Essential Tools – MomGadget Style
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This week’s Essential Tools series features Gayla McCord of MomGadget fame. Gayla is a Professional Blogger and Work at Home Mom who maintains and/or owns 13 blogs – including three she’s currently writing for the mega blog network, b5media. Having started working from home while being a single mother of twins, Gayla has developed a rather strict routine online and is always looking out for tools that make her time online more productive.
At this time the tools you won’t find Gayla working without are:
- FIREFOX – Gayla is officially a Firefox convert. She went reluctantly into the change from Internet Explorer, but admits that she is so glad she did. She can’t believe how much easier and smoother her multi-tasking goes.
- QUMANA – When it comes to blogging, there’s no blogging like Qumana blogging. Having thirteen blogs that she owns and/or maintains, Qumana allows Gayla to post quickly from one platform rather than logging in and out of each individually. Qumana is available in a free download at www.qumana.com. (I need to go check this one out)
- WS FTP PRO – Her final essential tool is WS FTP Pro – Gayla found herself in the situation a little over a year ago where she had to upload all of her work in individual pages and absolutely never wants to go there again. She likes being able to make changes and quickly upload them to the web without lots of unnecessary keystrokes.
Other programs Gayla has and uses often are Paint Shop Pro, Google Reader and now MyBlogLog. After reading my praises of the mozilla email program, she’ll likely be giving that a whirl sometime in the near future.
What’s in your toolbox? Leave me a comment and let me know what keeps your online world moving. Would you like to be featured? Just drop me a line and let me know.
10 Comments
January 10th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Thanks for the link to Qumana – I’ve just downloaded it, and it looks great! New tool to learn, but it does look like a good one …
January 11th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Jon from Qumana here .. thank you very much for the brief set of kind words / quote.
Lucy, I am hoping you will discover that it should only take you three to five posts to discover that Qumana should save you a bunch of keystrokes. We invested a fair bit in usability analysis and improvements to the tool following that analysis.
If you would like to bounce any questions off me, please feel free to email me at jon AT qumana.com.
January 11th, 2007 at 2:35 am
Lucy – Iet me know how you like Qumana.
Jon – Thank you for taking the time to stop in. Qumana looks like a very useful tool and I will most likely start using it shortly.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:06 am
You’ll love Firefox. I was reluctant to change to it also and my husband insisted. I’ve been using it about a year now.
January 11th, 2007 at 4:29 am
I love Firefox. I can’t believe I went so long before trying it. Even though IE7 has the tab thing now, I’ll probably never go back.
January 11th, 2007 at 5:13 am
We welcome warmly any user feedback re: Qumana.
We are working (albeit too slowly most of the time
on continuous improvement of the tool and it’s functionality, thus constructive user criticism is essential.
January 11th, 2007 at 9:39 am
I’m going to check out Qumana… new to this! Thanks for posting.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:35 am
TXWriter and Randa – I switched to Firefox a few months ago and I have never looked back. Thanks for stopping in.
Doris – I think for anyone who manages multiple blogs, Qumana could be a real time saver.
Jon – I do have a question – If you install Qumana but need to log in to your sites the way you originally did, will it still work? In other words, once you start using it, do you have to use it all the time?
January 11th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Char … you do not need to use Qumana to post to your blog. You can still do it the way you did before, by logging in and creating a post. Qumana just gives you a new / different access point .. .like having your blog editor ouside your blog platform.
When yiou install Qumana, it asks for your blog platform userID and password .. you input them, it’s ready to go .. but it does not mean that you are locked out of the normal blog platform editor.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Jon – I will definitely give it a try now and I’ll let you know how I like it.