Everyone has their own set of tools that makes their day to day working life easier. Below I have made a list of the tools I use regularly and recommend to others.
- Notepad ++ – A great little text editor for windows (I use Kate in Linux). I pretty much hand code everything now so I spend alot of time using a text editor and Notepad ++ and Kate are the best in my opinion.
- VMware – For firing up Linux workstations or running background processes while you work, nothing beats vmware. Really great multi-platform solution which has made such a difference compared to when I used to dual-boot desktops.
- Putty – A ssh client which I use alot to zip in and out of servers. Simple but effective.
- Firefox – My browser of choice. I use the following plugins to make it exceptional:
a. Tree style tabs – means you can have tabs across the left hand side of your browser and have about 30 open without it being crowded. Having them at the top is retarted if you have a screen above 800×600 resolution.
b. Firebug – great for development, seeing what you messed up this time
c. FireFTP – a simple, easy to use ftp client
d. Modify Headers & User agent switcher – useful if you want to bypass mobile redirects etc. - Overplay VPN – Just click on a country to connect to and it will change all outgoing IP’s to that country so if a site displays ads based on geoip information you can see what’s running or check your own redirects. Also useful for when an affiliate offer redirects you to an adwall because you aren’t in their area.
- TeamViewer – Like remote desktop, really easy to use. I have a little Samsung N220 with a pixel 3QI screen which can be viewed clearly in bright sun light. I’ll fire up my main laptop which has the processor power and ram I need, leave that inside and then connect to it using Teamviewer from my N220 sat outside in the sunshine. I only got this setup arround Xmas but I am really looking forward to summer this year 🙂
- Thunderbird – Best email client IMO, I heart Mozilla, if you hadn’t noticed.
- Fireworks – A bit 1995 but this graphic design software which was originally brought out by Macromedia and then sold to Adobe where they messed it up is still what I know and use all the time. Banners, logos, animated gifs, it does everything I need and I’m not ready to change.
- Linux Mint – I used ubuntu for years but couldn’t get on with their new unity desktop at all. I switched to Mint about six months ago and have found it pretty impressive.
- Micro$oft Excel – Bit of a boring one but a spreadsheet is a wonderful thing for working out daily earnings, downloading conversion data and generall mixing about with numbers.
- Skype – I use it as much as a instant messager as I do for video chat. The affiliate industry seems to be running on skype more and more. I think they are in a great position to take a massive chunk out of the communications market over the next few years as other industries and general users catch on.
- Grep – great lil linux command line tool to search for words in a document. I use this alot to find mistakes or things that need changing. If you have a 500 page website you can search for a particular query string across the whole site within seconds.
- PHP & MySQL – A great combination for website frontends and database management. I use ruby for most backend stuff still because it reads like a book.
- Facebook Power Editor – You need Chrome to run this in the browser but it makes uploading and managing ad campaigns in Facebook a lot more simple. If only getting ads approved was so efficient. You can download it free from within the Facebook ads tab.
- JAH Simple PPC – A really cool little tool for building massive keyword lists for PPC campaigns. I should probably recode this and make a website out of it as I’m sure alot of people would find it handy.
What are your favourite tools of the trade?
