Transforming ideas: tools for the dedicated blogger

One of the greatest prides somebody can take in his work is his dedication to producing excellent and valuable product or service. Blogging is by no means any different. In my ongoing blogging experience, I’ve learned that readers actually do notice a dedicated blogger who goes the extra mile in presenting his ideas professionally with his readers in mind.

Being a borderline perfectionist by nature, I’ve taken it as a rule from day one to always write posts in which I present something new or add a twist to an existing idea or conversation. In doing that, I’ve always put one question in mind: What’s in it for my readers? Whatever it is I’ve decided to write about, this question always helps me shape up the entire post into something meaningful and useful by the general population of my blog’s audience. It even helps me completely discard ideas that I perceive having less of an intellectual value.

In order to present a complete story in the ideas that do make it, I’ve gradually built up slew of tools that help me take my ideas from inception to complete, well-written posts supported by visual illustrations. (I’m a visual learner, so naturally I rely on visuals to convey my ideas). Today I’m going to let you in on the tools of my blogging trade. Not that any of them is unheard of, but I believe that having them combined and using them effectively should help you get your blogging in shape and make a bigger impact with consistently hit posts!

1) Capturing Ideas

Google Notebook

Why?

• Google Notebook is an online tool for capturing notes, images, URLs, snippets etc.
• Google Notebook integrates tightly with Firefox making capturing ideas for posts as I visit various websites that much easier and convenient.
• Google Notebook lets you reorder notes. I use this feature to prioritize post ideas.

2) Research

Google + Mozilla Firefox

Why?

• Umm, I’m just going to pretend you did not just ask this question :)

3) Organizing Thoughts

Mindjet MindManager

Why?

• Lets me quickly brainstorm the structure of the post without worrying about any technical details yet.
• Helps organize the flow of ideas in a logical fashion.

4) Stock Photos

Hemera Photo Clip Art + Google Images + Flickr

Why?

• Hemera Photo Clip Art is the most comprehensive collection of high-quality photographic clip arts with transparent backgrounds. Very professionally shot and organized.
• Google Images is quick for common photos like logos or screen shots.
• Flickr has a huge collection of interesting photos that are released under Creative Commons license.

5) Photo Manipulation

Ulead PhotoImpact + Microsoft Office 2007 + FastStone Capture

Why?

• I’ve been using PhotoImpact since 1997 and I’ve grown addicted to the simplicity yet power it delivers especially with its preset templates.
• Office 2007 delivers such expressive visual power that it became an essential tool for my my charts, diagrams and even visual effects needs.
• I’ve tried numerous screen capture utilities but nothing came close being as lightweight, simple, powerful and easy to use as this free utility from FastStone (also check out their free and fast image viewer, an all-time favorite of mine as well)

6) Online Storage

Box.net + divShare

Why?

• Box has awesome embeddable audio widget that I use around here in this blog to share some wonderful music.
• divShare has a better upload limit and also integrates with WordPress via a DivShare Uploader Plugin.

7) Dictionary

WordWeb

Why?

• I’ve discovered this aweseom freeware on CNET Download. Ever since, it became an essential tool for me that always sets quietly in the system tray waiting to be summoned via Ctrl+Alt+W to come up with meanings and thesaurus on the current word I’ve copied to the clipboard. Very handy and well done.

8) Tunes

Winamp

Why?

• I always do my writing with some music on. And this is my all-time favorite player since kindergarten. I usually play some ambient tunes while writing. What do you play?

Conclusion

I know that there may be handful of other tools that can do similar job and probably are less expensive (and I’m actually curious about which ones you do use), but the point of this post is to give you an idea of the kind of tools that any blogger will need on a regular basis. Armed with this knowledge, I hope that I have inspired you to be a better blogger by dedicating a bit more time to writing quality posts. Collectively, our ultimate aim is to maintain a quality threshold throughout the blogosphere. Indeed, this will help push this new media main stream and afford it wider credibility and acceptance.