Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like free stuff. The great thing about anything that’s free is that if it disappoints you, you’ve essentially lost nothing except the time it took you to check it out. Today I’m going one step further to save you that time and give you a list of online freebies that are not only really, really cool but also useful and definitely worth taking a closer look at.

Let me start with what has been one of the most helpful tools for me business wise and personally as well: www.MemoToMe.com If you’re like me and have a gazillion things that you need to remember to do, this site’s services will be a godsend. Schedule a reminder for yourself, and you’ll get an email at the time that you specify. If it’s a weekly or monthly event, you can schedule it as such, and you’ll only have to do it once. There’s even the equivalent of a snooze button—you can get emails about the same event, say, three days in a row, just in case you’re one of those, you know, procrastinators… You can also upgrade to their platinum membership, where you have more control over the way your reminders look, you can send to more than one email address, and you can even send reminders to your cell phone. This is not free, but—and this is a big “but”—you set your own annual price. That’s right. You decide how much you think the service is worth, and that’s how much you pay. It doesn’t get much cooler than that.

I’m sure most of you have at least heard of the blogging/publishing platform Wordpress, but I couldn’t very well do a post on great free stuff without mentioning it, especially since it’s safe to say that even RTB wouldn’t be what it is without Wordpress. Outside of sites such as Blogger and Livejournal, it seems to be the most popular choice of bloggers, and for good reasons. Set-up is a breeze, and it can be customized to your heart’s content. Everything is absolutely free, including the tons and tons of plugins and add-ons that make Wordpress so much fun to play with. And you don’t even need to have a web space of your own to enjoy many of the advantages of this blogging tool—for anyone who wants to use Wordpress without paying a single dime, there’s Wordpress.com where you can get your own WP blog even more quickly and easily. Oh, and if you do decide to go with your own website and set it all up yourself, check out the Wordpress Basic workshop on AccessRomance that was hosted by the fabulous Frauke of Croco Designs along with some other WP experts. The workshop is now open to the public for reading with no forum registration needed. Easy peasy!

On a related topic, if you have your own website, be it a Wordpress site or a regular ol’ site with HTML pages, you’re most likely using some sort of FTP program to upload and download your files. I’ve been using FTP programs for close to 10 years, and until recently, I hadn’t found one that made me 100% happy. With as much uploading of files as I do, I need a smart FTP program with all the bells and whistles that’s at the same time easy to use. When my tech guy Walt (incidentally also the tech wiz who handles any issues on RTB—let’s give him a round of applause for all his hard work!) mentioned the open source project FileZilla, I was skeptical. Could a freebie do everything I needed from an FTP program? Short answer: Yes. Slightly longer answer: Yes, and then some. This is a program that’s so powerful and yet so simple that it’ll work just as well for a beginner as it would a professional. I’m in love!

Moving on to another open source project, this one of particular use for authors: phplist. A while back we were struggling with finding the best way to manage our clients’ mailing lists. The software we were using was a behemoth, an old and outdated kind of program that incidentally was also a terrible resource hog. Oh, and did I mention that the professional version with all the advanced features was not free? We eventually moved on to phplist and haven’t looked back. Now, installing, setting up, and using this program is not for beginners, unless you’re an adventurous amateur. But if you have the savvy or have an unsuspecting relative or friend who does, consider phplist for managing your mailing list and sending out professional newsletters. One word of caution, though: Make sure you know your web host’s policy on newsletter mailings. Because of spam problems, there are often limitations on what ways you’re allowed to build a mailing list and what ways you’re allowed to send out newsletters. When it comes to respecting your host’s terms of service, better be safe than sorry!

And speaking of nuisances like spam… Did you know there are free ways to protect your computer and your privacy? I’ve never been a fan of the most common for-purchase virus/spam/spyware protection. They always seem to be big programs that, seeing as they need to run in the background at all times, take up resources and slow down your computer. The free stuff is generally so much simpler and equally effective. For a great, free virus protection program, try AVG Anti-Virus Free. 9 out of 10 geeks swear by it—or at least, that seems to be the case. To detect and destroy of spyware and other kinds of malware that could slow down or even crash your computer as well as endanger your privacy, you have options such as Ad-Aware, Spybot – Search & Destroy, and Spysweeper. It’s always a good idea to routinely clean up your computer with at least two different spyware protection programs, since one might find stuff the other program didn’t, and that way you’ll cover the most ground.

These are my personal recommendations. I also asked some friends with know-how if they had anything to add, so here are a few more.

Author Alison Kent recommends Open Office (free equivalent of Microsoft Office)

Author Lydia Joyce recommends:

-Zone Alarm (a firewall, for even more protection)

-Windows Defender (spyware protection)

-McAfee Site Advisor (even more protection!)

-IRFAN View (open source image/photo editor)

-Google Docs (free online word processor and spreadsheet)

-KompoZer (open source HTML editor)

And finally, Lydia also mentioned Ubuntu, the open source Linux based operating system. If you decide to install this, however, you’re braver than me!

Now, bring on the freebies. If you have anything to add, feel free (pun intended) to do so!