Top 5 Most Essential Blogging Tools

Blogging is hard work. As bloggers, we would have to show our appreciation towards open source world and other fellow bloggers who create and distribute very useful tools to ease our job. Here are top five most essential blogging tools that had saved me a lot of time. My blogging world would be miserable without these applications:

Filezilla – The Open Source Free FTP solution

FileZilla is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive interface. You can use it to upload and download files from your hosting server.

When you need to upload a bunch of files or images to be used in your blog content, FileZilla can handle the job easily. You don’t have to manually select certain files and upload via your blogging platform. You can also change the folder and file access permission easily.

Google Analytics – The Free Web Traffic Analyzer from Google

Google Analytics give you free analysis of your blog’s traffic. You will be able to know the visitors’ origin, length of stay, bounce rate, browsers used and other details such as the size of screen resolution and referral sites. It even let you track your conversion rate if you are using pay per click service to drive traffic. All you need to do is to copy and paste some codes onto your blog pages.

Google Reader – Web-based Reader Feed Aggregator

Google Reader is capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds, released by Google on October 7 2005 through Google Labs.

I use it a lot to keep track of other blogs. I also access Google Reader via my PDA phone. Now I can read update blog posts anywhere, anytime, even I am traveling overseas.

There is a search function in Google Reader in case you can’t find certain blog post that remembered that you read somewhere.

The new Google Reader also allows you to “share” the post feed you like. Moreover, you can see what your friends (other people in your Gmail contact list who are also using Google Reader) had “shared” as well.

Fast Stone Capture v5.3 – Free Screen Capture and Image Editing Software

FastStone Capture v5.3 is a freeware. But the later versions are shareware which you need to pay a small fee to use. However, I am still using the free version because it is already powerful enough to carry out simple image editing tasks.

It lets you capture what you see on your monitor, resize the image, add watermark and do some other simple editing.

ScribeFire – Free Firefox Addon Blogging Text Editor

ScribeFire is a Firefox Addon. You will need to use Firefox browser to be able to use this convenient tool. Before I use ScribeFire, I need to open my text editor and browser separately. It is troublesome to always switch between different windows when I need to refer to something on the Internet. With this tool installed, you can pull up Scribefire within Firefox.

Right-clicking on the page and select “Blog this page” from the ScribeFire submenu, it will create a link using the page title. Your highlighted text will be quoted too. This is the function I like the most.

When you had completed a blog post content, you can post it straight to your blog by setting up API access.

What are your favourite and most essential blogging tools? Please share with us in the comment.

This post is written by KCLau, who blogs about personal finance topics especially useful for Malaysians. He had published the Top Money Tips for Malaysians ebook which is free for download.