Alex Shalman, known for his Practical Personal Development site, is today’s Essential Tools feature.  Alex is a full-time student, working on his Masters Degree, and his passion for personal development is evident in every aspect of his writing. His most popular posts include Seven Questions that will Change your Life,  How to Make Everything the Bright Side, and The One Decision that will Change Your Life.

Alex’s Essential Tools for Success in his own words:

Microsoft Outlook and OneNote - This great little tool that integrates both my personal and work e-mails allowing me to respond as quickly and effortlessly as possible. In addition, Outlook provides me with a great place to store my contacts and calender entries.

Ever have anything important to right down? I do, and I trust OneNote to store everything I need. This application provides tabbed browsing, categories, folders and search features. In addition, you can set passwords up on choice pages in order to maintain maximum privacy for your most private writing. I never journal without it!

Olympus Digital Voice Recorder - Whether I’m recording a lecture in school, or making a ‘note to self’ while driving, I’m never found without this tool. This is my secret to never losing a great idea! You would be surprised how many ideas you get, and then forget, while being in the most obscure locations and doing the oddest things.

Firefox - The only way to browse. Between cocomment, pagerank, alexa rank, and a myriad of other little plugins, I use Firefox for all my browsing needs.

Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver - My number one choice for image editing. If you see something sparkly or shiny on my site, chances are I used Photoshop to edit it. Dreamweaver is the way I edit and upload all the code and images
that I like to fidget with on the site.

These are my essentials, that I basically use on a daily basis. Keeping me connected, updated, and creative.

Thanks to Alex for sharing his favorite tools! What’s in your essential toolbox?

Most Wednesdays I feature a single blogger/online professional in my Essential Tools series, however, this week I am going to do it a bit differently. Rather than inviting and featuring one individual, I have gone through my reader and bookmarks to find some essential tools posts that others have published.

• 10 Small Business Finance Tools I Can’t Live Without - Rich McIver’s post at Performancing.com features tools that help small businesses and freelancers manage the money side of their businesses more efficiently so they can focus on the things they do best.
• Recent Essential Tools feature, Chris Garrett, takes things a few steps more in his post Top 10 Tools I Can’t Live Without.
• Eric Miller shares an extensive list of Essential Graphic Design Tools
• Web developers will love the tools Elmer Thomas Jr.  highlights - from database design, version control, Flash and much more.
• Angela at melange takes Chris G.’s lead and shares her Top 10 Tools list - I’ll be checking some of them out in more detail.

If you have published a list of your favorite, essential, must have or can’t live without tools for online success (I use this term loosely), please be sure to leave me a comment and I will add you to this list.

What tools do the pros consider essential for online success? Author, pro blogger and new media consultant, Chris Garrett of chrisg.com and Authority Blogger Forum, is on board today to share his secrets with us! But before we find out Chris’ secret weapons, check out a few of his most popular articles:

• 10 Reasons Commenting is Good for Bloggers
  
• Blog SEO - Get Your Blog out of the Supplemental Index
• Where to Find Fresh Blogs and Get Your Blog Discovered

Chris G’s Essential Tools (in his own words)

WordPress - While I have built blogs on Drupal and CommunityServer the one system I LOVE to use is WordPress. It just suits me perfectly, plus has such a rich community that support it with help, themes, plugins … for an individual blogger or a team I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Firefox + Scribefire - I could be accused of slightly biased but I really do use this Firfox plugin every day and still recommend it even though I have absolutely zero input into it any more! Coupled with a Firefox spellcheck dictionary it is really a bloggers killer app.

Feedburner - Without feedburner how would we know how many subscribers we have? We wouldn’t!

Flickr - Whether it is for storing our own pics or for finding CC licensed images, you can’t beat Flickr for photographs. I just wish it allowed you to crop and annotate too.

CC PDF Converter - This PDF converter is useful for anyone wanting to create viral PDF ebooks. The CC PDF Converter is a free (open source) application that enables you to create PDF documents from almost any application (Word, Excel, Internet Explorer and more). The CC PDF Converter also allows you to easily embed a creative commons license in your PDF file.

Two new apps I have been trying out recently are MindManager for mindmaps  and Camstudio, a free screen recorder  that has most of the main features of the most popular $300 app.

Thanks to Chris for sharing his favorite tools! What’s in your essential toolbox? 

Related Posts:

• Essential Tools of a ProBlogger
• Essential Tools: Successful Blog Style
• 164 Essential Tools for Online Success