Ten Web Applications For Bloggers in Developing Countries

Blogging in a developing country is often a lesson in patience, endurance and ingenuity. You have to deal with power outages, internet failures, unstable voltage that threatens to fry your computer, potential data loss and more. In the past few weeks I’ve learned all about this. Here are the tools that I use to stay connected in a largely unconnected areas…

01. Wordpress

When Wordpress 2.5 was released, it included a feature that I had been dying for since I started blogging…the ability to schedule posts to publish in the future. When the power or internet is out, I often write posts offline. Sometimes I only have my connection back for a few minutes so I’ll often save all my posts to the server and schedule them to post periodically throughout the day or week. This feature especially comes in handy when I’m traveling.

One of my most popular posts to date “The Popularity of Programming Languages in Africa” was posted and went viral (on Reddit.com) while I was hiking through the hills of rural Rwanda, miles away from a connection. Post-scheduling has enabled me to keep fresh content on this blog even when I myself am busy or preoccupied.

02. Evernote

Evernote is a tool that I wish had been around from day one of my professional blogging career. It’s like the swiss army knife of blogger tools. Need a screen capture? Got it. Need to store a selection of text? Got it. Need it all backed up securely? Got that too. It’s incredibly useful!

Essentially Evernote is a ‘notepad’ for all your web research activities. It stores images, text, links and notes locally but also backs them up remotely online for safe keeping. If your computer crashes, for instance, all your Evernotes can be recovered as soon as you’re back online.

03. NetNewsWire + NewsGator

NetNewsWire is a desktop RSS feed reader that syncs to an online service called NewsGator. This means your RSS feeds are always accessible, either from your computer or from the web. NetNewsWire also gives you the option to archive your feeds as local HTML files.

For me this is the ultimate research tool. I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds. I don’t read them all (I couldn’t I’d never get any work done!) but I do use it to quickly scan headlines and to find interesting topics to write about. The HTML archive is very cool because If I forget to bookmark something or if it somehow slips by me, simply doing a search for a keyword on my desktop will find any related articles from any blog I aggregate.

04. Twitter + Twitter Feed + Tweetdeck

Twitter is a trifecta of social web utility that I’m 100% in love with. It’s great for keeping tabs on contacts around the world and getting quick information from friends and colleagues. When combined with TwitterFeed, it serves as a way to re-syndicate my blog feed to the world. The Adobe air application TweetDeck allows me to interact with Twitter as if it were an IM client and saves me the distraction of having to constantly refresh a browser window.

But mostly I like Twitter because I can use to share information from almost anywhere at almost anytime, as long as I have a working mobile phone. When the power went out during Campala2008 I used SMS from my mobile phone to keep the liveblog alive.

05. Del.icio.us + Del.icio.us Toolbar

I use Del.icio.us (now Delicious.com) very similar to the way I use Evernote: for taking notes as I research topics and surf the web. Although Evernote is more feature-rich, Dil.icio.us is faster especially when combined with Del.icio.us Toolbar.

Del.icio.us Toolbar makes bookmarking web pages a two-click process, something that is incredibly time saving. Beyond that, the toolbar allows you to display your del.icio.us bookmarks just like normal bookmarks. As you add new content to del.icio.us, you can have your bookmarks update to correspond to the changes. Also, if you ever suffer from a failed hard drive all you need to do is download the toolbar again and it will repopulate your browser with all your favorite bookmarked links.

06. Google Gears

Google Gears is nifty tool that makes it possible to ‘use web apps offline’. Using a technique very similar to LAMP, it creates a localized browser and server that copies information from a Web App that is modified locally when you’ve lost connection. Once you’re back online, Gears remembers where everything should go and synchronizes the data.

Another reason I’m fond of Gears is that Wordpress has added integration with the service natively. With their ‘Turbo’ option, I can enable Gears to cache my blog locally which makes it faster to operate on a slow connection.

07. Gmail + Google Apps Suite

Everyone loves Gmail. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s secure. What makes it an essential tool for me is that it offers a completely passive storage and back-up experience. Whether I choose to use my desktop client Thunderbird or another web based email interface, I can rest easy knowing that Google has done all the work to make sure my data is secure, archived and always accessible. In the past year I’ve gone through two dead hard drives on my Macbook, there’s always an important email or two that I’ve forgotten to back up. With Gmail, so long as I never delete anything from the server, all my mail is there to be recalled.

Google Apps makes all the Gtools like GoogleDocs and Gmail available for your custom domain names for free. Again, what makes this appealing to me is the passive storage. All my domain names are configured with Google Apps for this reason.

08. LAMP/MAMP/WAMP/SAMP

LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. It a server bundle that, when localized to one computer, allows you to use and develop web applications offline. The derivatives MAMP, WAMP and SAMP are for different operating systems (Macintosh, Windows and Solaris respectively). I use MAMP on my Macbook for developing Web applications offline. The Appfrica.net blog theme was created that way. I’ve also downloaded the blog database so that if necessary I can run my blog completely locally…with no internet connection. This is a big help when developing new features.

09. Zemanta

Zemanta, which just scored a new round of funding from Union Square Ventures, is a huge time saving tool. It’s a browser-side plug-in that scans the context of your blog posts (even as you’re writing it) and offers up a ton of time saving shortcuts like related links, photos, wikipedia articles, blogposts and suggested tags. With the click of a few buttons it can help you format your post in a way that normally takes hours! For instance, if you’re writing an article about Google, Zemanta will find recent articles about Google from other blogs, photos, logos and more.

It works with all the major blog platforms including Wordpress, Livetype, Blogger, Drupal and more. When I had an abundance of time (and internet) I would usually just do all those things myself but Zemanta speeds up that process significantly.

10. World Time Server + World Clock Deluxe

When you live on the other side of the planet than most of your friends, family and professional contacts, it’s often hard to do the math when trying to figure out the time in various locations. WorldClockDeluxe allows me to quickly look at my desktop to see what the time is in every part of the world. This way I don’t accidentally call my mom at four in the morning!

WorldTimeServer is an application for scheduling meetings. You enter several locations and then the time for the meeting in the main location. WTS then calculates the time differences and lets you know what time it will be for everyone around the world who needs to be on your big conference call. I’ve come to use this one on a weekly basis to arrange meetings with contacts in the U.S.A, U.K., Africa and Asia.