A Wolf with Feathers

No book review this week; I want to re-read the book before I review it and I never intended to do a book review every week anyway.

Today's post is going to be about useful pieces of software and websites. Everything I recommend in this post is free so all you need is the ability to download it and a computer and operating system capable of running it.



If you're reading this obviously you already have a browser, but in case you're looking for a new one my first recommendation is Firefox. I'm mainly recommending it because my next couple of recommendations will be add ons and so they'd be a bit useless to you if you weren't already using Firefox.

• Read it Later - Read it later is for those sites that you will bookmark and then read once, for example when bookmarking all the useful looking results from your google search so that you can then go through them at your leisure. It stops one time use only bookmarks cluttering up the rest of your bookmarks.
• Scrapbook - this add on enables you to capture web pages and then organise them in folders and sub folders. You can then export them if you want. Great for organising your research.
• Xmarks - remotely backs up your bookmarks. I used this when I got my newest netbook and it was wonderful. Easier than manually saving them and reinstalling them, especially since I never remember to save the file so my back up is hopelessly out of date. Don't worry - you can chose to limit it to bookmarks, not bookmarks and passwords if, like me, you find the idea of remotely backing up your passwords to be a little worrying.

And now for the rest of my recommendations -

• Mindola SuperNotecard - virtual index cards. I love these things. Once you get the hang of using them you can sort them, add references, group them by factor, and import and export your notes.
• yWriter - Before we start let me make it clear that anyone who tries to tell you you need special software for writing a novel is an idiot. Having said that, I love this. It is a handy way of keeping track of characters and locations and a timeline, which I need because otherwise characters randomly de-age or are in two places at the same time.
• Open Office - office suite including word processor, spreadsheet, and database. Basically it's Microsoft Office only with the ability to save in and open more formats and without that hefty price tag. You can save in .doc and .xls formats so don't worry about not being compatible with everyone else. I save most things as .doc since Word is so common, which means I can share with everyone.
• Semagic - a client for posting to most blogging sites. Brilliant for composing posts off-line or for composing long posts (and saving them as you go) like this one so that when the site or your browser crash just as you were about to hit post you don't lose everything. It also makes it easy to crosspost to multiple blogging sites. The only issue is if you use the same username on several sites you have to use a bit of lateral thinking to get it to save all of them.
• MoRun Sticker Lite - Post it notes for your computer screen. You can colour code them, change the priority of individual notes (the highest priority is equivalent to an always on top setting), and make them transparent or semi-transparent. Handy for reminders and to do lists.
• Word Count Tool - On-line word counter. I find both word and open office can't count, but in different ways, and for stories with a word limit or word minimum this is annoying. This has so far agreed with my actual manual counts so I trust it.
• MozyHome - unlike the other sites I can't give this a 100% recommendation, as it's the kind of thing you only really know how good it is when you need it and thank goodness I haven't yet. A free account lets you back up up to 2GB of files. I have it set to back all my fiction files up every night. Just in case.