I was recently away when my blog broke. A plug-in had somehow broken down, became corrupt and an embarrassing PHP error was seen on the top of every page. Worse yet the admin section wouldn’t work period. The solution was simple right? Log in via FTP and delete the corrupt plug-in.

Unfortunately Murphy’s Law was at work. The computer I had access to had no FTP client (I couldn’t install one/didn’t want to take the time). My two options were to wait till I got home to fix it, or I could use an online FTP client.

I love Firefox and I love extensions!

There I said it. I am an extension junkie!

I did a clean install today on a new laptop and I decided to document some of my favorite Firefox extensions. But before we get into the list …

I wanted to warn you that each additional extension you install uses more memory and can slow down your Firefox or computer. So try out as many as you want, keep what you need and disable/uninstall the ones you don’t to keep your fox running nice and quick.

Hey MUO Readers have I got a sweet suite of free tools for you network admins and regular end users. Being in the networking world for so long I have loads of tools in my admin tool box (My USB Stick). But recently a fellow tech blogger Paul Bauer introduced me to a nifty program that has more than 175 applications and features.

Did I stutter?

There are so many applications in here that I can not even begin to list all of them here. It puts A LOT of tools at my fingertips in its < 25mb install The program is aptly named Net Tools 2008 and it was written by Mohammad Ahmadi Bidakhvidi.

Bloggers, there are lots of things you’ve to keep an eye on, and most of the time, you’ll need the help of different programs for different needs. Sure, there are more web tools for the job, but nothing can get to give you the convenience and speed that desktop applications offer. So, here goes a list of over 30 handpicked application, that can possibly increase a blogger’s productivity.

Desktop Blogging Clients

Post to your blog straigth from the desktop.

I have recently begun to move all my photos from Flickr back to my own website. I was encouraged to begin this huge task when I was introduced to the freeware program Web Album Generator.

I figured this would be a good time to introduce it to Make Use Of readers, what with the holidays approaching and your photo-taking likely to increase.

Wordpress Pluggins: Part One

Last year it sounded all so easy and routine when I said to myself “let’s move my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Should be a piece of cake”.

Famous last words.

One year on and three attempts later, my blog is now finally on the Wordpress platform. I now feel like I need a long holiday.

Finally my hunt is over. Aibek, the main author of MakeUseOf told me when I first started being a guest writer that there is a “free version for everything”. So I sought out to replace any of the desktop applications that I used with free (and preferably open source) desktop only programs.

I don’t feel ashamed that I had paid for these programs since they did provide useful services to me until recently. Now I know better. Here are the results (please note I tried several other options before deciding on these applications):

(1) Office Software

If you have your own website, most likely you will be used to the regular task of transferring numerous files to the website from your computer. Whether it is an image, a document, a HTML page or a zipped attachment, it can be pretty tiring transferring them one by one if you are using a simple uploading tool provided by your web hosting company. This is where a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client comes in extremely handy as it can do a bulk upload of files from your computer to a web domain (or vice versa) at the click of a button.