Firefox is currently the ultimate choice for bloggers because of its awesome collection of addons. These addons provide a lot of flexibility by reducing the necessity of separate tools for different tasks of blogging. This saves a lot of time required in managing different tools and thus increases the overall productivity of any web User.
Brief
It is another Firefox addon which acts as an alternative for a feed reader. Its features are not less worth than a full feed reader. The feeds are displayed in form of a full web page with a sidebar containing user’s subscriptions. The items can be searched and bookmarked. There is also a notification option which informs whenever there is an update in any feed.
The WOT Add-on (Web of trust)
Web of Trust warns you about risky sites that cheat customers, deliver malware or send spam. Never in my life did I have a problem with some serious viruses infecting my computer until about a month ago. Suddenly my browser got frozen and in about 5 minutes all the programs and applications on my computer stopped working while the antivirus software that I had (kasperski) haven’t showed any thread which surprised me tremendously. Having restarted the system I trying at least something I was continuously getting the notice that I have to send a sms to some address and buy the security code that should unblock my computer or something along that line. I had to reinstall the system on my pc but this was not the end yet.
Ad block Plus
A simple nice add-on that blocks add-on the pages. Once installed it will show up in a red hexagon in the top right of the browser window. Nothing special to say about it but it makes my life easier.
Faster Fox
This addon increases overall productivity of blogger by providing some commonly used tasks in a refined manner. It tweaks wikipedia by showing related articles, auto loads next pages, shows suggestions by Google for a keyword in address bar, enhances Google’s search results and many more. Its my personal favorite and highly recommended for you.
AddThis
AddThis is a nice add-on making sharing and bookmarking simple. The list of social icons will be added to your
browser toolbar area as well as to right-click mouse options. You just click on the icon, the application connects to your social network account and posts the update there.
Read It Later
If your bookmarks are getting messy with links which you intend to read only once then you should use this extension. The web pages can be marked with single click for latter reading. The items can read offline and it is also possible to synchronize them between multiple devices and workplaces.
Copy Plain Text
Bloggers need to copy content from different sources and paste it in their article but in most cases the content has its own formatting. You need to remove this formatting and then match it with your content. Instead of doing this, you can copy text from a web page through this extension which removes all formatting and makes it simple text.
Fire FTP
This might be one of the most Firefox add-ons. This plugin allows you to upload files to the server as any other FTP client but you don’t have to install it separately on your computer. The interface is quite intuitive. On the left you will see list of files on your computer and on the right once connected to the server you will see the files on the server. When you start the files upload or download you will see the how the process flows in the bottom area, the connection errors will show up there as well. You can choose the mode for files transfer (binary, ASCII and automatic) and whether to show or not to show the hidden files.
HTTP Fox
HttpFox monitors and analyzes all incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic between the browser and the web servers. In simple words it shows you how the website interacts with the server and if any errors occur you can get the details of the error without having to check the server log files. I used to work for the company who developed a cool CMS system running on php and flex. Working with the customers, uploading files to their servers and helping them to actually manage the website I was facing some php or flex errors pretty often but the problem was that these were the errors the admin area was showing and I had no idea how to handle that. I’m neither a programmer nor a flash developer and this was a real nightmare for me. One of my friends recommended me to install the HTTP Fox plugin and there hasn’t been a single problem I couldn’t fix on my own.
Fire Bug
Fire Bug is a great add-on that will be of a great help not just for a project manager but an advanced develop as well. The number of features is enormous but in my daily work I use just a few. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. I used Firebug multiple times to customize and make small changes on the WordPress themes, to get info on the images and embedded videos and flash files and get info about properties of the page elements. You can call the application from the Tools section of the browser or just right clicking on some elements on the page.
SeoQuake SEO extension
SeoQuake extension is a must if you perform any type of work related to SEO, links exchange, online advertising etc. It gives you a profound info about the website, helps you study your competitors and potential partners. At one glance you can see the page PageRank, the number of pages from the domain name indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing, Alexa Rank, the age of the domain name and the direct link to the whois info.
ScribeFire
To do Blogging, you need a Blog Editor and ScribeFire in Firefox acts as a nice blogging editor. The user can drag and drop text from web pages, insert images, and post to multiple blogs. Unfortunately, there is a tracking option enabled by default but it can be disabled. This addon can actually make your blog editing platform independent from your operating system.
Reminder Fox
Obviously, Bloggers need to sort out their future plans to groom quickly. Reminder Fox lets you do it with ease in Mozilla Firefox. You can manage To Do lists, set Reminders with alerts or alarms right in your Firefox browser conveniently.
RSS Ticker
Bloggers need to remain updated with other blogs and sources of information for which the defacto communication standard is RSS. RSS Ticker is a nice add-on which displays the Live Bookmarks in a scrolling fashion across the user’s screen. It means that the user gets updates while browsing and doesn’t need to log in feed reader specifically for accessing RSS feeds.
Similar Web
If you are facing difficulty in finding a related website to the one you are currently visiting, Similar Web can actually provide many alternatives. In this way, the blogger can easily hit upon many similar resources and refine articles comfortably. It helps a lot and boosts my productivity while researching for an article.
Zemanta
You are wondering for addon like “Similar Web” which can find relative content for your blog post then you don’t need to worry, Zemanta is here. It’s a content recommendation engine which helps you in finding and suggesting images, links, articles, and tags correlated to your content from a large number of quality resources like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Amazon, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. An awesome addon which you should install right now.
Readability
Having some difficulty in reading text surrounded by redundant information on a web page. Readability addon will rip off the unnecessary information to make content more visible. In this way, the web pages can be printed with less clutter. This addon also provides auto scrolling feature which can give rest to your fingers and scroll a web page without keyboard and mouse.
Gmail Manager
Gmail is currently the mostly used email service in general and this happens to be same in case of bloggers. Also Google provides free email solution in a package named Google Apps for domains. Therefore, an enhanced Gmail notifier is needed and Gmail Manager addon is best for many purposes.
US English Dictionary
Nonnative as well native English speakers need a dictionary for easy look up. For a Blogger, it is even more necessary as it can provide more sophisticated alternatives for a given word which can polish Blogger’s write up.
Scrapbook Plus
This Firefox addon lets a blogger organize a library of web pages or full websites. The addon supports filters which can be defined to exclude related links and web pages that are not required.
If you are a Blogger and starts utilizing these addons, you will quickly feel an improvement in quality of your work which is obviously the ultimate goal. There may be an addon missing which is your favorite one, do let us know in comments.
