Bookmarkets and Firefox Add-ons ease the task of blogging in numerous ways. Here is a list of useful bookmarklets and Firefox Add-ons for blogging on a regular basis.
Copyright your blog post
What is the copyright policy of your blog?
Think…
Do you like it if someone copies your content and links back to you? Do you mind if someone uses your content for commercial reasons without your knowledge?
Choose a copyright policy for your blog post right when you are writing it!
Once you register at Safecreative and add the bookmarklet to your browser (works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Chrome) it becomes easy to choose a proper Creative Commons license for your blog post.
Create website screenshots for your blog
Screenshots are a handy way to illustrate an online reference. Numerous free online services make the task of creating screenshots a piece of cake.
Fireshot
Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.
Th captures can be
- uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting
- saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP)
- printed
- copied to clipboard
- e-mailed
- sent to configurable external editor for further processing.
- from the Firefox Add-on page
Fireshot allows you to create a screenshot of the page in whole or of just the visible part!
Kwout
“kwout” is a way you quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map.
To use this service, all you need is to add our bookmarklet to your favorite browser.
- from the site
After a screenshot is created, Kwout gives you the code that you have to put in your blog in order to display it.
Add Flash embeds easily in your wordpress.com blog
Note: Although they themselves say you can add videos easily with the help of the bookmarklet, it actually inserts other Flash embeds easily as well – slide shows, countdown tickers, video play lists, Flash games and much much more – in a wordpress.com blog.
How to Install and Use
Drag the bookmarklet button to your toolbar.
When you see a video you want to post to your blog, just click the WordPress logo button. It should automatically grab the embed code (this works for sites like YouTube and 100s of other video sharing sites).
If it doesn’t, you can copy the embed code and paste it into the pop-up window.
Make hyperlinks easily to be inserted in your website or blog
Colt
CoLT (short for “Copy Link Text”) is a tiny extension for Firefox which makes it easier than ever to copy a hyperlink’s associated text.
CoLT also includes a means of copying both a link’s text and URL at the same time. This feature is particularly handy for bloggers, web developers, or anyone else who finds themselves writing links to other places on the web.
- from Born Geek
CoLT is marvelous, fast and super-easy. And so I use it on an every day basis.
Copy as HTML Link
Creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text and copies it (into the clipboard) for pasting into other applications.
- From the site
I use this add-on regularly. Since CoLT doesn’t have a “select text” option, I use this to select appropriate text from the article to link the corresponding url, whenever I need.
Edit images and perform other image operations
Enter an image and you can apply any of these operations with a single click.
reverse / similar search: tineye · gazopa
share: flickr · vi.sualize.us · weheartit · more
host: imgur · kimag.es · juvo.se · imageshack · overpic · stooorage
hidden data: EXIF · http headers · http headers (2)
edit: pixlr · sumopaint · aviary · picnik · fotoflexer · drpic · pixenate · snipshot · lunapic · resizer
animated GIFs: player · reverse · split frames · -90° · 90° · 180°
convert: JPG · GIF · BMP · PNG · PDF · TIFF · EPS · HDR/EXR · SVG · TGA · WBMP
optimize: smushit · dynamicdrive · sitereportcard
effects: improve · to ASCII · to polaroid
special: what the font · tester · color palette · palette 2 · zoom.it
custom: edit personal links
- From the site
I am totally impressed. It’s like a Godsend! View an image in your browser, launch “ImgOps” bookmarklet and choose a task!
Tip: You can use ImgOps to edit properly licensed free online images, so that you can add a bit of your own creativity in the resulting output.
Add related content to your blog or site with Zemanta
Install Zemanta and you will be able to add related contents under blog posts from sources that you specify! Zemanta also searches for related images (licensed to be distributed) and inserts them with proper link back to the site.
Using an extra wysiwyg editor
Are there times when you need to test something – a code may be or some layout options – in your blog post? I hate the to-and-fro movement between the HTML and Visual editor needed for that. So I just use Scribefire as a second wysiwyg editor for that.
Create image codes with links to image url automatically
Use this bookmarklet to create image links and link to the image url easily!
When I find an image online that I want to add in a blog post, I click this bookmarklet and it creates the image code with the link in one click. After that, all I have to do is go to the HTML editor of my blog and paste the code.
Exercise discretion
You should not use images found online (with or without the help of a bookmarklet) from sites that don’t allow others to copy images for copyright reasons or bandwidth issues.
Create web archive for easy citation
Have you ever clicked an interesting link in a site only to find out that the contents have been removed? It’s not a good experience for the end user. If you feel bothered that the links you put in your post may not exist online after some time, then you can use the webcite bookmarklet to create an archived copy of that page. This archived copy will be accessible online even if the post is removed!
Create Full-text RSS
This bookmarklet is especially useful if you want to give the reader an opportunity to collect only a single page or post. This is handy for users who are not interested in subscribing to your blog, but still want to collect an article from your blog in their RSS reader.
This bookmarklet creates full-text RSS of a blog post or page in an instant!
Count characters and words
While it may seem that this bookmarklet is superfluous, since your blogging platform probably has a “Word count” options for your post, it is actually useful for a very valid reason.
This bookmarklet allows you to select some text and count how many letters and characters are there.
It is especially important to know how many characters there are in your post title. The number of characters in a post title plays an important role in how your post title will come up in a search engine. Please read the following post to learn about this:
How Long Should the Page Title Tag Be?
I have always wondered which bookmarklets and Firefox Add-ons others use to have a more productive blogging experience. So, don’t forget to share your favourite ones with me, I am all “ears”!
Learn about bookmarklets
To learn about bookmarklets please check out the links below:
