28 Nov 06 Useful Tools

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big fan of much Microsoft. It took a long time for me to warm at all towards Windows XP, and even now there is much about it to mutter about – not least the rigaramole that sometimes confronts you when upgrading, or when the registry gets corrupted beyond salvation, and no restore point, or registry backup will save you, as Windows refuses to load at all, even in safe mode, and in one recent case, the CD refused to even put a new copy of Windows on the drive as it kept finding the old, corrupted one, and stopping with a BSOD.

Anyway, a slight redemption comes with Windows Live Writer. I am using it now, and it is a very easy and useful tool for blogging. Simply add the Blog URL, your username and password, and it goes off and finds your blog downloads the template, and you’re ready to blog! If you can use WordPad you can use, Live Writer, it’s that easy! You can even drag and drop pictures off your desktop or explorer into it whilst you type, and set margins around them; add live links; add tags.

A brand new tool I have just (in the last hour) downloaded, is Diigo – yes that not misspelt. IT looks to be a useful bookmark saving type tool, much like del.icio.us – I’ll write more in this when I’ve played around with it for a while.