Frequently when talking to them about how to get started I begin talking about some other great tools that I use to organize your thoughts and create your posts and pages for your website. Most of these tools are free, or free with premium versions as well. All of them have been incredibly useful to me over the years (or months and days that I’ve been using them).

I’ve written about my use of programs like Evernote, Picasa, IrfanView, Windows Live Writer, Firefox and others on this site at some point or another.

I’m curious though, what other tools do you use regularly that you don’t think you could live without these days. If you’re not a blogger, don’t worry about it. Just let me know what programs you have installed on your machine that you use on a daily basis. Daily would be a good cut-off, perhaps at least every other day at the most.

Looking forward to hearing what you share and giving a few a try if I’m not already using them on my machine.

Image: sxc.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

The Tools of Blogging

Granted a note-taking application should be performing well in this type of setting. You’re taking notes at a conference with various sessions. The difference though is that there’s so many other nice touches that make it very helpful in this situation.

One of the first things I did was to import the PDF of the conference schedule and session agenda into the notebook I setup just for the conference. After that I grabbed the user specific free wi-fi account access for me into the notebook so I’d have that available.

As I was in sessions I could quickly take notes and organize them with keywords and tags for later retrieval as needed. Throughout the day as people would mentioned various websites and applications, I could visit the site and then use the Evernote bookmarklet tool to import that link to those sites right into my conference notebook.

Although I didn’t use my camera much today, if I wanted to, I could have copied photos that were taken in each session and throughout the day into the notebook and already prepare captions and information about what was happening in the photo to be ready to use for an upcoming blog post.

Evernote just made keeping track of all this information throughout the day certainly manageable. I love this tool the more I use it.

I will say I need to work on the keyboard shortcuts, because I just realized you can use CTRL+SHIFT+B to format a list as bulleted notes. That would have come in handy during the sessions. I’ll remember that for Day 2 of Blog Indiana.

Post from: EveryJoe

Evernote Fits Perfectly for Conference Attendees

The idea of software as a service (SAAS) isn’t really new these days as more and more applications and services are delivered via the web and via a subscription model. Wikipedia defines SAAS as the following:

Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced ’sass’) is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.

The examples I illustrate above in the graphic (Dropbox, Vimeo, Skype, Evernote, Pandora, flickr) are just some of the services that I’m currently a happy user of, but have not upgraded to the premium versions of each across the board.

If I upgraded to the non-free subscription for each of the services above, I’d be looking at enough of an expense that I’d need to really start paying attention to it on the monthly budget. However, with all of these services, the value could be very well worth the expense over the long-run.

How many SAAS options are you currently subscribed to with this type of service?

Post from: EveryJoe

Software Can Be An Expensive Service

Basic Evernote functionality provides the ability to import files into your notebooks for easy management. By default Evernote will import PDF’s, images, text files and audio files. You can import folders or files as needed or have Evernote monitor a specific folder and automatically import files from that folder.

I decided to combine an earlier tip on customizing your right-click “Send To” function with this Evernote import function and see how it works. I created a folder in “My Documents” called “My Evernote“. I then used the Evernote import wizard to setup Evernote to regularly check this folder and pull in any files that it can into my specified, default notebook.

All I need to do to send a file into Evernote now is to right-click on a file that Evernote will read and use my customized send-to routine to in essence send it directly to Evernote. So far it’s worked fairly well with the PDF’s I’ve tried. I really wish I could send any file, specifically Microsoft Office files, but we’ll see how this goes. Using CutePDF, it’s easy enough to save any document to a PDF file.

Post from: EveryJoe

Send Documents to Evernote Quickly

Some of my current favorite mobile apps have been PocketTwit, Google Maps, YouTube, Evernote and others. Some of these apps I’ve been able to install successfully to my 2GB MicroSD card and some won’t let me install to that location.

Anyone know of a reason why? Is this a problem with the application itself, the phone, or the storage card? Has anyone else successfully installed these apps on their storage cards? Let me know.

Image: SanDisk product images

Post from: EveryJoe

Problems Installing Mobile Apps on Phone

Prior to using Evernote I was using a combination of simple text files and Google Notebook to organize websites and other things I’d find online.

The Evernote application has been great. Mainly because it allows me to add items through the stand-alone application, the website if I’m on someone else’s computer, there’s an application for my mobile phone to use, and I can even send things to my Evernote notebook via twitter as well. How much better could it get?

Because of a tweet from geechorama who let me know there’s a way to import everything I had in my Google Notebook into Evernote nice and easy. Just visit this blog post on the Evernote website to find out how, and of course, while you’re there, go ahead and sign-up for your own account with Evernote.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Import Google Notebook to Evernote

1. Create notes, take snapshots, attach existing photos to notes, and record audio on iPhone and allow it to be sent to the Evernote service without the use of emails.

2. It also gives you one-click access to your Evernote Web account for full-featured searching, even by tags and attributes.

Check more details here.

Other updates about the Evernote include the following:

- Evernote for Windows has a revamped note view

- Evernote has eleased updates to all major clients, with tons of bug fixes and improvements

- Evernote now has a Facebook fan page.

- Evernote now has 175,000 users.

All in all, this translates to better service. Nice work Evernote!

Post from: EveryJoe

Evernote for IPhone released

What’s new in Evernote?

- PDF support
- Encryption on Mac and Windows
- Drag-n-drop in Evernote Web
- New blog/Facebook widget for easy sharing of public notebooks
- Flock browser extension
- Faster synchronization

Other updates includes an easier way to upload photos using your mobile phones- check it our here

Post from: EveryJoe

Some updates on Evernote

You can use it online or from the desktop – Mac or PC but no Linux, which is kind of sad.

You might have noticed that I really liked Evernote and this is because I really do. For me its practical when doing research and taking notes from the Web. And I have some invites left if anyone is interested.

Post from: EveryJoe

Evernote – a weapon worthy of the constant infophile

It is quite simple to install. Just drag Google Readers’ Note in Reader to your browser. Voila! its installed.

Sharing posts, pages and other such things is done with a click on the brower and one can write down notes using Notes page.

Interesting now I have Evernote and Note in Reader in my web browser. Both able to capture but for different purposes. At least for me.

What is interesting though is the Your Notes feature of Google Reader. Aside from annotating pages, post and sites that have been captured it can be posted on its own. Making it somewhat Twitter-like ? Well, It does remind of Twitter.

Post from: EveryJoe

Google Reader new feature is share and share