What are good blogging tools?

For some great tips and resources on blogging, the web is filled with sites that offer such help. For example: go to http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/my-50-favorite-blogging-reso urces.html OR http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/tools/sitemap-tools/ and follow the links from there.

Let your blog to express yourself. Write to tell stories. Write to share links and pictures and recipes and prayers and travel tips and love poems. Write well. Use precise grammar, good spelling and punctuation, clear structure and syntax. ?Clarity is key.? Blogging was once something that people did for fun, but because the blogosphere can spread news like a wildfire corporations are also starting to catch on.
Features of a blog include:
? Date header: The date the post is written. Posts are generally presented in reverse chronological order (most recent first).
? Title: Each post is given a title. This is a pithy phrase, a pun, or even a series of symbols.
? Time stamp and/or permalink: The time the post is uploaded to the blog. The time stamp often is a link to a permanent page just for this post. This allows other bloggers to link to a post.
? Post: A word, sentence, paragraph or essay, with links and names and current news. Key words and names are often highlighted in boldface, which makes the post 'scannable' (the usability gurus at Useit.com tell us that online readers don't read - they scan a page).
? Author nickname: The name or nickname of the person who wrote the post. For blogs written by one person, the author is often left off (because the author identification can be found in an About page). For collaborative blogs, the author helps to differentiate contributors. The nickname can also be a link to a page of all the author?s posts.
? Category: Individual postings are often labeled as part of a category.
? Comments: A software feature that allows readers to leave their own comments and reactions to the author?s post.
? TrackBack: A way for one blog post to link to the post of another blog. In other words, one blogger can write about the content of another person's weblog, and the two posts are linked in a web.