I received an email from Haydndup informing me of a post on Smashing Apps, which talks about 5 websites and tools that bloggers should know about, and naturally I wanted to share them here as well.
I’ve used all of them before, so what I’ve done is rank them below in order of my favourite at the top:
1. BlogDesk (I have blogged this before)
BlogDesk is my ultimate blogging tool, quite simply, it looks similar to notepad, but allows you to blog from your desktop, meaning that you don’t have to go into the Dashboard and therefore saves you a tons of time. It handles photographs, tags, categories and basically everything you might need.
2. WhoisLookup
Like the name says, this tool always you to look up who owns a domain name. There are many reasons why someone would want to do this, I’ll let you come up with your own. The joy of this application is that it’s just 100Kb in size!
3. DomainTools
If you’re an avid blogger, you’ll probably have more than one domain and you’ll have faced the whole “deciding/finding a domain name” situation. There are lots of domain suggestions tools available on the Internet, but DomainTools is a win and definitely a tool worth having in your box of tricks.
Hi Chris,
I use Windows Live Writer which was updated recently and compatible with Win 7. It allows you to import all current posts and pages and edit it if required. It also allows you to do a live preview within the tool before publishing. This is very handy with ads and affiliate banners to see how it will looks before publishing. It is also very easy to ad images and videos and has all the bells and whistles to edit image with ALT and TITLE info.
Another one with similar features that compliment blogging well when both are used is SCRIBEFIRE, a firefox addon that allows you to do everything within a new TAB in Firefox.
Both are new generation desktop blogging tools that make creating an attractive post very easy. ScribeFire even include ping functions to various hosts.
Windows Live Writer is decent software indeed, however I find it a little bulky compared to BlogDesk, that’s all. Scribefire is wicked software as well, used that for a good couple weeks and enjoyed the experience. I’ve probably tried around 8 windows applications and 3 or 4 Mac applications, all of which have a few excellent selling points than the others, but at the end of the day, it’s the lightness of BlogDesk that makes it sticky for me; my only wish is that Johannes Oppermann would update the software from time to time to stay in-line with how WordPress is moving, especially with the release of 3.0 coming out..