What 12 Technologies Power These Top 12 Killer Blogs? (Part 2 – Web Tools and Services)

After shaking the sand out of your beach towels and undies back in August, did you get a chance to read Part 1? As a quick recap, we went on a mission to identify  seven success factors from twelve leading blogs. Our focus was on user experience (UX) and content strategies.

Today we’re back to discuss these twelve killers again in Part 2 - Web Tools and Services. But this time we want do a bit of reverse engineering. Let’s talk about the Web tech that powers these great blogs. With this research I’ve gone so far down the rabbit hole. I think I’ve developed a recurring nightmare of getting chased by a Javascript...

Just a quick word of caution. We followed a rigorous method that we cannot recommend that you attempt at work on in your home office. Here’s why. We expected to run into a collection of 50 or so underlying technologies powering the blogs.

There was also some suggestion of a picnic in the park on Saturday. After realizing we had run into almost 350 technologies used, we had to pause. The closest we made it to a picnic was the bagel crumbs that fell into my keyboard. The bacteria will be ecstatic… unless they’re allergic to gluten.

For each of our top twelve blogs, we had to examine the webpage code to see what tools and services they were using.

Then we entered all this data into a massive spreadsheet and used it to rank the technologies used most. Can I just stop for a moment to express my sincerest admiration of data scientists who do this every day? The bagel crumbs must be encrusting their keyboards by now. I hope their office chairs have some advanced lumbar support.

Let’s talk about the most commonly occurring technologies preferred by our top twelve blogs.

Before you try to click “Back” because you think tech talk is kinda boring, answer the following:

Think about our twelve top blogs. If they use technologies that could help get better results for your blog, wouldn’t you want to know?

“True” or “False”?

If you said “false”, we sure hope you don’t think their success is all from luck. Remember, even though the Internet can’t seem to agree on who said this, it rings quite true:

“I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.”

I burned out my eyeballs digging through blog tech this weekend. Hang with me long enough to make sure you’re not missing out on anything that Vaynerchuk, Godin and the gang are using. You can speed read if you’d like. But make sure you take a look at each of the featured technologies we discovered. They were the most frequent amongst our top twelve pro blogs.

I think the lone holdout to WordPress was Mr. Seth Godin, but he’s an outlier when it comes to blog tech. Still sticking with Typepad? For the rest of our top blogs, WordPress definitely rules. We wrote about evaluating different blogging platforms before. Though there were lots of different options, each with their own advantages, we can understand why WordPress rules here.

As we noted, WP offers “power and flexibility”. When you achieve the status of one of the best blogs in the world, that’s precise what you need. The number of technologies we discovered is impressive. It’s is a testament to how proactively these pro bloggers work to improve their blogs and try new things. WordPress is a great platform to do so.

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