If you run any more than a few blogs you have been in the situation where you have asked, "can I automate this?" I have looked and there are some good programs out there that help you organize blogs. What I wanted was something simple and easy to use that would let me make new posts to all my blogs from one interface. I found what I was after in Live Writer. Im planning a full article about this piece of software and its pros and cons, but wanted to give you a heads up. If you havent tried it, they just updated it with a ton of new features and it is amazing. It is probably the best new thing for blogging to come along in a long time. You can write posts, create new categories, upload and crop pictures and much more right from one interface. Best of all it is free.

Keep an eye out for my full article on this soon.

There is a new version of the Chameleon Submitter program released today. I have been using it for a few days and can say that some of the new function are really cool. There are some nice new recip previews and other features like the ability to just select the the movies from your gallery folder and it auto fills in the size, total time and type of movies into the submitter form. Here is a list of things that have been changed:

I wrote a review of the chameleon submitter and other products here if you want to check that out.

I have recently posted some links to some photo shop tutorials. Then it struck me that sometimes I am lazy and don’t want to take the time  make a simple logo even though I know how. Also there are people out there that don’t have photo shop. Here’s a place I have found through my travels that will help you out. http://www.cooltext.com
This is a sweet site that will make you a logo online. There is also a nice button maker and some cool fonts you can download. And it is all free.

Enjoy and have a good weekend.

I wanted to share some sites I know that give free open source versions of popular and expensive software. Want MS Office or Adobe Photoshop but don’t want to pay the steep price? These programs are free and many of them work just as good, if not better.

Open Office is a suit of programs that is meant to be comparable to Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation builder and many other features. I have used some of the features on this product (mainly the spreadsheet and the word processor) and can say that they are very good. They don’t have every feature you get with office, but they also don’t cost a dime which is a very good price. I use this on a second computer I have that I didn’t want to buy another copy of Office for.

Another cool site is OSALT. This site lists many different free open source versions of various programs. They have open source versions of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and many others. I use a video editing program they suggested and works very well. Again, all of these programs are open source projects so they are free. This software is very good, is regularly upgraded and has some great documentation including, in many cases, an entire community of people using it and posting in forums answering each other’s questions. 

Whether you are building a second computer and don’t want to drop 1000’s of dollars on new software or you just want something new and cool and don’t want to have to pay for it, these two sites will give you a ton of great tools to help you run your business smoothly.

I want to use this post to talk about a couple of cool tools Google offers for free that I find very useful.

The first is the Google Toolbar. Many of you may already use it but some may not. You can install it on both Firefox and IE and it has some cool features including a built in spellchecker so you can spell check any posts you make on boards or forms or whatever. It also has the Pagerank reader that tells you the PR of any site you are on. While the importance of Pagerank is shrinking it is still a good indicator of overall link popularity so people trying to do search engine optimization will find this useful. You can also use it to bookmark pages and then access those bookmarks from any computer in the world. You simply sign into your free Google account and you can see your bookmarks there.

The other cool tool is called Google Notebook. This tool lets you copy and past text and links from a page right to a notebook and save them for later. You simply select whatever you want to save then right click and copy, open up Google Notebook and paste it. If there were links in anything you selected they will get copied too. If you are using Firefox you can download the Notebook addon for Firefox that will let you copy information off of pages without even opening your Google account. Just selected the text, right click and in the menu click on “Note This (Google Notebook.) I do a lot of research for articles and such and in the past I have bookmarked sites with information I wanted to use later only to go back to them in a few weeks and find they have changed and the information is gone. With Notebook I can copy the information in a matter of seconds and I will have it whenever I need it. The coolest thing is that when you save some text from a site Notebook will automatically put link at the top of your saved text telling you where you got it from. This tool has saved me a ton of time and headaches. Hopefully you will find these simple to use, free tools helpful in your daily webmaster life.

Here are a couple of my favorite pieces of software. These are things I use almost every day and they are either free or cheap. Seo Note (http://www.seonote.info/) is a cool little program that lets you create all kinds of notes, outlines and daily schedules. It took me about 20 minutes to figure out how to use it, but once I did I found it to be an invaluable tool. The fact that it is 100% free is amazing. I would pay for this it is so useful. Thumbnailer (http://www.smalleranimals.com/) is a thumbnail making program that also allows you to create many different custom html templates and it has some very cool plugins to make effects on your thumbs. You can use it free for up to a 100 thumbs a day or it is $25 to buy it. I bought it about 5 years ago and have gotten all the updates free and twice they have found my regkey for me. I can’t recommend this program enough. Ulead Gif Animator (http://www.ulead.com/runme.htm) is for people like me who want flashy cool banners and graphics, but have limited graphic skills. It is easy to learn and will have you making some cool animated graphics in no time. It is free to try and then $29 to buy. Unifed Stats (http://www.unifiedstats.com/) is a free stats program that will scan all the sponsor programs you use and list all your clicks and sales in a report. No more checking many different sites each day, now you can just look here. There are other programs out there that do this and are very good, but this one is free. Board Tracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/) isn’t for adult only boards you can use it to track 1,000’s of boards all over the internet. It is free and easy to use. Just sign up, select the types of boards you want to track and enter your keywords. Whenever those keywords show up in a post on a board you will be sent an email notification with a link to the post. I have learned a lot and kept up on a lot just by using this cool free service. These are just a few of the things out there. I’ll be telling you about others later. I hope you find these useful.