Software You Can't Afford To Miss
The Beatles once sang, “Woke up, got out of bed/ Dragged a comb across my head/ Found my way downstairs and drank a cup/ And looking up, I noticed I was late.” It could be said that this song is about an adult webmaster. For many webmasters their day is wall to wall activity and they are buried in work and ideas. Many webmasters take advantage of some software to help make their workload easier to get through and their day to run more smoothly. In this article I will discuss some of these programs, what they do and how they can help you. So for give me John, Paul, George and Ringo, but without some of these programs it might be me who blew his mind out in a car.
STATS
Many webmasters promote a lot of different sponsors. Last year alone I got checks from 30 different programs and there are people and companies out there that use many, many more programs that I do. A person could spend a couple hours a day just checking stats. The two most popular programs out there to help in this area are Stats Remote www.statsremote.com and Unified Stats www.unifiedstats.com. The primary difference is that Unified Stats is free and Stats Remote is a subscription program. Unified Stats makes up for being free by having sponsor placed ads inside the program where Stats Remote doesn’t. As far as features they seem to be pretty similar with a different layout and a few different features. Both are great time savers. You enter in the info for all of your programs and it constantly scans them and keeps track of all of your traffic and sales. All you have to do is open it up and you can see all you traffic and money earned in one place without having to log into dozens of different sites. Both have good websites that give you the details and Stats Remote also has a free trial to check out.
DESIGN
Based on what the webmasters I talked to have said Adobe Dreamweaver is the HTML editor of choice and Photoshop is the graphics program of choice. I use both of these programs and they are amazing to use, packed with features and are very powerful, but the learning curve on them can be very steep. But once you learn how to use them they can really expand what you are capable of doing.
OTHER
There is a mass of different programs out there that can help you do things faster and easier. First off a thumbnail program is a must. Some people will use Photoshop, but if you don’t have it, or you don’t know how to use it then a thumbnail program can really help you out. I personally use Thumbnailer (www.smalleranimals.com) and there is also Comus Thumbs (www.comusthumbs.com) Easy Thumbs (http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs) and Image Thumbs (http://www.gdps.dk/products/imgThumb.shtml) among others. I have never used any of them but Thumbnailer so I can’t say how good or bad they are. Thumbnailer itself is really good. It has a lot of functions and plug-ins and is very flexible and pretty easy to use. With one of these programs you can make 100’s of thumbs in mere minutes.
Another popular program is Roboform (www.roboform.com). This program allows you to auto-fill common information like your name and email into forms. This can make submitting sites and galleries a lot fast.
Speaking of submitters there are gallery auto-submitters. These are programs like Chameleon Submitter (www.chameleonsubmitter.com), Advanced Submitter (www.advancedsubmitter.com) and Dream Submitter (www.dreamsubmitter.com). There are others, but these seem to be the most popular. These programs allow you to submit your TGP galleries to 100’s of sites quickly and automatically. There are good and bad points to these programs that could take an entire article to discuss. All I can say is that used properly they are a valuable tool. Used wrongly they can cause you big problems.
Some other programs webmasters mentioned are:
pUTTY (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) – This is a nice easy to use SSH and telnet client.
ACDsee (www.acdsee.com) – This is a great program that you can use to view and organize content.
Rename It (http://www.scp-solutions.com/renameit.html) – super easy to use program that you can use to bulk rename files.
Google Toolbar (www.google.com) this can be used to easily check the PR of your sites.
These are just a few ideas for software you can use to help you keep things organized and streamline you work. There are many other programs out there that you can use, the ones mentioned here were the most commonly mentioned ones when I asked fellow webmasters. Give them a try and hopefully they will help you increase your productivity and your income.
Reader Comments: (2 posts)
|
Eva says: I am foevrer indebted to you for this information. |
October 26th, 2012 at 2:53am EST Rating:  |
|
Espn says: You?ve got it in one. Couldn?t have put it betetr. |
June 30th, 2011 at 3:35am EST Rating: |
