5 Awesome Blogging Tools

Over the past year, I’ve tried a lot of software and tools to make blogging easier. Some have choked my PC (Windows Live Writer), and some just don’t interest me (Qumana). But some have become essential parts my routine and made my life in the blog lane a lot easier …

My cell phone … Far and away, my cell phone is my favorite piece of technology. It’s wrong to love it as much as I do. It’s phone, it’s camera, it’s email, it’s IM, and it’s a tiny little blogging machine. From my car —

Blogging the news that Hoyer will be Majority Leader	Keeping up on email, via gmail
Perusing the Granholm-Cherry Campaign Blog

If my phone was also cable tester, and I could boot from it, I might just have to marry it. But it’s not just the phone that makes moblogging possible … it’s the combination of email capability on the phone, and blog-by-mail in WordPress that makes it a snap for me to blog from the road.

The Firefox Browser … actually this is two separate tools in one. Firefox renders pages nicely, but it’s the add-ons that make me love this browser. Peformancing Firefox, a built in web editor, makes it a breeze to blog a page. Highlight a block of text, right click and select “blog this page”, and Performancing Firefox opens with the text as a blockquote. A very convenient wysiwyg editor. Normally I use Word, Dreamweaver, or the WordPress interface, depending on the post. But for a quick post, Peformancing is the way to go. (All of my Performancing Firefox posts are tagged “powered by performancing firefox”)

FireFTP is another excellent plugin. This is an ftp client that opens in it’s own tab, right in the browser. Very helpful to people like me, who frequently ftp images and other files to the blog. Until I met FireFTP, Bulletproof FTP was my preferred program. The problem with Bulletproof is that once you register it, you have to run a .reg file to install it on another pc. I’ve had about 8 PCs since I bought Bulletproof in 2002, and half the time I don’t remember where I put the .reg file that I need to run. FireFTP is not only convenient and in the browser, it has put an end to hunting for registration info. That’s pretty sweet. Click here to download -

Bloglines … Bloglines.com is a feed reader. I like this because site because I can watch as many feeds as I like. When I find something that I’d like to blog later, I copy & paste it to the clippings board. Then when I’m ready to blog, it’s all there in the clippings. (I hear good things about Google Reader, but I haven’t tried it yet)

Editorial calendar … I learned about this from listening to a podcast interview with Yvonne Divita from Lipsticking. Use the calendar to schedule your topics, and ward off that wicked blogger’s block. I don’t use this worksheet anymore, but I schedule everything on my Outlook calendar. The editorial calendar is where I got the idea to do regular features on the same day each week. (“Now Playing” on Tuesdays, “5″ on Thursdays, etc.) It’s been very helpful in terms of structuring the blog.

WordPress … Despite recent problems with the feed and the dashboard, I really like WordPress. It has an informative dashboard, a great wysiwyg editor with a preview available beneath the edit screen, and easy plug-in management. I have used blogger, b2evolution, and a few others, and WordPress really is the best.