Sueblimely - Discovering Blogging

Firefox - is my browser of choice, with Flock a close second. Both allow easy addition of useful extensions and toolbars for blogging.

Extensions:

Scrapbook

Uses - blog editing and research

Scrapbook allows you to download pages, complete with images, quickly and simply and then edit them using any html editor/text. I find this extension indispensable and especially useful to view and style xml and java script generated content; which you can't normally view until you have saved your template or posted your blog.

Major Features:

• Save a web page
  
• Save a snippet of a web page by selecting text and images
  
• Save a web site (In-depth Capture)
  
• Erase parts of the page prior to capture if there are areas you do not want. (e.g. you may just wish to do some styling of your sidebar)
  
• Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks

It is great for the New Blogger. I 'scrapbook' my page; which is captured in html format. I can alter the CSS, add elements to the page, see my results in the browser and only alter my template when I am happy with the results.

I use it extensively as a research tool - capturing pages or just a few sentences of information I wish to review later.

If you are not used to coding in html or CSS you can scrapbook pages or elements of pages that contain coding or styling you wish to learn about.

You can read more information about Scrapbook and download a pdf tutorial on the developers site.

View Source Chart

Displays the source code of a web page as a Color-Coded Chart; detailing divisions, classes and their names. Very Useful for creating or editing templates.

JustBlogIt

JustBlogIt is a Mozilla / Firefox extension that allows right-click posting to a blog. You can highlight text you want to blog, or just click within the page for it to add the url and page title to a post edit window. JustBlogIt also supports posting from within many web-based News Readers. JustBlogIt checks to see if you are trying to post from a News Reader and adapts the blogging data accordingly. (I

Blog applications currently supported are Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Radio Userland, TextPattern, TypePad, WordPress, journalspace, b2evolution and BLOG:CMS. (although you can add any weblog type you want by customising the settings)

Make LinkCreate a clickable link by highlighting any text in a web page.

Highlight any text in a web page and click on the make link/html option in the context menu. This generates a link using the sites url. Paste the link into your editor or blog post etc. It is a useful feature for research and note taking too.

Other options are to save a link as plain text and to purely save link text as links.

Sage

is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for MozillaFirefox. It's got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don't.

Codetech

Codetch is a an open source code editing program with the following features

• Source view, WYSIWYG view, preview window, and quick reference view panels
  
• See multiple views via splitscreen
  
• Open multiple files with tabbed editing
  
• Launch previews of your documents in other browsers
  
• A sidebar file list for convenient file browsing
  
• Embedded JavaScript Console for quick debugging
  
• Easily validate saved or unsaved code with W3C validators
  
• Advanced search/replace and results panel
  

I think that is my lot for this post. I resorted to cutting and pasting for the last extension which tells me it is time to head off the computer.

Labels: Blog Toolbox, Blog Tools