This is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online school for OnlineSchool.net. Enjoy!

The most productive writers know how to use the web and other tools to meet deadlines and achieve writing goals. If you are looking for new sites to inspire and new tools to help you write and edit your next piece, this article can guide you to 15 resources guaranteed to make you more productive on a daily basis.

Writing.com - Created for writers of all levels and interests, this online writing community is a wonderful place for writers to hone their skills, learn new techniques, and become a more productive writer. After signing up for a free membership, site users can create a writing portfolio, participate in writing activities, and utilize Writing.com’s many writing tools.

Writers Write - Writers Write is a comprehensive resource for writers who are looking for information on writing and getting published. The site features a blog, articles, book reviews, author interviews, news, writing jobs, and much more.

NaNoWriMo - NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an inspiring site for writers who want to adopt a seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Every November, community members pledge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

WritingFix - This site offers free interactive writing prompts for writers who are having a hard time coming up with something to write on. Simply click on the prompt generator until you find a prompt that sparks your interest.

365 Pictures - Launched in April of 2009, 365 Pictures is a collaborative project that provides a new picture and thought-provoking writing prompt each day. Pictures include photos, illustrations, mixed media imagery, and other artwork.

Seventh Sanctum - Perfect for writers who have a difficult time naming their characters, equipment, or organizations, this site offers multiple name generators for nearly every occasion. Seventh Sanctum can also be used to come up with writing ideas and plot lines.

Grammar Girl - Productive writers can study grammar on the go with this amazing podcast from Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Each episode is devoted to a particular grammar issue and includes quick and dirty tips for remembering grammar rules.

Style Guide - Given to everyone who writes for Economist.com, this handy guide makes a great reference for writers who need to quickly find answers to style questions. The guide covers everything from capitalization and punctuation to abbreviations and titles.

AutoCrit Editing Wizard - AutoCrit is a paid service, but writers can use it to edit short, 800-word pieces for free. The Wizard searches for overused words, repeat phrases, and sentence length variation.

Booksie - Booksie is a good site for writers who want to electronically publish novels, poems, short stories, and articles and receive critiques from other people. The site allows writers to build a profile, interact with the community, and retain full rights to all of their work.

yWriter - yWriter is free novel writing software that keeps writing organized by separating it into chapters and scenes. The software also backs up work automatically so that you never have to worry about losing a piece in progress.

RoughDraft - RoughDraft is a free, award-winning word processor for older versions of Windows. Features include live spellchecking, instant backup, genre-specific formatting, an HTML converter, a dictionary and thesaurus facility, and much more.

Wridea - Wridea is a free web application for writers who want to organize their ideas and better manage the writing process. The app can also be used to share outlines and brainstorming sessions with friends.

Web-Chops - Web-Chops is an excellent tool for writers who conduct their research online. The tool makes it easy to quickly collect information from around the web and place it on one web page.

Joe’s Goals - Establishing goals is a good way for writers to get on track and stay productive. Joe’s Goals is a simple way to establish and monitor all of your writing goals.

Image by ClawzCTR via Flickr

One of the things I’ve had the hardest time figuring out since my freelance writing began producing a significant income was how to manage my estimated quarterly tax payments. For the time being, I’ve been over-paying my taxes at my day job and hoping that it was enough to cover the taxes I wasn’t paying on my freelance income. Last year my overpaid taxes just barely covered my freelance taxes – assuming my income keeps climbing at the rate it is (and especially once I start scaling back my day job) this jury-rigged system isn’t going to work for much longer.

Enter Outright, a free online service to help freelancers manage their taxes. Using Outright is fairly simple – you just enter in your income as it comes in, and your expenses as they go out. Around the end of each quarter, Outright sends you a reminder saying your upcoming taxes are about due, and figures them out for you (including Social Security – both employee’s and employer’s contributions) and Medicare). Where several methods exist to figure out your taxes, Outright uses the one that requires the highest payment, on the principle that  its better to overpay a little now and get it back at the end of the text year than to underpay and get hit with fees.

[NOTE: Outright is designed for the US tax system and, as of right now, does not support non-US taxpayers.]

What makes Outright really shine, though, is its integration with other services. On the “income” side, Outright integrates with online bookkeeping system FreshBooks, importing paid invoices every night and updating your tax estimate. On the “expenses” side, you can track receipts using Shoeboxed, an online system that allows you to scan receipts into the system so you can dispose of hard copy (paid versions even allow you to mail your receipts in and have them scanned for you).

Altogether, Outright, FreshBooks, and Shoeboxed create a full accounting system freelancers – particularly at low- and mid-range incomes. Outright scales pretty well, though – as your tax needs get more complex and demand the attention of a bookkeeper or accountant, you can easily give them access – a couple clicks and the system sends an email with a link to set up third-party access to your books.

With a system like this, there’s no longer any excuse to avoid paying your quarterly estimated tax payments. Entry-level versions of FreshBooks and Shoeboxed are free, as is Outright – why not set them all up and give it a try?

Jamie Grove of the excellent writing blog How Not to Write has created something special for iPhone or iPod Touch owners who write: WriteChain. More than just a word-count tracker, WriteChain is built around the principle of the chain, encouraging you to write every day to avoid “breaking the chain”.

WriteChain is a simple app. On the home page, you enter how many words you write each day. If you want, you can add notes by editing the day’s session under the “Sessions” tab. WriteChain will keep track of each day’s session, and let you review the sessions and notes whenever you want.

But that’s not the real reason to own WriteChain. The “special sauce” of WriteChain is the idea of a chain. Here’s how it works: you enter in a daily writing goal, and every day you meet that goal, you add a “link” to the “chain”. Your goal is to keep the chain unbroken – to keep adding links day after day after day – and WriteChain will let you know if you let the chain break.

If you’re not a daily writer, that’s ok – you can select a longer period in the preferences. So, for example, you could select a maximum timeframe of 3 days. As long as you meet your writing goal in that three days, you’ll earn your link; go three days and an hour (or 14 weeks, or a year-and-a-half) without reaching your writing goal, and the chain is broken – you’ll have to start over again with zero links.

WriteChain is not a revolutionary app. What it is is a convenient and fun way to keep track of your writing. If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, it’s certainly worth adding to your mobile writing toolkit. For more information, visit the WriteChain page on Jamie’s site, or download WriteChain directly from iTunes.

WriteChain: iTunes (99 cents)

Today I bring you a guest post from Gavin Nachbar. Gavin is a freelance writer who cannot be found anywhere in the world without his iPhone. As a writer, he has written for a couple of magazines including Hyphen Magazine and The Escapist Magazine.

Gavin doesn’t have a site of his own right now, but says you can feel free to email him with any questions about the iPhone!

Back in 2007, Apple.’s iPhone was released to a crowd of cheering fans who couldn’t wait to have their phone and iPod together in one. They were excited to be able to get their email and go online in places where WiFi had previously said “no”. In two short years, though, the iPhone has turned into so much more.

The iPhone has not gone without criticism, though, and many people will swear by their Blackberries. Throughout the election, we heard about Barack Obama’s obsession with his Blackberry, and many of us couldn’t help but think “Maybe I should get one of those?” Both iPhones and Blackberries are great in their own right, and either would be a great choice for a writer.

Then what sets these two phones apart? The iPhone has over 25,000 third party applications ready for download, and that number is only growing. Different applications serve different purposes, and they do all kinds of things. Some of them can identify a song on the radio while others can give you directions back to where you parked your car. Of all of these applications, here are 6 of the best for writers to use.

[Note from Dustin: For more info or to download these apps, please visit the iPhone apps store either on your phone or in iTunes.]

1. Text Editor

One of the major knocks on the iPhone, since day one, has been that it is much harder to type on than other phones, particularly the Blackberry. Anybody with fingers larger than a 12-year old’s will run into problems typing on the small touchscreen keys. The way that the iPhone makes up for the difficultly typing is by having a great spelling corrector. Text Editor is one of the many applications that works to fix the “small keys” problem. With Text Editor, each key is two times as large as the typical iPhone’s keys making it much easier for us as writers to type longer notes, essays, or even books. Cost: $0.99

2. Voice Notes

You know that time you were sitting at work or cooking dinner and you have a “light bulb above the head” moment, but when you’re sitting at your computer later that night you can’t for the life of you remember what that idea was? Enter Voice Notes. All it takes it two taps and you can talk as if you are making a phone call. Just hit the play button when you have a brain cramp later, and you’re good to go. Price: Free

3.Photonote

Just like when you have an idea in your head, most writers know that feeling of seeing the inspiration for an article. Photonote uses the iPhone’s 2 Megapixel camera and combines it with a program similar to Text Editor. This application allows you to snap a picture easily, and then write a caption to remind you of why it is you took that picture in the first place.

4. Dictionary with Spell Check

This app has made the impossible…possible! You can now bring that 5 lb. dictionary on the road with you without being weighed down by a giant book. Easy look up makes it possible for writers to just search a word, or one close, and this app gives you the definition and even more important, the correct spelling! Price: $2.99 (Larger dictionaries can be bought for as much as $29.99)

5. Worklog

This app was made for freelancers. Period. As freelancers, we’re always looking for ways to track how long we’ve worked on a certain project, to know how much to charge, etc. Enter Worklog. With an extremely simple interface, Worklog was made with the freelancer in mind. With that said, it is not perfect. One of te major knocks on the app is that is it not designed to track your work for more than a handful of projects. If you are working on a dozen articles at a given time, the app will have some trouble tracking your work on each individual project. Price: Worklog Lite: Free, Worklog Full: $7.99

6. Pandora Radio

There is only one thing better than music, and that is…free music! We listen to music as we write, we listen to it in the car, and everywhere else we can! With the iPhone making it possible to listen to music in more and more places, Pandora Radio is an application that streams free Internet radio stations directly into your phone. One can choose their songs, sorting by genre, or by searching for a favorite artist or song. With that, the application will sort through it’s database and find the song you are looking for, as well as ones similar to it. Price: Free

All in all, for many writers the iPhone is a dream. Personally, after buying mine half a year a go, I can’t imagine what life was like before it. With that said, the number of WiFi hot spots around the county are increasing every day, and as a writer you often don’t even need the internet, just a computer. The iPhone does not, and will not, replace your home computer or laptop, but it will while you’re on the road.

Saving documents as PDFs has become trivially easy. A huge number of PDF creator apps have emerged, most of them free, and almost all of them quite simple to use. Programs like Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org have “save as PDF” built in (you need an add-on from Microsoft to do this in Word 2007, but it’s part of the normal interface once you install the add-on). Adobe’s Acrobat.com lets you save to PDF from their word processor, Buzzword, and includes a PDF converter that will transform any document you upload to PDF.

What if you want to go the other way, though? That is, what if you want to get the text back out of a PDF so you can edit it in your normal word processor? This is quite a bit harder than creating a PDF — strange things happen to the original text when you create a PDF that make it quite difficult to pull the text and, especially, the formatting out.

Enter PDFtoWord, a free web-based service that has just begun offering its services publicly. PDFtoWord is simple — you select a PDF file on your harddrive, select whether you want the output to be a Word (.doc) file or a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file, enter your email address, and click “convert”. Within an hour or so (like I said, this kind of conversion is difficult!), PDFtoWord emails you the output of the process — a very nicely formatted and ready-to-edit word processor file.

I tried it with a copy of my e-book for students, Don’t Be Stupid, a complexly formatted document of about 80 pages, laid out into a dozen chapters and a few appendices. PDFtoWord preserved the pagination, the chapter breaks, the text formatting (though not the styles used), and every line of white space — the document I got back looked remarkably similar to the document I’d sent, far exceeding my expectations. The missing elements are things I couldn’t imagine there being a way to preserve, like the styles — I don’t know how the program could guess that all large bold text aligned right should be “Heading 3”.

So what I’m saying is that as a free service, PDFtoWord performs admirably — even better than some paid programs I’ve tried. PDFtoWord is offered by NitroPDF, which makes several other free, Web-based PDF utilities for creating and even editing PDFs, in addition to their desktop-based paid program NItroPDF Professional, which aims to be a sort of “Acrobat Lite” for creating, manipulating, editing, and combining PDF files.

PDFtoWord (free)

Taken as a whole, Twitter can seem like one gigantic mass of everyday tedium (“Eating cheese again, yum!”), TMI (“I’m having sex. Right. Now!), and occasionally useful snippets of information (“THere was just a giant earthquake in China!”). But just as bloggers have taken to tagging their posts to make work on a particular topic easily found (look at the bottom of each post on this site, for example — you have to be on the post page to see them, not on the front page of thesite), Twitterers have developed a system of tagging for tweets to help make it easier to find tweets on a specific subject.

Because space is limited and there’s no built-in space to add tags, Tweeters mark their tags with hashtags (#) to differentiate them from the body of the tweet, like this: #twitter. Searching for #twitter (with the hashtag) at search.twitter.com will bring up all the tweets from across the Twitter system that people have marked as being about Twitter.

This makes Twitter a unique and quite useful research tool. You can find out what people are saying about a subject, and who you should be listening to if you’re interested in a particular topic. Most tech events agree on a Twitter tag so that attendees can pool their impressions of various panels, discussions, and the event in general. You can also see what’s hot by looking at the “trending” topics on the Twitter Search homepage, or for a more thorough look at today’s how topics on Twitter check out TweetStats.

To improve the findability of your own tweets, and to reach out to the community of writers who might be interested in what you have to say on Twitter, use tags wherever possible, For questions and comments about writing, use #writing; for tweets about editing, use #editing. The more you use hashtags to tag your tweets, the more useful the service as awhole will be — and by agreeing to use standards like #writing and #editing we can all contribute to the great community of writers on the Internet.

Twitter is one of the most significant social media platforms to emerge in the last couple of years. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, have a look at this post where I explain the general concept, then head over to Twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

I’m always interested in finding new people to follow on Twitter, especially writers (because, let’s face it, if you’re gonna read something someone wrote, even in 140 characters or less, it’s always better if that person can write!) and I figure many of the readers of this site are, too, so here’s the deal: drop a link to your Twitter profile (In the form http://www.twitter.com/username) into the comments along with your name, and every few days I’ll shift them into this post to create a single list of Twitterers. Follow them and join the conversation!

Check back every couple of days and see who’s new and who you might want to follow!

Here’s the list to date (names link to website, when it’s given, @username links to Twitter profile):

1. Dustin M. Wax (@dwax)
2. Kimberlee Ferrell (@kimferrell)
3. Sonja Faust (@Sonja_Faust)
4. Johne Cook (@theskypirate)
5. Curt Wingerter (@Artistcw)
6. Douglas (@palisade14)
7. Alex Lobov (@alexlobov)
8. Thursday Bram (@thursdayb)
9. Copywriter Underground (@ChandlerWrites)
10. James Chartrand (@MenWithPens) 
11. Brandon J. Mendelson (@BJMendelson)
12. Elspeth Murray (@ElspethMurray)
13. Monica Valentinelli (@mlvalentine)
14. Rich Chastang (@richcat1989)
15. Tom Colvin (@tomcolvin)
16. Carolyn (@WordCountess)
17. Nathan E. Lilly (@nelilly)
18. Silvia Straka (@silviastraka)
19. Jetse de Vries (@Shineanthology)
20. James Mallinson (@jmallinson)
21. Roy Jacobsen (@rjacobse)
22. Jeff Wetherington (@thewordofjeff)
23. Zoe Westhof (@zoewesthof)
24. Danielle Marie Crume (@sumsette)
25. Michael Pokocky (@michaelpokocky)
26. Carly Tuma (@ThePiratess)
27. J.M. Strother (@jmstro)
28. Sina’i Enantia (@SinaiEnantia)
29. Jennifer Aderhold (@jjaderhold)
30. Who’s next?

A Twitter Tip for Writers

One of the cool things about Twitter is you can search the tweets of virtually everyone on Twitter (except a few holdouts whose stream is marked “private”). Go to search.twitter.com and search on any keyword to see what people are saying about it (try your name or the titles of your books to see what kind of buzz is out there).

I use Tweetdeck, a desktop Twitter client, which allows you (among other things) to set up a live search in a column that is automatically updated whenever a new tweet is posted by anyone on Twitter that contains the keyword for that search. The most useful search term I have is “for writers” (with the quotes), which is updated whenever someone posts a job “for writers”, a question “for writers”, or a link to a good post “for writers”.

Have another good search term “for writers”? Add it to the comments along with your Twitter ID!

Want More Writers on Twitter?

Twittterpacks.com is a site that collects sets of Twitterers you should follow and orders them by category. CHeck out the WRiting Twitterers here.

As it happens, it’s not a very lengthy quest, since as far as I can tell, there’s only one candidate: the aptly named Deadline. Deadline is a simple, free application that only does deadlines; you enter the task and the date it’s due, and Deadline sends you a reminder on that day and another as many minutes, hours, or days before as you select in your settings.

Entering tasks is simple: Deadline uses a natural text parsing system so you can enter things like “Interview with Dustin Wax due Jan. 18th at 5pm” and it will figure it out. Once entered, Deadline adds the entry to the list and adds email notifications to the queue. When it’s done, you just click the “Done” button and the task is removed from the list.

I have Deadline set to send me reminders three days before anything is due, which is an ok compromise time for me but not perfect – I’d rather have the ability to set different notification times for each item individually, and in some cases, to set more than one. For example, for a 650-word piece with minimal research, three days is fine; in fact, two or even one day would be fine.

On the other hand, for a major academic presentation I’m giving in April, I’d rather have weekly notifications so I can make sure I’m on track to finish in time and plan the various steps as I go. Getting a notification three days before the conference won’t be of any use – if it’s not done by then, it’s not going to get done! (Sure, I could use project planning software to set milestones and schedule each step, and I will – but I also want the security of something putting the deadline in my face on a somewhat regular basis.)

Still, it’s a handy little app, and I hope the developers will add a few features to it as time goes by. I appreciate the simplicity, so I hope they don’t go overboard, but given that they’ve incorporated the ability to customize the look and feel of the site (with built-in themes or custom colors and backgrounds) I would think they could manage to allow some customization of the actual functioning of the app without overloading it with complexity.

Deadline - Free

The whole point of a blog is that the author, or blogger, wants to share something. What they’re sharing could be anything, from 401K investment advice to tips on bathing your cat without incurring major injury. There is a dizzying array of topics that people blog about, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all bloggers have one thing in common: they want the information they’re providing to reach readers. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a blog to begin with?

There are many ways to go about building a blog, but generally your top priority is going to be making what you have to say easily accessible to your readership. If no one’s visiting your site to read your brilliant account of backpacking in Paraguay, then you’re essentially talking to yourself.

That’s why I’m here today - to discuss something that many bloggers seem to take for granted, the RSS feed. Dustin wrote a great post about the basics of RSS here, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of syndication. Instead, I’ll take it a step further and talk about the finer points of linking to your RSS feed.

I can tell you from personal experience that if I stumble upon a website with content that I find interesting or useful, you’ve got about thirty seconds for me to locate the link to your feed before I get annoyed and leave. I don’t like having to search the text of your page for the words “subscribe” or “syndication,” and if I’ve gone through all that and still can’t find your feed, you’ve lost me as a reader. The link to your RSS feed needs to be clearly marked for the world to see and subscribe to. If folks can’t find it, no one will subscribe, and you’ll be left staring woefully at your dwindling web stats.

With that scenario in mind, I’d like to introduce you to my friend the RSS icon:

This little guy is pretty much the standard for clearly marking the link to your blog’s feed. Most people know it, and they look for it. When it’s not there readers get confused, then annoyed, then they navigate away from your page. This standard is a good thing, because it creates a common navigation between your site and the rest of the internet - no longer are we left to scroll through blogs in vain looking for a subscribe here link, because we know what to look for. You even have a plethora of options when it comes to stylizing your icon to fit the look and feel of your blog.

Now, let’s talk about placement. You generally want your feed link at the top of your page, usually near the top of your sidebar. Look over to the right corner of this very page – see how easy it is to find the RSS feed for the Writer’s Technology Companion? Dustin has done a good job of placing his feed icon in a location where it’s hard to miss, and goes a step further by putting a second link at the bottom of every post. If someone wants to subscribe to his blog, they don’t need to hunt all over for the link.

Many prefab blogging services, such as Blogspot and Blogger, do not clearly mark your feed by default, instead creating a little, nondescript link way down at the bottom of your page that says “Subscribe to: Posts.” This is very difficult for potential subscribers to spot, and unless they’re searching your text for the word “subscribe,” they’re not going to see it.

There are many ways to add a more obvious feed link to your blog, but if you’re not comfortable getting elbow deep in html, I recommend using a feed service like FeedBurner. They’ll let you create a feed for your site with all sorts of nifty features, and then will provide instructions on how to add the code to whatever blog platform you happen to be using. Easy! Feed services also tell you how many people have subscribed to your site, so you’ll be able to see firsthand how the placement of your feed link is affecting your returning readership.

Please be kind and clearly mark your RSS link. You’ll save your blog’s visitors a lot of time in superfluous page scrolling!

Stephanie Stiavetti is a feature writer, copywriter, and all around technical savant. Having spent the last decade ensconced in both the editorial and computer industries, she’s comfortable in either world and often combines the two. Her areas of expertise are food, cooking, nutrition, health/wellness, technology, and the writing lifestyle, though if she had her druthers, she would spend 100% of her time writing about her culinary exploits. Read more about her and her work at Wasabimon.