13/09: Great Free Software For Bloggers

The Best Things In Life Are Free - Good Free Software Is One Example

During the course of my blogging and activity online I often find myself in the position of needing something to help me complete a task or enhance my output. This is usually how I discover the best free tools when I need them most and I'm sure this is true of many bloggers and internet users.

So, I thought today I would mention a few of the most useful tools and sites I've run across in my time online. These are only the tip of the iceberg, but I'd like to encourage everyone to drop by and share their own favorites too, so if you've found something invaluable and free that has helped  you with your blogging, why not share with everyone? Remember, you'll get some link love too

Working with colors online can be a pain, particularly when editing items within your blog to ensure that they blend in nicely with your design. With today's high resolution monitors, color pickers can be almost impossible to use but help is at hand. For a reference list of web colors try HTML Color Names which gives a quick shortcut to many of the popular hex values and color names.

If you need more I highly recommend the free ColorPic software from Iconico.com that will allow you to quickly and easily copy any existing colors on your display and generate the hex and RGB values. You can save colors and use a great range of editing options and it works in most major browsers and other programs like Photoshop.

If you're a webmaster or blogger the next free tool is an excellent way to monitor your sites downtime and your hosting provider's true performance. Downtime Witness is completely free and is available at our main website. The software will alert you whenever the URL or IP addresses you specify go offline and will also send you a notification when those sites recover. Most monitoring software with the features of Downtime Witness cost money, but as one of my readers, you get the software and activation key free gratis and for nothing :-)

Another useful blogging tool is a good screenshot program and although I've tried a number of them over the years, including the Firefox add ons, the best free program I have ever used, and still use, is the MW Snap Screen Capture utility by Mirek Wojtowicz. His website looks a bit dated but his little freeware application is anything but. For the times when a good screen capture or image is just too much, or where you need to cut down on load times for a page of images, you're going to want a thumbnail generator. There are plenty available but my program of choice has to be Easy Thumbnails from www.fookes.com. Again, the website is basic, but their software delivers the goods just fine.

I've written elsewhere about a few other free tools I've used for some time now but they deserve another mention so I'm throwing in the incredible RoboForm for password security and ease of organization, Arelis and IBP the superb free SEO suite of tools and the AutoMapIt Automatic Sitemap Service which are all extremely useful and worth more than their free price tags. 

For RSS feeds you might like to check out a free submission tool from Allscoop RSS Submit Pro which although not as thorough as some other RSS submission software is excellent for a free program.

I think that's enough to keep you all busy for a while, I'll publish some more links at another time, but enjoy these free programs and if you would like to recommend a free program of your own that you think I should know about, please leave a comment and share your little gems.

TCH

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