Essential Tools Of Pro Blogger Chris Garrett

Essential Tools 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:

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 mindmapsÂ and Camstudio, a free screen recorderÂ 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?Â

RSS 26. September 2007 (07:22)
Filed under: Essential Tools

7 Comments»

Susan Suarez
26. September 2007 | 15:04 h
I’ve always been curious about Drupal and Joomla. I’m currently using Wordpress and love it.
Chris Garrett
26. September 2007 | 17:11 h
Drupal is great if you want to build a portal or large community site, but if all you want is a blog, WordPress can’t be beat
Richard Rinyai
29. September 2007 | 13:56 h
Hi,

These are some really great tips. I noticed that my readership has increased since I started blogging just over a month ago, since I installed FeedBurner.

Also, commenting on other blogs and trying to contribute to posts helps quite a bit as well.

Thanks,

Richard
David Stopsky
1. October 2007 | 00:12 h
Thanks Char for the great tips. Even though I’m already an avid Wordpress user, the one nugget I found extremely useful in this post was CamStudio, something I’ve been searching for for quite some time. Now, if only they could make a Mac version, I’d be in heaven.
Stephan Miller
10. October 2007 | 16:34 h
Most of these tools are on my list, along with:
In the images category:
Gimp for editing
FastStone Capture for screenshots
Camtasia Studio because CamStudio doesn’t work on Vista ( but Wink does, only to create Flash movies
Picnik.com for fast editing straight through to Flickr

They do have a Drupal module now that will run Wordpress. And Drupal is for more than communities. It is great for data that doesn’t fit into the “blog” category like ad tracking or a million sharesale products ready to be hooked to the Wordpress alinks plugin.
Stephanie
14. November 2007 | 22:56 h
Hello!

I was using StumbleUpon today and happened to come across your site.

I really like what you’re doing here, keep it up!

Stephanie
http://www.makethegreatescape.org/
Leonard
19. November 2007 | 14:39 h
Wordpress’ simplicity over apps like Drupal and the huge support base out there makes it so much more attractive. I have found that users would rather *make* Wordpress work by being quite creative than going for the more complicated solutions.