Improving Your Workflow
OK, where to begin. I’ve already written this once and lost it due to a program crash, but I’ll give it another go. I’ll talk about WordPress plugins, a couple of sites and some programs that I think will save you time and improve your workflow, at least they do for me.
Just to be clear, this is more about all the administrative things you have to do as an artist today and about streamlining your workflow, not about the actual music making process.
Social Networks & Websites
I was looking around for some place that would allow me to update all, or most, of the social networks I’m on, from one place. Since as an artist you don’t really have the luxury of choosing one of them, you have to be on all of them, and keeping it all updated by yourself is more or less a full time job. I wanted to minimize the time I needed to spend updating all those places, and after searching around and testing various services I found ping.fm. It allows you to add networks like facebook, facebook pages (which doesnt seem to be supported in many places yet), twitter, tumblr, myspace and a ton of others, and you can update them all from there, either in one go, or individually.
After I set that up I wanted some way to use it from my desktop so I wouldn’t have to fire up the browser, 
go to the site, login and navigate to the right page every time I wanted to update something. Some more searching ensued and after a while I found MePing, not the prettiest thing around perhaps, but it does what it does very well. Namely import all your networks and custom posting rules from ping.fm and allows you to update, that’s it. Time saved!
OK, then I was thinking, what if I could integrate this site into ping.fm as well, I already had a plugin that updated Twitter every time I made a new post, but what about all the other networks. Once again I went on the hunt and I found WordPress 2 Ping.fm, I’ve been running it a couple of days now and it seems to work flawlessly. It sends an update to ping.fm, which automatically posts it to your configured networks, every time you publish a new post on your blog…
More time saved for important things like actually making music.