoulders that we can't get tired of praising it's usefulness. It integrates with almost every service we use including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Ghost, Discourse, Trello, Google Docs to name a few. It makes experience that much more smooth for someone who isn't a professional social media expert or novices like us who forget to keep proper journals of content online.

Discourse

Discourse is the sidecar that Ghost needs the most. This is because ghost lacks one feature natively i.e. comments. Now, let me be honest, Not every site needs comments. most users will be happy with people praising their content on social media or using a service like disqus which allows you to embed comments, But, we choose discourse because it makes life that much more easier and flexible. First off, we are in control of the content, we can manage content and allow ourselves a space to grow a small community where we can interact with our users outside of the blogs/comments feedback loop. We get that much more freedom and flexibility using discourse. Additionally, since discourse is a full-fledge community software, so we can use it's power to enhance the overall user experience. We plan to use discourse for more community engagement, creating community engaging content and direct interaction with our readers to collect more feedback, suggestions and ideas about the blog.