My blogger toolbox

Every Sunday afternoon is my blogging time. It’s my time of the week where I read, write, comment and catch up on what my fellow bloggers have been up to.

After putting the kids (and the hubby) down for their afternoon nap, I revel for a moment in the peace and quiet, and perch myself in front of my laptop with a cup of tea, and open up all my favourite go-to applications and tools on my desktop.

Here are my favourite applications and tools I use during my blogging time…

First stop, Feedly: my RSS feed reader of choice. I do browse through a few posts throughout the week, but on Sunday afternoons I enjoy taking my time to read through the various posts of bloggers I follow and click through their links to give some comment love.

Second stop, Blogger: where I make a stop at my blog to read through and respond to comments, and click through to fellow bloggers’ links to catch up on what they’ve been up to.

Next stop, Windows Live Writer: Although blogger is my chosen blogging platform, I do my actual blog writing on Windows Live Writer. I find it so much easier and intuitive to write and format my post through this Word-doc like platform. I link my blogger account across so my blog theme is integrated into the post as I write and it’s quick and easy to publish or schedule each post directly once I’m done.

I also switch across to Windows Photo Gallery to manage and edit my photos. I love having beautiful images for my posts, unfortunately I don’t have much time to play around with Photoshop to edit them (although I know Photoshop is a wonderful tool for that). I like the quick and easy buttons and filters in Windows Photo Gallery to give my photos a quick fix up before I post them.

And another favourite reference I use is Thesaurus.com. Every writer needs a good Thesaurus. And for bloggers, the online version is the ideal alternative. If I get stuck on a word or need to find a different way to express something, this is my go-to site to help me.

And finally, I jump onto to Hootsuite, my new favourite app in my blogger toolbox. As every blogger knows, the last important thing they need to do is to share and promote. I only recently jumped back onto the Twitter bandwagon. I was reluctant to do so for a long time because I was worried of adding yet another social media arm to my profile. But this tool has been a terrific help in enabling me to cross-post my updates and sharing across a couple of platforms in one step.

 

What about you? What are your favourite tools and tricks you use in writing? I’d loved to know!

 

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