Having a sound blogging implementation plan contributes big time to the whole business blogging strategy. However, it is just a part of the story. When you get the plan in place, now is the time to carry it out. Blogging is suppose to require persistence and a lot of determination, but don’t have to be difficult though.

If you follow through the steps in this business blogging article series, you should have a clear vision about where and how you are going to achive those. It is the purpose of this article to introduce you to some of the tools that I think can help you in your blogging endeavour.

Again in my opinion, the very nice thing about blogging is that it makes the tedious process of updating web pages with content and uploading to your web server virtually non existence.

In some weblog application, the contents are stored on the database in the raw format and then assembled on demand during requests. More sophisticated software takes the step further to cache the page, but really all of them happen behind the scene.

All a blogger does is type and push a few button, like using email program.

The process becomes more complex once you want to add pictures and other multimedia objects to the blog, which are common nowadays. While audio and video publishing is beyond this introduction article, I try to answer some computer programs that can help me research and get updated about topics to blog about, blogging tools and other software I use on a day to day basis.

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• Mozilla Firefox — the only browser I use for browsing. One of the most useful features about this browser is the tab feature, which allows user to open multiple browser window on a single window.
• wbloggar — a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) blog editor software that allows me to post to many different blog platforms and save draft for later editing and posting. There is an alternative for Apple platform.
• FeedDemon — a desktop based news aggregators. I subscribe to hundreds of RSS and Atom feeds as the news source for blogging. It also supports podcasting.
• SnagIt — great program for capturing text, images on your desktop. Save a lot of time as you can grab only a section of the window, so you don’t need to crop it manually on an image editing software. SnagIt can produce the torn paper effect on images in a snap, a feature that I use frequently on this blog.
• Adobe Photoshop — the only image editing software I rely on. SnagIt can do basic editing but since I sometimes design some logo and do other image processing tasks, I need this software. I find it particularly useful to optimize image for web. I try to limit the size of every image I post to under 20KB, often times less than 10 KB.
• Mindjet MindManager — The indispensable mind-mapping software for project planning, article brainstorming, and others. I even use it to get a draft outline of my article series.
• The Journal — My desktop based journaling software for notes, ideas, URLs, todo list, frequently asked questions, resources, journals and scratch pad. I implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done system on this software successfully, except the calendaring system.
• Trillian — instant messaging program to communicate with other bloggers.
• Gmail — My favorite e-mail program that I use to check emails twice a day. Having forwarding, POP3 and excellent filtering features make it great.

That’s it. Others software contributing less to blogging include Adobe Reader to read various reports and surveys, and Macromedia/Adobe Captivate to record screencasts. Total Commander is the software I use as file manager to replace Windows Explorer.

Of course, if you are already familiar with one software, you can continue with that. The main point is to keep your productivity high. Any tool will do it, as long as it is efficient and can help you accomplish many repetitive tasks faster.

Speaking of online productivity, 43 Folders is the blog I read for productivity and time saving ideas. Highly recommended especially if you are a Mac OS X (I am a Windows and Linux user).

Suggestions and comments are always welcome.