Cloudflare
I’ve finally gotten all my sites, plus all my clients site routed through Cloudflare to manage their DNS records. Not only do things propagate nearly instantly, Cloudflare allows me to leave notes in all my records (so I can remember what they are for) — which is a huge help. I also get lots of use out of their email routing to set up various emails.
Price:
Free
Figma
I spent about 15 years in the design industry working all day in Adobe Illustrator. When I moved to web, I continued to use it… but I’ve realized it’s not the best tool for web design. Thankfully, Figma was built for that and over the past year or so I’ve started designing sites in Figma and using the fantastic components and auto layout features.
Price:
Free / $12 – $45mo
iMovie
Content Creation, Video Production
I had been struggling to wrap my brain around Premiere Pro for years, without much success. When I got my MacBook, I decided to give iMovie a try, and I instantly improved my video production. It’s not fancy, but it can make quick work of the types of video content I create (which is mostly using jump cuts to remove all my mistakes).
Price:
Free
Kiwi for Gmail
Communication, Email, Productivity
I have to constantly manage 4 different inboxes, and while there are a lot of tools that handle this, I just love Kiwi for Gmail. It’s nothing fancy, and doesn’t have any bells and whistles — but it works great and never gives me any problems or slows my computer down.
Price:
$30 – $58.99yr
Loom
Communication, Video Production
Loom is one of those tools that I don’t know how I ever lived without. Explaining technical things via text isn’t easy — but with Loom I can quickly record a video sharing my screen, my webcam or both and instantly have a link to share with anyone.
Price:
Free / $12.50mo
Notion
I’ve just recently added Notion to my tools as a replacement for Google docs, and I’m already enjoying the benefits. Everything is more organized, easier to find, and it’s an absolute joy to write in. I end up doing a lot of writing, so I’m excited to see how much more productive I’ll be with Notion going into 2023.
My Switch to Notion (article)
Price:
Free / $8 – $15mo
OBS
Content Creation, Video Production
I’ve been using OBS for a couple of years now to record videos and host livestreams. It’s free, open source, and can handle everything I need it to do without a problem — from tutorial videos to live interviews — OBS handles it all.
How We Use OBS for Live Streams (video)
Price:
Free
TextExpander
TextExpander is another one of my favorite tools. I use it to store things like email addresses, URLs, canned emails, software licenses, and (of course) emojis. With my assigned keyboard shortcuts I insert those snippets anywhere in seconds.
Create Websites Using TextExpander (video), One-on-one TextExpander Training (video)
Price:
$3.33 – $10.83mo
