12 Useful Firefox Add-ons For Every Serious Blogger

Fire­fox is one of the most rec­og­nized com­peti­tors to Microsoft’s hor­ri­ble Inter­net Explorer (IE8) because of it’s vast func­tion­al­ity and quite impres­sive flex­i­bil­ity. Straight out of the box, Fire­fox is a sta­ble and use­ful browser, but with a few plu­g­ins and themes you can really cus­tomise to look and func­tion as par with your heart’s content.

Sim­i­larly to pleas­ing our eyes or mak­ing cool but­tons; there are some very use­ful plu­g­ins to help us blog­gers improve our blog­ging skills. Today, I want to show­case 12 Fire­fox Add-ons that every  blog­ger should have! This is an exten­sion to a pre­vi­ous guest post that had some great Fire­fox plu­g­ins for blog­ging as well..

Firstly, I want to apol­o­gise to all our read­ers and Alex for my recent yet pro­longed absence. I’ve been inac­tive for about a week due to a series of unfor­tu­nate events. How­ever, all is well now and I’m back in the ball-game

If you aren’t using Fire­fox already, you can down­load it here. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion is com­pat­i­ble with an array of oper­at­ing sys­tems and lan­guages. You can choose the one that is applic­a­ble for you. After down­load­ing and installing it, return back to this post to super-charge your FireFox/Blogging experience!

12 Fire­fox Add-ons

1) Brief – RSS Reader

Out of the many organ­ised RSS Read­ers, I find that Brief is the one that stands out. With sev­eral nice fea­tures such as view­ing full articles/headlines or excerpts only, a built-in search func­tion, abil­ity to use keyboard-shortcuts and many more other cool customisations.

> Down­load!

2) Read It Later

Read It Later allows you to do exactly that; read it later. When you brows­ing the inter­net; either casu­ally or in search of spe­cific infor­ma­tion – how many times have you come across some­thing else that is of inter­est to you? How­ever,  you don’t really have the time to diverge your atten­tion – but using this tool; you can eas­ily get back to it.This is a very use­ful tool for the heavy-stumbler.

> Down­load!

3) AutoPager

AutoPager is a sim­ple tool that loads the next page, when you reach the end of your cur­rent page.  This, as said in the said in the descrip­tion, is use­ful when view­ing search results on web­sites such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or any­thing or search engine. When your near the bot­tom of the results of one page, AutoPager will auto­mat­i­cally load page 2, and so forth.

> Down­load!

4) FireShot

FireShot allows you to take screen­shots of any web­site; either of the com­plete page or a partial-shot. How­ever, this tool also allows you to anno­tate (make notes) and edit the image in real-time. This makes FireShot supe­rior to most screen-capturing pro­grams because something’s don’t make sense after some time – so chuck in a quick note on the side to help you remember!

> Down­load!

5) ReminderFox

Reminder­Fox “dis­plays and man­ages lists of date-based reminders and ToDo’s” – what else can be said?

The rea­son why this tool is on this list is because of its sim­plic­ity. It’s a sim­ple pro­gram that noti­fies users of pre­vi­ously added dates/events.

> Down­load!

6) Headup

Headup has sev­eral key uses but one of the more sig­nif­i­cant pur­poses of this tool is the abil­ity to enhance Google Search Results. Accord­ing to many reviews, and per­sonal expe­ri­ences – Headup retrieves more tar­geted results than when run­ning a search on the con­ven­tional Google SE.

> Down­load!

7) Insta­blogs Submitter

Insta­blogs Sub­mit­ter, which plays on the word “instant”, allows you to sub­mit any website/link/image/anything in fact you find that you might think is newsworthy.

It’s like a Digg or giv­ing some­thing a Stum­ble but just eas­ier; no log­ging and all – just High­light, Right Click and Submit!

> Down­load!

SkewzBar

In the blo­gos­phere – your per­sonal touch to con­tent goes a long way. How­ever, it also has a major down-side too; because your con­tent can get TOO biased; espe­cially on fac­tual posts (doesn’t include per­sonal opin­ions, sto­ries and/or cre­ative pieces). So, root­ing from this comes a com­mu­nity called the Skewz that rates con­tent for its “bias-ness”. You can check how biased is the con­tent your reader is rated by the Skewz com­mu­nity. Pretty cool, IMO.

> Down­load!

9) Feedly

Feedly allows you to trans­form your home­page in a magazine-like page, where you can place dif­fer­ent excerpts from dif­fer­ent sources such as your Twit­ter pro­file, Google Reader, Frien­feed, Deli­cious and YouTube. Its a RSS-dependent tool, and most web­sites do offer RSS sub­scrip­tion – even Blo­gus­sion

> Down­load!

10) Word­Press Helper

New to WordPress.com? This Fire­fox addon pro­vides a bunch of very use­ful tools and help to max­imise the func­tion­al­ity of your WordPress.com blog! Not only for begin­ners but any­one can use this tool to iden­tify if the page you are view­ing is of WordPress-based – sometime’s the cus­tom themes can be so good; you won’t even know it’s WordPress!

> Down­load!

11) Resize­able Textarea

Ever come across a text-area that you just don’t have enough space to write in? Sure they expand with the “scroller” but some­times, it can get really annoy­ing. If you can’t see what you typed 2 lines ago – then the web-developer behind that page is pretty.. igno­rant to be hon­est. Well at least small text-areas are a worry of the past.

> Down­load!

12) Update Scanner

Even though RSS Sub­scrip­tion is a recog­nised fea­ture of modern-day web­sites; not all of them offer it. Per­son­ally; it is pretty sad because a form of sub­scrip­tion is almost com­pul­sory for a web-master’s suc­cess. Hav­ing said that; there are still many web­sites out there with­out any sub­scrip­tion ser­vices avail­able. If you know of such a site and want to still sub­scribe to its updates; this tool will save you the trouble.

> Down­load!

There WE GO! These are just some of the plu­g­ins avaible for Fire­fox — you can find many more over at Mozzilla’s Addon Show­case, specif­i­cally the Blog­ging Cat­e­gory. Do you use any other Fire­fox plu­g­ins for blog­ging? Not only Fire­fox, there are plu­g­ins for other browsers too — share them if you please in the com­ments below

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