OUR BLOGGING ESSENTIALS

Writing for blog isn’t always easy. Sometimes it could be time-consuming with all those photo editing, file-sharing, finding the right words, all done while discussing our plans for Living Loving’s development and offline-events.  Luckily we have some pretty useful tools that make things more simple, and we want to share it with you.

No, we were’nt going to give a “top 10 apps” or “best tools for blogging” or something-like-that kinda post because we’re not an expert on this area. We just want to share some apps, websites, and other stuff that helped us a lot during our blogging time. Some of these tools helps us to save time so we can run the blog more efficiently.

1. Thesaurus.com

This one helps a lot when we’re writing the post title, or looking for an event’s name, or when we wrote a post in english. I’m even using it now! :)) Who knows there’s so many synonyms for the word “home”, right? You can check the Indonesian thesaurus at sinonimkata.com.

2. Phoster

As you may have already guess from its name, this is a poster generator app. It’s simple and easy to use. You can choose from many cool poster templates, add some text, add a picture, put some filter on the picture, then, voila! You’ve made a modern-look poster in a short amount of time that can be used as your event announcement, e-invitation, or an e-cards for a friend’s birthday! Nike made some of our e-flyer using this app. Unfortunately this apps currently made for iPhone only. You can buy this app for $1.99 on iTunes App Store.

3. Trello

Trello is a free web-based project management application. The first time we knew this website was when we used it to discuss the progress of our new layout design. Andri, our IT guru, was the one who introduced us to this useful website. If you’re planning an event with your friends, doing some group task at your school/ office, or working on a collaborative project (like we do), you’ll find this app is very helpful. Trello is also available through Google Play Store and iTunes App Store.

4. Dropbox

One of our main problems is that we’re living in two different parts of the city, about 40 kilometres away from each other house. I live in East Jakarta, and Nike’s home is at South Tangerang. So we can’t always meet up when we want to share some files for the blog.

Thankfully, there’s Dropbox! Dropbox is a file hosting service–or the more popular term is–cloud storage. It’s a tool that lets us share files and photos easily. Files that are too big to be sent through e-mail. Just copy and paste the file directly from computer to our dropbox folder. Give it some time to synchronize, then we can access those files anytime anywhere just by logging in to our account. Dropbox is available for  iOS, Android, Blackberry OS, MacOS, and Linux.

5. Pixlr

Last but certainly not least, our most-useful tool: Pixlr! It’s a cloud-based free image editing tool. For a netbook or MacBook Air user, this is an easy way to edit photos without having to install any software onto your computer. We loves it because it can save our time when we need to edit a lot of photos for the blog, rather than to edit it on Photoshop.

We use the Pixlr Online version that available in 3 different tools. You can choose from Pixlr Editor: the first one that remarkably resembled Adobe Photoshop’s interface. Think of it as a portable Photoshop! And then there’s Pixlr Express, that lets you quickly crop, re-size, and fix any picture, remove red-eye, and whiten teeth. You can also choose from an array of effects, overlays, borders, and stickers. For a simpler version there’s Pixlr-o-matic, that features some retro effects and turn your photos into a vintage-looking image in less than a minute. Pixlr Express and Pixlr-o-matic are also available for download at iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.

So what about you? What is your favorite tools for blogging?