Must Have Tools For New And Upcoming Bloggers

I am not a professional blogger yet and in this post i present before you some tools that i use for blogging. These tools are very useful since they serve my every need. I think these are enough for people who are fairly new to the blogging world and have little or no knowledge about the concept. Now you just need to add a innovative idea and you are done.

A Good Domain Name And Hosting :

According to me a good domain name and a good hosting is one of the basic necessities for a futuristic blogger. By a good domain name i mean that the name should not be too big ,easy to read ,easy to speak ,not too much common and last of all should be available. And by a Good hosting i mean one that is easy on the pocket ,providing maximum uptime ,providing good storage ,good bandwidth ,24×7 tech support and other things as per your requirement. These are the most important part of self hosted blogs so proper care should be taken while choosing them.

Windows Live Writer :

I have just now started using Windows Live Writer and to my amazement i find it really useful and a must-have thing. All you need to do is synchronize your blog with it ,give it adequate permissions and you are done. Now all you need to do is write whether online or offline and the rest will be handed by this software itself. It is also a handy tool to upload images and videos. No matter you are on Blogger or WordPress as it has no conflict with any of them and the best thing it is not only for professionals but for new and emerging bloggers also because of its easy to use interface .

Few features i like the most about this software are :-

• Insert multiple photos Hassle free
• Insert and publish video to YouTube (then to your blog )
• Support for bidirectional languages (motivates variation)
• Tabbed view switching (easy to use interface)
• Auto Linking (eases work)
• Not to mention mostly all other things offered by your dashboard

Last but not the least it provides support for additional plug-ins like :

• Flickr Upload – Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.
• Digg This – Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
• Twitter Notify – Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
• And Many More !

SnagIt (Screen Capturing Software) :

I post a lot of tutorials,tweaks and how-to-do kind of stuff. And to be true i firstly test all the tweaking and stuff on my desktop and then publish it into posts. For doing tutorial posts and these how-to-do posts ,a screen capturing software is a must and i use Snagit for the same.

Few features that are needed in a good screen-capturing software are:-

• Easy screen capture (one-click)
• Good editing interface (for cropping ,etc)
• Easy to use interface (all bloggers are not professionals)
• In-built image format converter(for various sizes)
• Watermark/Copyright option (for those who need )
• Print in multiple page layouts
• Email screenshots
• Virtual marker
• Other tools for professional touch (as per requirements)

Apart from these features associated with blogging i would like to say that SnagIt also provides running video capture facility which at-times is very useful.

WordPress (Blogger ,BlogEngine.NET ,Typo ,etc) :

Writing about this may take my whole writing space and time so to be intact i would like to say (about WordPress) that this is what has changed the blogging world completely. This has made blogging a lot of fun and easy for people to share their interests with just little bit of technical knowledge. WordPress has a templating system, which includes widgets that can be rearranged without editing PHP or HTML code, as well as themes that can be installed and switched between. Some other features are :-

• Integrated link management,
• Search engine-friendly,
• Basic SEO provided,
• Clean permalink structure,
• Multiple author capability,
• WordPress also supports the Trackback and Pingback standards for displaying links to other sites that have themselves linked to a post or article,
• Rich Plug-in architecture,
• And much more…..

I was firstly blogging through blogger but it was a bit complex, so i shifted to wordpress and needless to say i am enjoying it specially the widgets (they make everything so easy).
Stock.xchng (Any other Copyright free image) :

Well to create enthusiasm and to support your content you always need good images ,and i would like to mention here that just googling the image and pasting it is not the right thing to do as you may end up using some copyrighted material and being caught in international laws. So the best thing to do is use image sharing services like these which host copyright free images. And you would become free of the risk of putting some copyright stuff accidentally.

P.S:- The tools i had mentioned here are a part of my preferences . And I know that a whole lot of other tools are available. So i request our readers to share their views and experiences with us.