Software tools

Over the years I’ve been playing around with various blogging platforms and blogging tools. I started off in 2001 with Radio Userland, moved on to Typepad, had a little thing with Blogger but ended up with Movable Type. After all these flirts it’s Wordpress now. I’m extremely happy with Wordpress and its community. The plugins are a joy to work with. Same as their use of templates. So easy to incorporate. Besides using this awesome platform I want to discuss a few blogging tools that I use extensively.

Textmate (Mac only)
If you use a Mac this is a must have app. Promoted as the missing editor for Mac it all does what Textmate promises you:

TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

It is so easy to use and the possibilities are almost endless. You can even post to your blog straight from Textmate! Most posts on Mindplunge came from Textmate but I stepped it up a bit. This brings me to my second app.

MarsEdit (again, Mac only)
MarsEdit was developed by Ranchero Software (same company who developed NetNewsWire. More about this later). Last year it was acquired by Red Sweater Software and they just released the 2.0 version. MarsEdit is a blog publishing tool that lives on your desktop. No need to login to your blog account and use a sluggish online editor.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog’s web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.

MarsEdit has a intuitive interface, it’s widely compatible (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Vox), it’s Flickr enabled and the best thing in my opinion: if you decide to do so it lets you use an external editor (Textmate!). Awesome tool.

Last thing I want to talked about are RSS readers. A lot of people already know what I’m talking about but the majority of people surfing the web (yes, mainstream) are clueless. Let me quote Wikipedia about RSS:

RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

There are several ways to read your RSS feeds. NetNewsWire is pretty popular but in my case a go with an online version: Newsgator.com. It just saves me a bunch of time just going through my feeds and click on the articles I really want to read instead of navigating to a web page and see if they updated their site.

There you have it. Some tools in a nut shell. I could go on and on about this subject but for now you have a starting point.

What tools are you using and am I missing some major ones? Let me know!