If you are not already keeping a Blog of your own you may be finding you are soon to be a minority.

It has become so easy to create one now the complex part is actually wring in it, and this article is about new ways to create or edit Blogs from other programs, offline so to speak.

The first I’ll describe is one I am trialing to make this part of this post. It’s a freebie from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer.

I am trying to demonstrate how it will handle images very nicely, it even adds the show effect on the graphic you see.

Because it is a Microsoft product it hanles inserting info from all the Microsoft services (which I am not a big fan, MS maps, video sites instead of YouTube and Flickr and Google Maps).

For a Windows product, it’s not bad.

mozy

I’ve Blogged about this before but I see they have received some TV coverage in San Diego and so I will say it again.

I use Mozy and recommend it for any Windows XP system. It’s free to 2gigs of files and $5/month for 30gigs. It’s easy to setup and runs in the background on broadband connected computers.

Do it before it’s too late!

Google Reader (100+)

Today Google updated their page format of Google Reader. It now can look much more like Bloglines or Pluck in addition to its old style of display.

Personnaly I think this is a great improvement once again making Google the big bully on the web, M$ is falling backward again.

Consider this a top recommendation from me, I think Google really made something useful here!

Folder View – Official Home

Folder View is a free (freeware) add-on for Windows that drastically enhances the way you browse the folders on your system. Files are often scattered around many different folders on the harddisk and locations on the network. Every time you want to copy, move, open or save a file, this situation leads you to a quest through levels of folders.

I haven’t tried this yet, but only becuase I have been using Windows Explorer replacements for some time. If Eplorer did these things I might use it again. (Linux has had this all along. )

meebo.com

If you ever tried to use Internet messengers it probably didn’t take long to find that your friends are scattered over a number of different systems and they don’t talk to each other. How could the service wind up this way!

There are a number of good programs to get by this problem, Miranda, Trillian and others will log into multiple systems and so you can monitor them all until there is somebody on you want to chat with.

But Meebo is a simple web page that does the same thing. Just visit the site and log into AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Jabber/GTalk and monitor the page, no software needed!

Make Firefox Faster at Forever Geek

If you aren’t using firefox and you have been reading my blogs, you have learned nothing.

If you are this link from forevergeek.com has a very good suggestion on how to speed firefox’s browsing. It is for broadband (cable/DSL) connections and basically tells you haw to make Firefox load more than one page file at a time, much like the download Managers do. So instead of pulling in the HTML page, and each graphic one at a time you will pull in up to 30 items at once.

It works!

I actually moved to using Firefox back in version .8 and I *HIGHLY* recommend it. For many reasons, security, features, speed, to name a few I find Firefox browser much better than MS Internet Explorer or it’s derivatives. (I used Netcaptor which was a fuller featured IE instead of IE before I upgraded to Firefox.)

Several months ago I switched mail programs from MS Outlook to MozillaMail, part of the Mozilla Suite. I liked Mozilla and wondered what the value of switching again to Firefox/Thunderbird would be. About a month ago I began switching to Firefox as Browser and kept using MozillaMail. The only drawback I found was clicking a weblink in MozillaMail always uses the Mozilla Browser, even when Firefox was ‘default’ browser.

Now I have everything working in the latest Firefox/Thunderbird combination and I’m finding I like it a lot.

The one thing I liked about MS Outlook was its calendaring ability. The Mozilla Suite has a Calendar that I found adequate and it is now available as a stand-alone program, Sunbird. It is an ical compatible program (meaning it uses a format MAC’s have used all along) and while I’m not yet as accustomed to it as I was the Outlook Calendar, I think its going to work for me.

All programs are under constant development and this Open Source program I will call ‘Ready for Prime Time’ and are recommendations from me.

Miranda Instant Messenger

If you use Yahoo IM or AOL IM or MSN IM or ICQ or Jabber or just want in house network IM this is one handy Open Source (No Charge!) Internet Messenging client.

I have a few people on each service that I like to stay in touch with but its memory (resource) intensive to run all the brand name clients so I was looking for some way to have them all in one.

Actually I have been using Trillian for this purpose for several years and it has a free version which works well but you really need to buy their Pro version to get full use of it. It is very good, but my $ is going to medicine and food these days, so a little more searching led me to Miranda.

Miranda has loads of Plugins that will not only let it interact with other IM servers but has added features for RSS feeds, Weather feeds, Stock feeds and more. It’s not as easy as prehaps the Yahoo IM itself to set all this up, but its not unreasonable either.

This is now one of my standards for OS Setups.

PSPad – freeware editor,PHP editor, XHTML, JavaScript, ASP, Perl, C, HEX editor

Once in a while I run into a real gem of a program and can’t believe it’s not better known.

I’m not a programmer but I play one on the web.

As such I need to work with text files and read them as a real programmer would, recognizing line numbers, programming formatting, and comparing file differences.

I have used Context free version for some time fairly happily but it is a little lacking of features in the free version.

I used Win32PAD and found it fast, but the line numbering doesn’t stay with the line when you word wrap.

Now I did a little searching today for a free file compare program and ran into PSPad at NoNags.com. This is truly a *GEM*!

Not only is it doing normal text editing wonderfully but it has a file compare feature built right in. I has FTP built right in. It has excellent help files (in many languages) built right in. A spell checker built right in.

If you want a replacement for Windows Notepad just about anything will do but this program has everything I can imagine any normal human will ever need.

In my book it’s five star *****