Portable Applications Bloggers Can’t Travel Without

I travel. I travel a lot. Not as much as some, but more than most. Usually I have my laptop with me, but occasionally, I’m caught off guard and have to stay somewhere without access to the tools I have become dependent upon for my business and my blogging. Three times this winter I was caught off guard in a snow storm or flood and was separated from my laptop.

I now carry with me a 5 gig small portable pocket drive stuffed with my essential, can’t-live-without blogging gear.

I found most of these on my own, but the Wikipedia List of Portable Applications features many of the must-have applications and tools all in one place.

A portable version of a program is sometimes the full version of the program with all the help and extra files (templates, graphics, import, export, and helpful but not used every day files) removed to slim it down to a smaller, more portable size. Others are a “lite” version of the program with the non-essential features removed. It does what it is designed to do all the time and the bells and whistles are stripped away.

There are two ways to use a portable application. You can save the downloadable and executable file to your portable drive or flash drive for installation when you need it on another computer, removing it when done, or you can install it to the portable drive to run directly from the drive, a fast and convenient way to get to work from any computer.

Mozilla Firefox is an essential tool for bloggers, web designers, and web browsing fans. They also offer Firefox Portable to take Firefox on the road.

Other portable applications and tools I can’t live without with my blogging and work are:

See Also

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• Thunderbird Portable (Email)
• Filezilla (FTP)
• NoteTab light or NoteTab Pro (Text Editor)
• PSPad Text Editor
• Foxit Reader (PDF Reader)
• OpenOffice Portable (office suite)
• GIMP Portable (Image Editor)
• Gyula’s Navigator (File Manager)

I don’t need a lot. In a pinch, a text editor and Firefox can get me through at a minimum.

Do you travel and take your blogging on the road? What tools can’t you live without? Do they have a portable version?

Lorelle VanFossen blogs about blogging and WordPress on Lorelle on WordPress and author of Blogging Tips, Tips Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.