I’ve spent some time this week micromanaging the relaunch of The Bivings Report (TBR) and as part of the process I’ve been taking a fresh look at various blogging tools and add ons. I figured I’d provide a rundown of what tools we’re using on the off chance its of interest to someone in the process of setting up a blog.

The original version of TBR was custom built in late 2001 by our in-house developers. There were a few blog tools around at the time, but they were pretty primitive so we just built something ourselves. In redoing it, we decided to switch to WordPress after investigating all the usual suspects. We chose WordPress because it has almost all the functionality we wanted built in, has a robust set of accompanying plugins, is highly customizeable and utilizes our preferred programming language/platform. Its also free.

We used this plugin to create the weighted display of categories we are using to classify posts. We decided to run our RSS feed through feedburner to make it easier for people to subscribe. And we ended up using BlogBeat to help keep track of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that will surely start flocking to revamped The Bivings Report. In the future we may add a listing of Digg stories and/or maintain a list interesting bookmarks on del.icio.us.

Anyway, let us know if you’ve heard of anything cool.

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