Turn Firefox into a Blogging Stronghold
Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by Julius.
Every day hundreds of people build a new blog or web site. Because of that blogging is becoming more and more popular.
The problem with blogging is that it requires a lot of time. Most bloggers have at least 200 web sites that they check every day for new articles. This is of course not the only thing they do. They also have to talk to their followers and write posts. And of course they have to do research about topics, as blogging is about learning.
As you can imagine this requires a lot of time and that is why its so essential to increase your productivity while blogging. As most people use Firefox anyway why not increase your productivity through Firefox plug-ins?
In this article I will lead you through the steps to turn Firefox into a blogging stronghold.
First of all, to save time why not include a feed reader into Firefox using a plug-in? Here we go:
RSS Readers
To be faster in blogging you need a built-in RSS reader. There are actually several of those but I have only tried Brief and Wizz RSS.
Brief
Brief is the plug-in I am using. It is a good RSS reader and actually has all the options you would need. The only problem with it is that you have to import all your feeds into it as I haven’t figured out how to add feeds to it directly.
Wizz RSS
Another option might be to use Wizz RSS which is similar to the previous plug-in. Although I did use it for quite some time I would rather recommend using Brief.
Other RSS reader plug-in:
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is important for every web site because it helps in generating traffic. Firefox plug-ins will make your life a lot easier concerning all this stuff that you have to do on a daily basis for optimizing your rankings.
RankChecker
One Firefox plug-in that I am using is RankChecker from Seobook. It allows you to track which rank a certain web site has for a keyword on the three different search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo and MSN. For example it might show you that the web site http://example.com is ranked first in Google for the keyword “internet mark
eting” .
SeoQuake
SeoQuake is an extension for Firefox that automatically shows you everything you need to know about a web site from the web developer side. It provides you with information about the current web site’s page rank, alexa rank and the number of back links.
SEO for Firefox
This is another plug-in from Seobook and it is actually similar to SeoQuake in that it provides information about Page- and Technorati rank, and lots of other metrics about a web site.
Other SEO plug-ins:
- Alexa Toolbar — if you want to increase your alexa rank then install this plug-in
Social Media
The next thing you need to do if you want to be more productive is to integrate social media into Firefox.
Shareaholic
This is a plug-in for link and content sharing. It adds an button to Firefox on which you can click whenever you want to share something. It is easy to use and highly customizable.
Twitterfox
As many people love to use Twitter, especially bloggers, I added a plug-in called Twitterfox. It makes tweeting a lot easier as it automatically converts links to tinyurl along with a lot of other things.
Image Plug-ins
Every blogger uses images in his articles, and some spent a whole lot of time trying to take a screenshot or decreasing a photo’s size. That’s where Firefox plug-ins come in handy.
Fireshots
Fireshots is a plug-in that creates screenshots but it is only available for Windows. It lacks some features, for example you cannot take a screenshot of a region.
Screengrab
Screengrab is a Firefox extension for taking screenshots. In my opinion it does this pretty well but the quality of the pictures is not the best as with every non-commercial screenshot software.
Other image plug-ins:
- SnagIt — seems to be quite popular
- smush.it! — best plug-in for reducing the size of images. Take a look at it!
Writing
Most people blogging probably spend the most time on writing articles. Reducing this time even a little bit will greatly help you as you have time for other things and that’s what these plug-ins are for.
ScribeFire
This is an essential blogging plug-in as it is an browser integrated editor through which you can write posts and publish them immediately on your blog.
Copy Plain Text
Copy Plain Text is a very simple Firefox extension that let’s you just copy text but without any HTML or other code. It is pretty simple but people just love it.
Zemanta
One last plug-in you should know about is Zemanta. It suggests tags, photos, links and related articles while you write an article. The images are of course free from copy right infrigdment. Try it out!
Other writing extensions:
Web Development
When blogging there are lots of things you need to do on a daily basis, may it just be fixing your WordPress template. Doing this without ever leaving your browser might increase this process dramatically.
Web Developer
Web Developer is great especially for, well, web developers . With it you can change almost everything you want on a page without needing to change the source code.
Colorzilla
Colorzilla is used by web developers to measure the color of a region of a web site. It is easy to use, just click on the Colorzilla button and then on a region of a web site and it will present to you the color in various formats.
Measureit
Measureit is also a cool plug-in that might be helpful for web designers. You can use it to measure everything on a web site. Just click on the icon on the very left bottom and select an area. It will then provide you with the exact width and height of the area.
Other web development plug-ins:
- Extended Statusbar
- Firebug — one of the best web development extensions I’ve used
WordPress
WordPress is probably the most used blogging system. Using it you become highly productive but that doesn’t mean you can’t tweak it a little bit.
WordPress Helper
WordPress Helper is not a bad Firefox extension but I would not call it a plug-in. All it does, as far as I saw it, is to list the most up to date WordPress version and also several WordPress help pages.
WordPress.com Sidebar
Another plug-in that might be interesting to you is WordPress.com Sidebar. It adds a sidebar to Firefox through which you can log into WordPress.com easily.
Further reading:
Any suggestions on which plug-ins should be included? What plug-in did you not know about?
Related posts:
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13. Apr, 2009
great post why i cant subscribe to your rss feed?thanks
jules
13. Apr, 2009
You should be able to. On what did you click to subscribe to my rss feed?
Bart
15. Apr, 2009
Great Post, Thank you very much
jules
17. Apr, 2009
thanks Bart, I am glad you like the post.