I’m at SOBCon 2008 and we’ve been charged with writing a five-minute blog post. Chris Garrett, whose blog I read regularly, and who I can thank for bringing me to Chicago, recommended several tools for effective and efficient blogging.
He mentioned:
1) Mindjet Mindmanager
I already use this – it’s a fantastic tool for mindmapping.
2) Scribe Fire
I looked at this when it first came out, but I wasn’t quite smart enough to make it work. I’ll go check it again.
3) Skitch
Mac only – this one’s handy for taking screenshots of sites
4) Blogbridge
An offline feed reader. I’m a Google Reader user, but this could be a really good backup. Especially for the 8-hour flight home.
5) Skype + Call Recorder
A great way to record podcasts. I use both, but I haven’t published anything I’ve recorded that way.
I started using scribefire in firefox a few days ago – it works well, especially helpful with incorporating a number of links into a post because it recognises the tab you are on as the one you want to link to.
I think I picked up the idea from twitter.
Blogbridge looks worth a gander.
Skitch is invaluable if you blog regularly with images, not just screen grabs but jpegs you’ve downloaded or been sent.
With Created in Birmingham I used to load stuff into Photoshop, resize, save and upload using WordPress’ file upload thing. With Skitch this turns into a 5 second process.
Plus you can set it to ftp to a number of sites or just up to Skitch, or you can drag the new file to the desktop or email it. You can grab the heml to embed it into a page or just the file link. And that’s not even mentioning the stuff you can do with Skitch.com itself (there’s Twitter integration somewhere I believe). Wonderful service!