4 Handy Chrome Extensions for Bloggers
Discover my favorite Chrome extensions for bloggers, including what each does and why they made our list.
Brett Helling is a digital marketing expert with over 10 years of experience building, managing, and scaling websites.
It seems like desktop programs are becoming less needed as more tools are being brought to the browser.
Sometimes it’s just more convenient to have a browser extension instead of having to fire up a program that you’ll only use for a few minutes.
This post will take a look at 4 handy Chrome extensions that are sure to come in handy for any blogger.
- WordPress Stats offers quick access to blog stats directly within the browser.
- Zemanta suggests images, links, and tags to enhance blog content creation.
- ScribeFire allows in-browser editing, posting, and scheduling across multiple blogs.
- Awesome Screenshot enables capturing and annotating screenshots without leaving Chrome.
WordPress Stats
For those who love to keep up with their blog statistics, this is a must have tool. First you’ll need to have the WordPress.com Stats plugin installed on your blog.
To get started with the extension you’ll need to enter your blog URL and WordPress API key.
You’ll then have access to four stats tabs: referrers, top posts, search terms and clicks.
These are pretty self explanatory. WordPress Stats is a definite time saver and huge convenience.
Zemanta
There’s quite a few things that Zemanta can do within your blogging dashboard.
It supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Drupal and Tumblr as well as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.
You’ll notice the Zemanta widgets right away in WordPress. The tool gives you suggestions for images, links, related articles and tags that can be inserted (with a single click) into your blog post.
To the best of my knowledge, it’s the most useful content suggestion tool that you’ll find and is great for enhancing your blog posts.
ScribeFire
I don’t think any extension list for bloggers is complete without this tool. A known favorite to many bloggers, ScribeFire is a blog editor that lives in your browser.
It lets you post to WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, Tumblr, Posterous, Xanga, LiveJournal and more.
You can add numerous blogs and then access them to edit, delete, add and even schedule posts.
Unlike the Firefox version that works via split screen (for easier posting), ScribeFire for Chrome opens up in a new tab (which to some is a huge inconvenience).
A nice touch though, is the Zemanta integration which lets you link to related articles.
Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate
What blogger doesn’t like to add screenshots to their articles? No blog post is complete without at least one screenshot or image.
With Awesome Screenshot, you don’t have to rely on a desktop tool because it’s built into your browser.
You can capture selected areas, only the visible part of the page or an entire page (even parts that aren’t visible).
You can also annotate any image by adding shapes, arrows, lines, text and more. Saving screenshots can be done to your compute or to awesomescreenshot.com.
As bloggers, what is your favorite Chrome extension to use?
