Try Out These 30 Firefox Plugins To Enhance Your Blogging Experience
Majority of the bloggers prefer Mozilla Firefox to other browsers not only because it is fast, cool or error free, but because it is the most convenient browser that possesses a number of blogging solutions in the form of plug-ins and add-ons. The Mozilla Firefox store includes some great plugins that add more intellect to blogging. Here is a list of 30 Firefox plugins which are immensely helpful in blogging.
- SEO Link Analysis: A Firefox plugin that customizes Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Webmaster, thereby enhancing your blogging experience. It basically customizes the link data in Yahoo! Explorer interface and Google Webmasters Tools by showing the Google PageRank accredited to the linked webpages, nofollow links, anchor text user etc. It helps you understand the blog SEO factors.
- easyComment: You must be aware that posting comments on other blogs influences your PR, increases exposure and attracts incoming traffic. This plugins fills in the details such as Name, URL and Email in the respective fields automatically, thereby making the commenting task easier.
You may configure different profiles and values (in case you have more than one identity or blog) and simply click on the link “easyComment” located on the status bar. This saves a lot of time and makes post commenting faster.
- FeedBurner Subscribers: This plugin efficiently monitors the visitors on your blog and presents you with a report to allow you to track the RSS activities. It keeps a watch on the RSS subscribers depending on how many RSS feeds have been hit. You no more need to logon to FeedBurner account. You may monitor everything from the browser itself.
- OnlyWire: This add-on has ability to submit content to more than 30 social networking websites with a single click. You do not need to submit your content to various websites manually. After installing this add-on, you will have a flawless experience while you submit contents as OnlyWire bypasses all the captcha verifications during content submission on websites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.
- Screen grab to WordPress: Bloggers often require screenshots of various web pages, screen activities etc. to add to their posts. Normally, you capture screenshots using keyboard or other tools, customize them and finally upload them using the image upload feature in WordPress. However, this plugin enables you to directly save the screenshots and upload them to your WordPress blogs.
- Share Buttons: This add-on adds buttons of social media websites such as Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Reditt, StumbeUpon, Email etc. to your posts. These sharing buttons become visible only when you publish the posts. This add-on supports blogger platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.
- MySpace Blog Editor: This plugin would be an ideal one in case you use MySpace for blogging. It allows bloggers on Myspace to post to their posts directly from the Firefox interface itself. When you publish posts from Firefox, they automatically get published on your Myspace blogs.
You can also save drafts, use features such as drag and drop in order to copy text or images from webpages, format images and text, etc.
- Save Complete: Using this extension, you can save any web page flawlessly. Since most of the websites use CSS stylesheets to format webpages, built-in webpage saving feature in Firefox does not work satisfactorily because it does not support stylesheets.
However, this extension makes up for this drawback and has ability to save an entire web page along with all images, flash, JavaScript files, stylesheets etc.
- User Agent Switcher: Different people may visit your blog through different platforms like mobile phone, web based browser, iPhone etc. However, your blog’s prime readers i.e. “search robots” use an own developed platform. User Agent Switcher ensures that your blog loads perfectly on all platforms.
By using User Agent Switcher, you can also add a toolbar button and menus with which you can easily switch user agents.
- Clipmarks: Clipmarks helps you in linking to specific files rather than linking to an entire webpage. You can share desired files or a precise portion of a webpage on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, post them to your blog directly, email them to your friends, print them or simply save the files on Clipmarks.com.
- Feedly: This plugin offers magazine-style interface in order to display your subscribed RSS feeds. It enables you to import desired RSS feeds from Bloglines, Google Reader, Netvibes or from your bookmarks and arrange them into categories or tabs. You can personalize the look by selecting options such as Title and summary, title only, video grid, image grid and entire content.
You can also filter the popular contents, share your articles on various social networking sites, synchronize with multiple computers, make use of keyboard shortcuts etc.
- Better Google Analytics: This is the most important plugin for bloggers that integrates several GreaseMonkey scripts to enhance functionality of your Google Analytics account. This plugin allows auto-login to your Google Analytics account. It also allows you to add search box facility to your keyword reports, export a CSV file of your Analytics reports to Google Docs, view full-screen reports etc.
- Google Global: This add-on enables bloggers to categorize the Google search results. Google Global displays both, organic as well as paid results as they emerge in distinct regions, cities, ZIP code, IP address, search pages of different languages etc.
It is also possible that you open complete results from cities, regions and countries in different tabs so that it becomes easy to compare and filter your searches.
- Blog This in Windows Live Writer: This is an extension of Live Writer tool in Windows that helps you open a new Live Writer post pre-populated with title and contents of any webpage to your blog. It helps you in blogging an interesting thing on the internet quickly and easily. After writing the post, you may publish the same to WordPress, Windows Live, Blogger, TypePad etc with a single click.
- KGen: This smart plugin pulls out the entire set of words from a webpage and locates the major keywords depending on the page weight. This helps you in optimizing your webpages and keeping track of your competitor secrets. It also allows you to choose keywords and then tag them when you submit your contents to networking sites or fill in the meta-keywords of your webpages.
- Zemanta: As a blogger, you can use Zemanta to expand your blog dashboard with related links, images and tags in order to encourage visitors to refer to similar contents. Zemanta has ability to collect news from IMDB, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, MusicBrainz and CrunchBase, videos from 5min and YouTube, and images from Wikipedia, Flickr and Getty.
This plugin supports WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, Drupal, Ning, Tumblr and LiveJournal. It also supports email platforms like Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.
- MeasureIt: This is a plugin that a blogger would require every moment. Using this Plugin, you can draw a ruler to check the height, weight and alignment of a webpage. You can measure the length and width of a table, flash game, iframe etc. The vertical and horizontal center guidelines created by MeasureIt allows you to measure dimensions using multiple measurements and different units.
- IE View: You must be always concerned about how your blog loads on various web browsers. Even though Internet Explorer possesses the least features, it is the widely used browser. Therefore, bloggers would certainly be interested in knowing how their blogs load in IE.
If you open your blog in Mozilla Firefox with this plugin, you will be able to load your webpage in IE by simply right-clicking on it or you can set a few websites to load in IE by default.
- OneClick Installer: OneClick Installer is an extension specially dedicated to WordPress Blogs. This extension allows you to install WordPress Plugins or Themes from the Firefox context menu. Once you install the OneClick Plugin to your WordPress blog, this add-on detects plugin and theme files automatically and adds an option “Upload” to the Firefox right-click context menu.
- NoDoFollow: This plugin helps recognize NoFollow links present in a webpage. It is very useful to check the webpages which don’t offer credit to posted links.
- ScribeFire Blog Editor: This extension combines a popular web browser with a great blog editor using which you can create new posts, edit them and then publish them on your blog quite easily. You can easily drag & drop formatted text, make quick notes, upload and post images to different blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger etc.
- Screen Grab with Online Upload: Using this add-on, you will not only be able to save webpage screenshots but also upload them to any image hosting website in order to share your screenshots instantly. It allows you to capture the entire webpage or a specific frame. Once you capture the screenshot, this add-on will automatically upload it to the website “Imagebam.com”.
- ScrapBook: This Firefox extension allows you to save a webpage quickly and easily with correct accuracy, lightness and multi-language support. Not just webpage, but this extension can also save snippets from a webpage or the entire website and organize the saved pages in the same manner as you organize your bookmarks.
It also allows you to perform a full text search as well as filter the search collection results. You may also edit the collected webpages.
- GreaseMonkey: Using this extension, you can customize the appearance of a webpage as well as customize some default functions. You may customize a website so that it looks exactly the way you prefer.
- Firebug: This web application tool is incorporated with Firefox in order to allow you to edit, monitor and debug HTML, CSS and JavaScript codes in a webpage. Its advanced features allow you to edit and inspect HTML, make changes in CSS, visualize CSS metrics, profile and debug JavaScript, explore DOM, search errors etc.
- Web Developer: This is yet another web development tool that is loaded with powerful features. After installation, it adds a toolbar and a menu to your Firefox browser with a number of web developer options for you to customize or view webpage details like various codes, CSS stylesheet etc. Web Developer extension supports different keyboard shortcuts for making your task simpler and faster.
- SearchStatus: A blogger is much interested in Alexa rank, Google PR and complete ranking of a website. SearchStatus plugin displays all this important information needed by a blogger. The add-on also displays SEOmoz, mozRank and Linkscape along with a number of other blogging metrics like nofollow/ keyword highlighting, Alexa info, backward/related links, fast keyword-density analyzer etc.
- Shareholic: Blogging generally involves sharing content with major networking sites. Shareholic Firefox plugin enables bloggers to share content with over sixty social media sites and be well-informed about latest news, videos, images and buzzes. This is an ideal plugin for sluggish bloggers who like to get things done quickly, yet smartly.
- FireFTP: After installing the plugin, your Mozilla Firefox browser will be transformed into a FTP manager. You will not require any third party FTP tools. FireFTP not only transfers files quickly but also offers numerous advanced features like syncing directories during navigation, directory comparison, SSL encryption, SFTP, search/filtering, remote editing, integrity checks, file hashing, drag & drop etc.
- ColorZilla: In case you wish to pick a favorite color from a webpage, this handy plugin is a useful one. This plugin easily gets the color code from one webpage and pastes it to another program. It lets you zoom-in to a webpage to check the distance between 2 points.
It also possesses built-in palette browser for you to choose from the pre-defined color sets and its DOM spying feature enables you to get information on DOM elements.