This page was originally a blog post, but the more I wrote it the more I liked the idea of having running lists in a lot of areas. Some admittedly dorky, some terribly fun to use, most of it freely available or inexpensive. (As programs or services go away or I stop using them, I cross them out.)
Languages & Frameworks
Drupal I used this content management system to drive this blog and a ton of much, much larger sites. I think it's just awesome from a programmatic standpoint, and opensource at its core.
WordPress It is not The Best out there, but it sure is easy to manage. I use this blogging engine with several sites.
Software
Cool Iris (formerly PicLens)
I've used this for entire presentations, presenting photos & infograms from my Flickr account live in the meeting. It makes for one beautiful presentation.
Chicken of the VNC
Funny name, totally efficient.
Coda
This is probably the most elegant coding client I've ever used, and I've used a few. Fast, feature-packed, and it has JUST the tools I use every day. Awesome.
Jabber (with iChat)
You can set up your own instant messaging service with AV capabilities...) It's what makes my mostly-telecommute situation possible.
OmniGraffle Pro I was a hard-core Visio user for a few years there... OmniGraffle took me back to where I really should have been - focusing on the content. It does some pretty amazing things for presentations and diagras/visuals. Now, you have a learning curbe until you get the hang of Group/Ungroup and Lock/Unlock so the software doesn't mess with all of your manual decisions, but it's very intelligent and extensible.
Seesmic Desktop 2 My current desktop social client that allows multiple accounts and a pretty intuitive management console.
Skype When I'm trying to do a quick video chat with people outside of my company - or just phoning home while I'm on the road - I use Skype. The quality is consistently not-as-good-as a Jabber service, but acceptable. [When it's bad, it's very, very bad!]
Things I ascribe to the David Allen "Getting Things Done" school of thought about planned & unplanned work. Cultured Code's Things app helps me stayon top of my wide workload by providing a single inbox for all actionable, deferred, or delegated work.
Services
Basecamp My firm and clients use this service for task management.
Beanstalk Sure, you can manage your own git repository. But who wants to? Pricing is on par with that of private github accounts, with a lot of great ssh deployment features.
CoTweet
This is *the* best brand management tool out there for twitter presence. I love it. You can grant multiple users access to tweets on a particular account, delegate actionable @-mentions, even have a board where you see a bunch of individual keyword searches. It's missing integration of the latter piece, but I forgive that. Just amazing.
Dopplr There are a few sites out there for travelers - and I'm certainly no poweruser analyst type on this site - but I do find it cool. I started putting business trips in there and will probably start adding family vacations and getaways soon, even if only as a way of remembering where I ate and what was fun to do.
Drop.io (DROP-ee-oh)
I use this on my subversations project now for submissions. It's insane cool and with a low-price upgrade can you FAX from it... how great is that??
Dropbox Where Drop.io was the most open, Dropbox is the easiest. Desktop sync with a Mac, lacking very few features that would make it enterprise. Very, very handy for sharing files with others and keeping the work products in sync.
Facebook Okay, so who DOESN'T have one of these accounts now, but it's worth noting its potential for fueling reunions and reconnections.
Flickr GREAT site for sharing images. I don't generally share a lot of photos here, but I do use it to share original or otherwise publicly available graphics.
Last.fm I haven't sync'ed in a while, but this is a great way for me to publish what I've been listening to and get recommendations based on those.
Lijit This cool concept is a search aggregator that I can include/embed into my site. I'm not 100% fond of it - a lot of the "blackbox"-style stuff that's delivered in the widget (sorry: "wijit") can go haywire, but I just-just-just fixed some things so it works again. Ah, technology.
LinkedIn Perhaps the single greatest self-promotion and business tool ever. Well, aside from blogs and telephones.
SubSume Allows me to get Facebook updates t my desktop via Growl. (Sorry, Mac only!)
TripIt I travel less than I used to, but when I do I have to coordinate that schedule with a lot of people. TripIt's email parser, which allows you to send anything from a hotel reservation to flight booking email to "plans@tripit.com" and have it automatically associated with an upcoming trip, is simply amazing. Their account merge features (so it can expect emails from multiple sources and associate them with you, even accounts that were originally separate) is the best anywhere.
Tweetie Excellent twitter client for Mac, looks & behaves like an iPhone app, plus you can manage multiple twitter login simultaneously. GREAT interface.
Twitter Microblogging, technically speaking. But really just a great way to share little snippets about your activities and "follow" the activities of others who use the tool.
Twitterific The easiest way I've found to get Twitter updates (tweets) to (and from!) my desktop. Free (ad-supported) or cheap, with only the occasional hiccup over at Twitter.com. (I dumped this in favor of Tweetie.)
Yugma
This is a nifty screensharing application with integrated chat and I believe an extension for Skype, though I've never used it. Great for long-distance presentations, and really best when everybody's on a Mac to use their custom client so you don't have to be browser-based at all.
Utilities
JSONLint Ever get the feeling that your code's fine, but the data are garbage? If it's JSON, this site's for you.
Rob Locher's Regular Expression Tester
I know, I know... but it was a really cool find for me.
