Steve Andrews's Blog

Before the advent of Twitter, bloggers were generally segregated into two - the elite, high-end bloggers who were mostly full-time bloggers and excelled in their work, and the hobbyist or wannabe bloggers who couldn’t quite ‘get there’.

Being popular and having to work hard for long hours, probloggers were generally found lacking in conversations with smaller bloggers. Of course, you may point out some exceptions, but they were just that: exceptions.

Fast-forward to the age of Twitter, and bloggers of any stature are able to communicate with probloggers. The role of Twitter: to provide a level playing field. No longer would you have to spend time commenting on other blogs to get bloggers to notice you and give you a reply. Michael Arrington, Darren Rowse, Chris Garrett, Robert Scoble - they’re all on Twitter and a @tweet away.

Here’s my own experience: I have contacted and/or established acquaintance with Darren Rowse (Problogger.net), Daniel Scocco (Daily Blog Tips), Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration) and of course, PChere (this blog) for this guest posting opportunity.

Some benefits of using Twitter as opposed to IM or email:

• Bloggers can chose to receive tweets when they want. This can be a boon when you’re busy and hurrying to meet deadlines. It is almost like an RSS feed for your instant messages - you chose when to receive content. In other words, it is a ‘pull’ system of communication (where you decide when to get the messages).
• Bloggers are no longer considered rude if they do not answer immediately. When using instant messaging or emails, most people take offense if you do not reply. However, in the ad-hoc world of Twitter, there are several reasons why someone may not reply: Twitter fails to deliver tweets sometimes, the recipient may be busy (and may miss it when coming back later) and/or both parties may forget.

Ultimately, Twitter’s best use for bloggers comes from the fact that it helps smaller bloggers communicate effectively and clearly, and those who ask questions will be heard, whether you are a no-name blogger, an up-and-coming blogger or a problogger.

Collecting

Google Notebook - Highlight the content you want to save, Note it with this extension. You can organize different ‘notebooks’ with their own sections. Each note will have a link back to the original website.

Session Manager - Great for doing research and rounding up a few sources. Save the session of tabs so you can come back to them later.

coComment - Keep tracks of comments you’ve left on other websites. This is particularly useful if the comment section is providing more resources than the actual post content.

Speak It - Have articles read out to you so you can do the dishes while researching. Not to be used while at the computer - speed reading = productivity. This extension uses the Microsoft TTS Engine.

DocuFarm - This is a cool extension that previews word, PDFs etc within Firefox. It comes with a search, which you can also use to search PDFs!

Writing

Scribefire - Performancing.com’s popular split-browser blog editor. Multiple blog management, categories and simple source editing. FTP Uploads are available but buggy. No good image support.

Deepest Sender - Very similar to ScribeFire, these two extensions lack greater features like image uploading, time-stamp editing and compatible tagging. Both are very easy to set up.

Resizable Text Area - If you stick with your regular blog editor, such as Wordpress, this extension comes in handy to resize the text area quickly and freely.

Spellbound & Google Toolbar - Inline spell-check, ala Microsoft Word. Use the extension or Google Toolbar’s built-in spell-checker. Both work great. Superseded by Firefox 2’s built in spell check.

Tabinta - turns the Tab Button to a text editor spacing tab rather than cycling through the web forms. Only interacts with the text area, otherwise does the regular Firefox tabbing.

Split Browser - Great when copy and pasting content and URLs, this extension makes it easy to split any tab any which way. Put your editor in a ’sidebar’ and continue surfing the other tabs in the other pane.

Copy Plain Text - This is a can’t-live-without extension for me. When I copy text, I don’t want any of the original site’s formating, links or text-link-ads to be copied over as well. Just the text. That’s what this extension does.

Copy As HTML Link - Use this extension in conjunction with Copy Plain Text to create links for your posts. Only make links when you want with the text you want.

Images

Web Developer - Other than View Source and those functions, Web Developer is great for getting image information like size etc. If a site is making it hard to get access to their images, use the View Image Information button to get all the images and their links. Respect copyright.

Snagit - to use with the SnagIt image capture application, this extension just makes it easy to start grabbing screenshots while still in Firefox.

Picnik - this web based app trumps SnagIt in many respects. With the Picnik extension you can grab a screenshot of the visible page, or the entire page, with one click. The same goes with any images on the web, including a button at Flickr.com.

Picnik is also a very good image editor. I don’t use anything else to edit images for articles. You can take any photo, from your computer, Flickr or Picasso account, or anywhere on the web, and start editing without downloading anything to your computer.