Google Chrome has gone from strength to strength since its introduction a few years ago. One of its biggest benefits is the huge ecosystem of extensions and applications that can be used to add features and customize the browser experience.
Given the prevalence of WordPress and of blogging, it’s no surprise that many developers have turned to solving blogger’s problems with extensions. It’s possible to adapt Chrome so that you never even have to visit your blog to post, monitor, and engage with readers. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but it can be very handy to dash off a quick comment or a minor post without seriously interrupting your workflow.
In this article we’re going to show you 10 extensions for Google Chrome that will turn it into a blogging powerhouse.
Post to WordPress
Post To WordPress does exactly what the name suggests. It allows WordPress bloggers to write posts from their browser’s tool bar, add a featured image, and publish.
WordPress Stats
Constantly keeping an eye on the number of visitors your site is getting isn’t especially healthy or useful, but bloggers tend to be a bit obsessive about knowing the numbers. This plugin will show you top posts, search terms, clicks, and referrers in real time.
Related Content by Zemanta
Writing blog posts is fun, finding images, related content to link to, and suitable tags is less so. Zemanta analyzes your post and makes helpful suggestions about who you should link to and what images are relevant to your content.
WordPress Commentify
As you might expect, this extension lets you monitor and respond to comments on your blog.
Feedly
Google Reader’s sad demise is almost upon us, and Feedly is the best of the crop of RSS readers that are vying to replace it.
Buffer
Once your posts are written and ready to be published, it’s time to send out tweets and Facebook posts to let the world know about your most recent stroke of genius. Unfortunately, if you’re like me you’ll be finishing up writing at 3am when no one is around to see your social media activity. Buffer lets you queue up tweets and release them at predetermined times.
OpenAttribute
Properly attributing the Creative Commons images used in articles is one of those little bits of blogger housekeeping that can be easily streamlined.
The Outliner of Giants
Outliners are an excellent way to plan out articles. I find that if I use an outliner to structure my thoughts before I start writing, the writing itself goes much more quickly and the end results make for better reading.
Google Tasks
The thing about most writers is that they love being writers, but don’t really like writing, which means that any opportunity to procrastinate is more welcome than warm cupcakes. Having a constantly visible list of tasks is a great reminder that you should probably get on with the work instead of spending the next half hour cleaning your keyboard with a Q-Tip.
SEOquake
This extension is a great way to satisfy yourself that the blogging competition isn’t doing as well as you are (hopefully). It’ll show you PageRank, Alexa rank, and various other SEO stats.
Feel free to give a shout out to your favorite Chrome extensions for bloggers in the comments.
