Posted by Barry Welford
Darren Rowse poses an interesting question in asking What are Your Favorite 10 Blogging Tools? It clearly also is a topic that will generate a great deal of comment and discussion given the popularity of his Problogger blog.
It’s time for a little discussion – lets talk blogging tools. Over in the ProBlogger.com forum there’s been a lot of talk about different tools, applications, platforms and plugins that helps to improve blogs. I’m loving the different opinions and experiences and thought it’d be a good question to open up to the wider community – what are your favourite 10 blogging tools? I suspect most of us will probably include our blogging platform (Blogspot, WordPress, TypePad etc) in the list somewhere but other than that anything goes. Perhaps it’s a comments tool, perhaps a desktop editor, perhaps a plugin or widget – anything goes!
I am sure the resulting blog post with all its comments will be very search engine visible and many others will link to it.
However I am not sure that these lists of 10 that are so search-engine friendly are necessarily the most useful to readers. In this case, I can suggest a more user-friendly topic, which will undoubtedly be much less search-engine visible. I hope many will choose to comment since this could collect a host of revelations and new finds for our readers. The question we are asking is:
What is your favorite blogging tool that you believe few others may have found?
I could have nominated Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is software to create text by dictation, and which is a real productivity help:
Dragon NaturallySpeaking gives small business and advanced PC users the power to create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type — with up to 99% accuracy. Most people speak over 120 words per minute, but type less than 40 words a minute. That means you can create documents and emails about three times faster with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon never makes a spelling mistake, and it actually gets smarter the more you use it!
DNS does of course cost money, so my nomination for the best, least known blogging tool is to use Mind Maps to organize your thoughts before you expand on your ideas. A great free tool to use, which I highly recommend is FreeMind, which is free mind mapping software.
FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click “fold / unfold” and “follow link” operations.
If you have some blogging tool that you are using that you think is not well enough known, why not add a mention in the comments. I’m sure others will appreciate your effort.