Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use
(Or At Least Consider Using)
1) Firefox - For those of you who have been living under a rock, firefox is the great new internet explorer out there. It is the a la carte of internet browsers. You can download what you want and what you need. No need for a bloated internet explorer with options you won’t use.
Some Great Things About Firefox
- Fire Ftp- An ftp client which blows away the one in internet explorer
- Adblock - Lets you specify filters and remove any content from the sources in the filters. For example, hate seeing doubleclick ads? specify *doubleclick* in your filters.
- Colorzilla - Lets you grab a color reading from any point on a webpage, or measure the distance between any two points on a webpage
- Google Preview - Grab a small snapshot of each page with your Google search results
- Tabbed Browser Preferences - Gives you enhanced control of all aspects of tabbed browsing
2) Wordpress -If firefox is the a la carte browser, then wordpress the The a la carte blogging tool. It is easy to use, it has excellent plugins available, and best of all it is free.
Some Great Wordpress Plugins
- Adsense Deluxe - Lets you easily insert Adsense ads into your posts with just a few characters of html. Has good options that enable you to track your adsense channels.
- Akismet- Stop comment spam on your blog.
- Sitemap Generator - Automatically generate a sitemap for your page. Updates with every post and pings the search engines to let them know to reindex your page.
- Related Posts - Puts links to all the related posts on the bottom of each page. Keep your users around longer by letting them check out related pages on your site.
- Database Backup - Automatically backup your blogs database on a hourly, daily, or weekly schedule
3) Dreamweaver - Dreamweaver is another great tool for webpage generation. If you don’t want to use a free off the press publisher such as Wordpress, Dreamweaver is another great option.
Some Nice Wordpress Features
- Site Templates and Libraries - You won’t have to update each page of your site by hand, just update one page in the template
- Broken Link Checker - Checks all the links on your webpages. Lists any of them that are broken, allowing you to either fix the links or remove them.
4) Textpad - Textpad is the best text editor around. It has a free indefinite trial period, but if you like it you should really pay the $10 to register. It is far, far superior to notepad or wordpad
Nice features include
- Recordable macros for repeat editing of similar text
- Customizable text highlighting filters for different coding languages such as CSS, Perl, C++, etc
- A full line of shortcuts to make editing easier, such as copy and paste columns, data sorting, and file comparison
- Tabbed documents
5) Bloglines - Bloglines is my blog aggregator of choice. It is a handy time saver for bringing all of a blogs posts to you, so that you don’t have to go get them
Some reasons to use bloglines include
- Ability to see how many people are subscribed to each thread - Great to see how popular your blog is
- Incredibly easy to use, find a thread by its url or the url of the blog
- Very fast - much faster than your typical web based tool
- Completely free
on May 9th, 2007 at 12:04 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 12:22 am
wow, nice list
and frankly i don’t many of them
thanks for sharing
on May 9th, 2007 at 1:23 am
Great list, I already use most of them already but I’m sure it would be useful for many bloggers.
And Firebug (www.getfirebug.com) for Firefox is a great extension too!
on May 9th, 2007 at 2:45 am
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on May 9th, 2007 at 2:51 am
I have all the FF extension except for Google Preview, I think I’ll install that as well.
Great read for the group blogging project. Check out mine on my blog.
on May 9th, 2007 at 3:57 am
I love Firefox and Wordpress, though haven’t used Dreamweaver in a while. Textpad seems very similar to Notepad++ which uses colour coded HTML. And I used to use Bloglines until I refined Firefox’s email client, Thunderbird which is also an awesome feed reader.
on May 9th, 2007 at 4:02 am
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on May 9th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Great tips. I just found your blog through the ProBlogger contest and I’m subscribing.
on May 9th, 2007 at 5:20 am
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on May 9th, 2007 at 5:43 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use, proving I’m lazy […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 6:37 am
I found you on the ProBlogger Top 5. I learned a few things about Firefox and WordPress from your post. Oh, and I am also a HUGE fan of Textpad.
I will add you to my Top [some number] favorites from Darren’s Top 5 Group Writing Project.
on May 9th, 2007 at 7:24 am
I love to use bloglines. Its lighter than Google reader.
on May 9th, 2007 at 7:27 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 8:07 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 8:48 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 10:45 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 11:27 am
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on May 9th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
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on May 9th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Hum… may I suggest you to try Google Reader? I really think that it’s a better tool than Bloglines. Nice list though
on May 9th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I love Firefox and Bloglines…
Maybe I would love to try creating my blog using Dreamweaver…or even Wordpress
Never tried Textpad before…
on May 9th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
[…] para aprender cosas de blogs fueron: Top 5 Wordpress Plugins that Help Increase Comments Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use Top 5 Free Ways to Start Generating Traffic to Your Blog Using the Web to Find Writing Jobs (The […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
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on May 9th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
First off, nice article, Mr. … oh, I can’t find your name! I think your blog would see increased stickiness if you had your name somewhere on your post.
I agree with your list, only I’d replace Bloglines with Google Reader. I used Bloglines for a long time, and Google Reader’s marking of each item *as it’s read* totally stole me away.
Great list!
on May 9th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I downloaded Textpad today. Thank you so much!
on May 9th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott – and why these tools a great […]
on May 9th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Wow,
Best response I’ve had to a post so far… by far.
First let me thank all of you for stopping by.
There seems to be two themes to the comments so far,
1) People haven’t used textpad before but seem to like it. I first used it at work and was suprised at how good it is.
2) A lot of people think Google Reader > Bloglines. To be perfectly honest I haven’t tried Google reader myself. I’ll have to give it a shot.
on May 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I actually use just one of them.
i) I use Opera Browser. I do have Fx installed and use it occasionally, but it still has a long way to go. What I hate about it is the lack of basic functionality. And then if it add too many extensions it tends to get sluggish and often extensions conflict each other. I have had wierd problems before due to incompatible extensions. Opera is fast, secure, functional but has a certain appeal thanks to its very unique but well thought of UI.
Btw, an interesting link to read if you have some time : http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
ii) This is the only one that I use from your list.
iii) I have only a blog so dont find any need for it. For minor purposes, Nvu does the job and its free.
iv) I use Notepad2. http://www.flos-freeware.ch/
But, textpad seems to be better. I think I may switch to that.
v) I use Opera’s inbuilt reader mainly as I am lazy. It doesnt have advanced features like combining feeds, tagging feeds or organising them into folders. But it has basic functionalities like searching through feed. The advantage is I dont need to use another software or go to another webpage just to check my feed. Also, I automatically get notified if there is something new to read.
on May 10th, 2007 at 6:23 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 10th, 2007 at 11:22 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 10th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Pallab,
thanks for stopping by. I’ll have to check out Opera next time I get a chance and see if has some functionality which I’m missing with my other browsers.
on May 11th, 2007 at 6:42 am
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on May 11th, 2007 at 10:31 am
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on May 11th, 2007 at 11:48 am
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 11th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on May 11th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Today I can’t live without Firefox and Wordpress.
on May 11th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
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on May 12th, 2007 at 12:28 am
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[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
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on May 13th, 2007 at 7:21 am
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[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use (Or At Least Consider Using) […]
on May 14th, 2007 at 5:38 am
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on May 14th, 2007 at 6:40 am
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on May 16th, 2007 at 1:34 am
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on May 16th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I love Textpad as well and just can suggest to try give it at least a try. Especially I use the macros a lot and it already saved me a lot of time.
on May 19th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Thanks for the list. I thought about Firefox.. so I will try it. I will use Bloglines, too.
Dreamweaver - hmm… I postpone..
Textpad - interesting.. Maybe I will try it, too.
And Wordpress - I already use!
So the article was helpful with good reason and advice.
on May 25th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
[…] Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use by Scott […]
on June 9th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Great article! I’ve posted it as part of my Blog Carnival at techloaf.com. thx
on June 10th, 2007 at 10:00 am
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