For the last year or so I’ve been using portable versions of popular open source software applications installed on a USB Flash drive. It’s brilliant! I just plug the flash drive into any Windows PC, anywhere and I have instant access to my e-mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird), web browser (Mozilla Firefox), office suite (OpenOffice.org), FTP Client (FileZilla) and much, much more. It’s like being in my own office… only not.

Now these portable applications have been bundled into a Portable Apps Suite that’s simple to install on any removable drive, and provides a handy launcher in the Windows taskbar that gives you easy access to all of your portable applications.

It’s the perfect solution for a writer on the go.

I can carry all of my current work, and the applications I need to work on it, around with me on my USB flash drive. I’m always ready to meet that deadline, no matter where I find myself!

What’s more I have all my browser bookmarks, saved passwords, e-mail and account settings ready to go. No more remembering addresses, login details or struggling with awkward webmail interfaces.

And because they’re all open source applications I have no software licensing headaches.

Give Portable Apps a try, and pretty soon I bet you’ll be wondering how you managed without them!

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Maintaining this blog just got a lot easier thanks to a neat little Firefox add-on called ScribeFire by Performancing software.

It’s a free, full-featured blog editor that integrates seamlessly with Mozilla’s outstanding browser Firefox.

Screenshot of ScribeFire in action while writing this post….

Basically it adds a little icon to the bottom corner that pops up a WISYWIG blog editor in the bottom half of the Firefox browser window. It lets you write and edit your blog posts whenever and wherever you want, while you continue to surf the web in the top half of the browser. You can even fire it up offline and write posts for submission to your blog later on.

It can handle multiple blogs, works with all popular blogging platforms and is a piece of cake to use.

Best of all, like Firefox it’s completely free.

Give it a try… it makes it so much easier to keep your blogs up-to-date.

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