10 Free Software Packages I Cannot Live Without - #TipsTuesdays 31

There are some pieces of software that run on my computer on a daily basis that are not simply the obvious ones like Word and Photoshop and McAffe. I find them very useful, so I thought I would share.. What's even better is all of them are FREE :).

10 Free Software Packages I Cannot Live Without

Some of these I use solely for work, some solely for pleasure, but nearly all of them are all started up almost every day.

Calibre - eBook Management Software

Calibre not only manages all your ebooks for you, including your devices if you wish, but it also converts between formats that do not have DRM. If you wish to read your Kindle books on your PC in PDF format, Calibre can convert them for you in a flash. It will even do them in bulk, just leaving out the ones with DRM.

It has a very use friendly interface and it updated regularly. There are also plugins, for example, one that can help you keep your Goodreads profile up to date or another that can download fanfiction for you etc.

It is completely free to download and use, with a donate button for those who can afford to give a little back to the creator.

PSPad - Text Editor

PSDPad is a freeware editor that allows you to edit all sorts of text based files. For example it is very good at HTML editing and CSS editing as well as simple text file editing. It allows you to have as many files open as you wish at a time and it's search functions are very easy to use. This is my go to text editor.

As you can see it has a great coloured interface and you can have the text wrap or continue all on one line as I have in the above image.

As I said, the software is free and they also have a donate button for those who can afford to give a little for such a useful program.

Audacity - Recording Software

This is the software I use to make all the recordings for SoundCloud and Youtube. It has a very user friendly interface, everything is easy to adjust and understand. Best of all it has a really useful noise removing filter that comes in very handy when recording anything. All you have to do is remember to record some silence at the beginning of your recording and then it can remove the underlying hum from everything.

It's completely free, with the usual donate option and it has all sorts of plugins, including saving to mp3. This is a great piece of software for those new to recording and those who have been doing it for a while.

Malwarebytes - Anti-Malware

This piece of software is brilliant. It is the only one that is not 100% free, but the premium version is well worth it.

If you download it for free it will scan your computer and remove any malware from it. It is a good idea to do it twice or even three times the first time you use it, because malware can be tricky, but it is very good at disinfecting any machine.

If you pay for the premuim version it also runs realtime and prevents any new infections. It blocks malicious sites known for trying to add malware to your machine and it also scans once a day like a virus checker to make sure nothing slipped past. It even warns about software that isn't technically malware, but that you might not be aware of or want on your system.

yWriter - Novel Writing Assistant

Now if you've been here before I know you've heard me mention yWriter before. It is a great free novel writing package which is being updated all the time. I love it so much I wrote an entire post about it here, last year.

Once again it's free, but you can register it for $11.95 to help the developer spend more time making it even whizzier :)

FileZilla - FTP Software

With the cloud and Google drive and everything else out there these days, FTP seems a bit old and clunky, but I still use it regularly. Well, these days sFTP - so it's secure. I use it to update our Wittegen Press website and to upload files for use in posts on sites that do not offer large storage space etc.

I've been using FileZilla for years now and it's a very reliable FTP solution. It has a nice site manager functionality and it has clear and precise error messages if anything goes wrong. Best of all it's free. As ever there is a donate option to help the developers keel developing.

VLC Media Player

VLC is quite simply the best media player for just about everything and it's free. It will play everything; it plays most codecs without needing to fiddle around and download anything; it can repair files; it runs on literally everything.

I have never looked back since I first downloaded this player and I have never needed to look for anything else. It is distributed and maintained by a non-profit org which you can donate to if you wish.

Nitro Reader - PDF Reader

The simple reason I love this PDF reader is one function it has that is so very, very useful. You know when a friend of a colleague sends you a PDF and you need an image from it? Nitro lets you export all the images from any PDF document. It's brilliant.

There seems to be a pro version and a free version of this now. I have the free version and it's really good, does everything I wish it to.

KeePass - Password Safe

This program helps generate safe passwords and then keeps them for you so that you don't have to remember them all. It's really useful - just never, ever lose your master password :)

It's completely free and even open source, with the usual donate button if you feel so inclined.

DVD Profiler - DVD library

When I first used this software it was completely free, these days it's free up to 50 DVDs, but then you have to buy it. Since it's only $14.95, it doesn't exactly break the bank :).

I've been using this for a long time and it's very, very good and I couldn't keep track of my DVDs and Blu-rays without it. You can add you DVDs in several ways - the easiest being by EAN (barcode), but you can do it by title and inserted disc as well. The database online is huge and many users help to keep it up to date as well, so it's forever growing.

You can also upload your collection so that you can give the links to friends so they can see what you have. It even has borrowing facilities for you can keep track of who has what. I wouldn't be without it.

Do you have any little gems of free software you use all the time?

How To Display the Blogger Labels Widget on a Separate Label's Page - #TipsTuesdays 15

So I reorganised all my Blogger labels at the weekend because they were messy and not very helpful and I also looked into how to Display Blogger labels on their own page (mine is called Blog Topics), like the tags page on LJ so they were easier to see. I had a few issues, so I decided to write it up.

How To Display the Blogger Labels Widget on a Separate Label's Page

Now blog labels are very useful to find topics about which we might be interested or to track down our own posts without scrolling through the whole list. I believe we often use them straight from the posts on which they have been placed to find like posts, but Blogger also offers a widget so we can display the labels in our blog layout as well.

If we look at a screen shot of my blog I have this widget on my left side bar and I have called it Blog Topics:

click to enlarge

However, until Sunday, this list was much, much bigger and very disorganised. What I did over the weekend was give all my posts what I like to refer to as Major Topics and then Sub Topics, where the Sub Topics are much more specific and the Major Topics are more an overview. Only the Major Topics are now listed in the sidebar.

However, I did not wish to lose the functionality of all the Sub Topics in a list as well.

All the topics, Major and Sub are now listed on the Blog Topics page which I created at the same time. As you can see in the following image, which is just a subsection screen capture of that page, there are many more topics listed, but they are much more useful for finding individual posts.

click to enlarge

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Being a complete beginner when it comes to editing Blogger in any way except directly through the menus, I needed to do some research and it seems I am definitely not the only person who wants to do similar things. I had to edit my Blogger Template directly and I used this very helpful article to find out how to do it: Blogger-Hints-and-tips - How to Edit Your Blogger Template.

Then I used the following article to find out what-part-of and how-to edit the template so that I could make it do what I wanted it to: Blogger-Hints-and-tips - Displaying Gadgets Only on the Home Page. However, this post doesn't quite cover everything specifically and I found a few hang ups so I am going to create my own How-To post which will also list the other steps I took.

Re-Organise Your Labels:

Now your labels might be already beautifully organised, but mine weren't so the first thing I had to do was that. Doing this first will make choosing what labels go where much easier for us and means we won't have to do it twice. Bloggers labels can be a real pain and I had no idea how to change them, so I'm including that information as well.

How to Change Your Labels:

1. Go to Posts in your Blogger back end.
2. Choose the label you wish to edit from the drop down

   

   Label select drop down.

3. Select all posts and add the new label using the "New Label" option in the Add/Remove Label Drop Down Menu as show below (if you put a * in front of a label, it will appear above normally alphabetically sorted labels).

   

   Add/Remove Label Drop Down Menu

4. Use the Add/Remove Label Drop Down Menu again to choose the label you wish to remove and it will remove it from all selected posts.

DO NOT do this in the opposite direction because all the posts will disappear from the list you are looking at since they will no longer have the search label and then you will have to search them all out again by hand. Trust me, this is a pain in the bottom - I had to do it a couple of times :).

Adding the Labels Gadgets:

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1. Choose Layout from the main Blogger Dashboard menu.
2. Click "Add Gadget" in the side bar where you wish to add the main Labels gadget and pick it from the options.
3. Go in to this Gadget and choose the Selected Labels option, choosing all your Main Topics from the list offered.
4. Repeat the adding Gadget process and move the gadget to the position in the Main section above the Blog Posts.
5. Go in to this Gadget and choose the selected labels option and pick just one - this will mean the gadget is not obtrusive while you are making the other changes.
6. Edit this Gadget again and maximise the edit window and look at the URL listed at the top, it will look like this and you will need the widgetId at the end shown below in red (it will probably be something like Label2) (once you have it, just cancel the edit):
   https://www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=8918688759465977896&action=editWidget&sectionId=main&widgetType=null&widgetId=Label2

Add Your New Topics Page:

I'm sure most of us have done this many times, but I'm including it for completeness.

1. Choose Pages from the main Blogger Dashboard menu.
2. Click New Page and create your new one. You don't need to add any content to it.

Editing Your Template:

The first 3 steps of this are how to edit your static template, if you are using a Dynamic template you will need to check the article I mentioned above at this link. You can tell which you are using by looking at the Template page.

1. Choose Template from the main Blogger Dashboard menu.
2. Always BACKUP your template before you do anything else using the Backup/Restore button then make sure you save it somewhere safe in case you mess up and want to restore it.

   

   Backup/Restore button

3. Click Edit HTML under the "Live on Blog" to open the raw template code.
4. Use the "Jump to Widget" option to go to your Gadget using the ID you recorded when adding it. The code should look something like this:

   

   Click to enlarge and read

5. Under the line that says <b:includable id="'main'> add the following line:
   
   <b:if cond='data:blog.url == &quot;http://tashasthinkings.blogspot.com/p/blog-topics.html&quot;'>
   Replacing the URL in red with the URL of the page you created as your topics page - as you can see mine is imaginatively called Blog Topics :). ALWAYS use the .com version of the URL, not the .co.uk one, because it won't work - it took me a whole day to find out why my condition was never being hit.
6. Just before the line which says </b: includable> at the end of the widget, put in the following code:
   
   <b:else/>
   
   <style type='text/css'>
   #Label2 {display:none !important;}/*remove blank space that the gadget leaves*/
   </style>
   </b:if>
   Changing the Label2 part in red to the id of your widget.
7. Use the Preview Template option, your new Labels Gadget just above your main posts should have disappeared.
8. Save the Template.

I also added the new Blog Topics page to my main menu at the top and added a new HTML/text widget in just above the Major Topics widget in the side bar to point people at the more detailed topics should they want to see them like so.

And there you have it, how I rearranged my blog labels to make them more useful :). Of course you can choose different ways of arranging the labels and different criteria for the labels you have in your side bar, but, hopefully, this will help have all your blog topics in their own page should you wish to.

We can do the same with any other widget since the principle also works for any of the Blogger Gadgets, simply choose the correct widgetId and the correct page URL when editing the code.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.

---

Authors - win a month's stay in a castle for NaNoWriMo 2016 via Derek Murphy (book designer and author).

Click to Enter

(occasionally you see a page not found, but wait a second and it will redirect you to the right place - I think sometimes the server is overloaded)

Audacity - The Wonderful Free Cross-platform Recording Software

I'm part of a promotions group called BooksGoSocial - they have very reasonable prices and will tweet about your book and promote it on their mailing list and lots of other wonderful things. However, the best thing I have found about this promotion service is their author group. I am learning so many things thanks to the advice of other authors and the wonderful author who started the whole thing: Laurence O'Bryan.

One of the things BooksGoSocial has to help their members promote their books is a SoundCloud Channel for book excerpts.

That got me thinking because SoundCloud offers recording options, but I always like to get things perfect before going anywhere near online. I know lots of people already know about Audacity, but I thought I'd make a post about it anyway for those who don't.

Audacity is the answer for anyone trying to record sound quickly and easily. There are many wonderful things about it, and here is a list of why I love it.

• Great user interface - very straightforward
• Multiple tracks
• Noise reduction filters
• Lots of other filters
• Easy set-up
• Exports to mp3
• Is FREE unless you wish to donate
• They have a wiki with all the tutorials and help you need.
• They also have a manual with everything

I used to use a headset mic to record, which works perfectly well, but now I use this ProSound USB Podcast and Vocal Microphone, which gives a much clearer sound. Mine came from Maplin, but they are available all over.

With the noise reduction filter, however, standard headset mics work fine.

This is a detailed post by How To Podcast with lots of useful information: Audacity Tutorial for Podcasters. There are also many other useful posts on the web, just ask Google :).

No1 tip (found on a podcasting group):

The first thing to do when making any voice recording with Audacity is to record several seconds of silence. The most useful thing I ever use is the noise reduction filter and you have to set up a noise profile for this to work. The recording of silence is in fact the noise you will later remove, so I always make sure to never skip this step. This part of the wiki tells you what to do after that.

The Wonders of WordPress that I Never Realised

For a very long time I thought WordPress was just a blogging platform because we used it once on a site we had running and that was all it was at the time. However, when Soph and I rebuilt our website (WittegenPress.com) we found out just how wrong we were.

WordPress is not simply a blogging platform, it's a whole content management system with wonderful plugins and everything you could possibly need to build a site quickly, easily and in just the way you want. We were using Joomla before and compared to that WordPress is a dream.

If you would like to know the details of how we rebuilt WittegenPress.com then we created a post on that site about exactly how we did it: How We Built This Site (wittegenpress.com) With WordPress.

However, I'd like to talk about some of the advantages I've found with at least one of the plugins, other than the obvious that they let us do what we wanted to do.

We used iThemes Security, which is a plugin which greatly enhances the security of your site. I would recommend it to everyone using WordPress. However, one of the features I had no idea it had when I first installed it, that I have found very useful is the 404 lockout option, and not just because it prevents people from randomly trying to find ways into our site.

What the 404 option does is lock out users who bring up too many 404 errors too quickly in succession, which might be an indication of them trying to find a security weakness to your site. It has many customisation options so you can make sure it doesn't happen when it shouldn't, for example you can make certain files like images, ignored by this functionality. However, what it also does is log all those 404s. This is incredibly useful because we migrated our site from one platform to another and have used .htaccess to reroute requests for pages that no longer exist.

I thought I had been very thorough in making sure I had all the redirects we needed, but the 404 log showed me just how wrong I was. There were whole sections I simply hadn't though about because they weren't URLs I ever used. Over the last few days I have been watching the 404 logs and then adding required URLs to the .htaccess file so that all URLs which are still current go to the right places.

It also showed me that part of the SEO plugin we were using wasn't working and allowed me to fix it.

NanoWriMo - day 2 - going well do far :)

So nano is going well so far. I have completed my word count for both days and have lots of ideas to keep going. At this point I am pacing myself because I don't want to burn out. The novel idea is still percolating in the back of my brain so I don't want to run out of what I know before the rest has had a chance to grow :).

Was nattering to Rob about it over breakfast this morning and he gave me a wonderful idea for the spaceship :).

Hope everything is going well for all my NanoWriMo friends too.

BTW if anyone wants a copy of my variable Nano spreadsheet it's here: Word Count Spreadsheet.

It does the same things as the Nano stats page, but allows you to have:

• a variable number of days, 
• a variable word count 
• a total before start date (so if you have some scenes already written that are not part of your word count you don't have to try and remember to take that off every time you update your total).

Here's a screen grab of what the sheet looks like.