Some of my favourite Internet tools for raising a voice

The Voice of the Martyrs is committed to be an effective and reliable source of information and support for and about the persecution of Christians on the Internet. At the same time, we work hard at keeping our expenses down and working an efficiently as we can.  I thought that I might share with you some of the tools that I find especially helpful in doing as much as we do, given our limited resources and staff.

Blogs: We are committed to the value of blogging and have been fro several years.  Our main blog page is www.persecutedchurchblog.com.  We also have a theological research site at www.theologyofpersecution.com.  Both are Blogger sites, a free service operated by Google.  Easy to use and reliable, we have been quite happy with what we can do with a little tweaking here and there.

Blog writing: The easiest way that I have found to write and upload blogs to Blogger is a free program from Microsoft called Windows Live Writer. Without it, the process can be a bit cumbersome. Live Writer makes the process simple and gives you options, especially with editing links and pictures, that you cannot do otherwise.

RSS Feeds: Increasingly I get my news updates via RSS feeds rather than by email.  With Google Reader, I am able to go though dozens of stories in a matter of minutes throughout the day.  It is a real time saver that also allows me to add comments to stories for my staff to read who also use the program.

Twitter: As many of you know, I love Twitter. The best tool I have found for both twittering and organizing my tweets is TweetDeck, a safe, free, and reliable third party application.  If you do most of your twittering on your computer (like I do) this is the program to use, rather than doing it off of the Twitter site itself (which is too often slow is responding).

Browser: The browser I use the most is still Windows Internet Explorer 8, not because I think it the best but because it is the most popular and I need to see what others see when they look at our websites.  I am increasing fond of the latest version of Chrome by Google.  With the coming of Google Wave (which I am looking forward to), I suspect Chrome is going to become much more popular than it presently is.

So there are some of my tools.  Do you have any suggestions or tools that you find helpful?  Love to hear from you.  One caveat though; please don’t contact me asking me to help you know how to download or use these programs.  I am self-taught on all of these programs and hence, I just use them; I’m not always sure how I do it.