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Im like everyone else and love to have something for free, though if you were to believe what others say you should go with dreamweaver, photoshop e.t.c for the best products. Don’t get me wrong they are great but what about the average blogger who can’t afford to pay hundreds of pounds on software.

The answer is use the free stuff floating around the internet. There is a lot of rubbish out there but also a lot that can stand proudly next to their bigger brothers.

Im going to list some of the best software out there that can really help to improve your blogging as well as doing it for free.
If you listen to a lot of the top bloggers they write down everything first using notepad and then spell check, check for errors e.t.c so you dont have Microsoft Office and you cant afford to pay for it. Try the following it does just about everything that Microsoft Office does but for free.

Office Tool For Writing

OpenOffice

Ive been using this since the first release and its never failed to impress me, you can use it for spreadsheets, word documents, drawing, presentations, slideshows e.t.c the list is endless and offers everything other pricey products can offer.

OpenOffice

Browsers

A browser can be fun but it can also cause a lot of problems, trying to get your blog to look right on every browser can be a pain. But what browsers should you be using and why.

Firefox

I think this is one of the best browsers out there and is really worth getting for your blogging as some of the plugins you can get for it are worth their weight in gold.

Plugins to use

This is my top ten

1 Scribefire

ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

2: Monster Blog Sack

The Monster Blog Sack toolbar allows users to surf blogs (according to your categories of interest,) sack (a MBS rating system,) tag, search, share, and add blogs to favorites.

3: Blogger Bar

Brings the power of Blogger into a single toolbar.

4: Submit’em now

Blog and RSS Feed Submitter. It already have build in database, so you can submit your blog to 100 blog and rss directories!

5: Snap Shots

With Snap Shots™ Add-On for Firefox, you can bring the functionality of Snap Shots to the websites you surf every day, enhancing Firefox with the right content at the right place and time. * When in you search in Google or Yahoo!, mouse over the links and get videos for YouTube, summaries for Wikipedia articles, product descriptions from Amazon and more * Mouse over profiles in MySpace and see pictures and descriptions without clicking away from the page you’re on * Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database become even more useful as links turn into summaries * Plus upgraded functionality on the major blog platforms, Xanga, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, The Drudge Report, and many other sites.

6: Deepest Sender

Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too, with support for more stuff to come. Note that the actual Deepest Sender website will always have the most up to date version.

7: Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs is a personal search engine for your browser. Breadcrumbs saves your visited pages and allows you to search your pages from the search toolbar. It stores data locally to protect your privacy. Breadcrumbs also allows permanent offline browsing.

8: OneClick Installer for Wordpress

OneClick is a companion extension for the OneClick plugin for wordpress. It allows you to install any wordpress theme or plugin from the context menu of firefox. This extension requires the OneClick plugin installed on your wordpress blog.

9: Adsense Notifier

Displays your Adsense earnings on the statusbar.

10: Adsense Preview

Internet Explorer

Its not that bad really…honest…it gets better with each revision and 50 updates. But it is a must seeing as 70 percent of users still use it.

Flock

Its not got a big share of the market but it is well worth looking at, it has tons of blogging features built in and is a must even just to try out.

HTML

Onto html editors, I know alot of you dont want to use them but they can realy help your blogging and teach you a thing or 2 about how to do little things like change text size and font.

First up is PageBreeze a FREE html editor that is award winning as well as an excellent piece of software.

A nother free one is coffee cup for doing simple html editing these are both fantastic products and well worth downloading, being able to preview what you have done is excellent and can clearly show you what you have written and what it does.

Photo Editing

There is only really one tool for this, it can edit, optimize, convert and is totally free IrfanView

But why is editing so important, for a start if you optimize your photos and images your blog will load faster (unless you are a widget magnet) It is also a great for making a nice header, favicon or logo for your blog to give your blog a bit of a unique look.

Favicon

Favicons have been covered here before and I have shown why you should have one. After you have used the above software to make a favicon you need to make it into the right size and optimize it, you can use Clic for creating and resizing and is an excellent tool besides the free pricetag.

Blogging Software

Of course you will nedd some blogging software and if you require free hosing to go with it the places to go are wordpress.org and blogger , they may be subdomains that you get but they are free and offer everything there in front of you to use. You can also use both with your own domain name.

Social Networks

This may sound a bit strange but you need traffic and is what you really need as a blogging tool. Some of the best places to go are

Blogcatalog

MyblogLog

Cre8buzz

Myspace

Facebook

If you want a bigger list, I have listed 50 Sites for Gaining traffic here.

SEO

Want to see your pagerank then use google but if you want a toolbar that offers over 30 SEO tools at the click of a button then use Rankquest

Not an SEO tool as such but HTML Enforcer can be used for mass editing and could be used to create links to documents easily.

FTP

You want to upload your images e.t.c if you are using self hosted blogging platforms so you will need an FTP programme to do this and one of the best free ones is TuFTP which offers an explorer like interface that is very easy to use.

File Storage

If you want file storage for images, files that you don’t want on your web server then diigo is fantastic their free accountoffers upto 2gb of storage and is easy to use.

That should be it for everything you need besides a spellchecker Statcounter and feedburner if you can think of anything else you think I should add here drop me a message or leave a comment, I will add it and then link back to your website as an extra bonus.

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