Blogher07: Blogging Workflow Tools and Tricks

BlogHer07 in Chicago - Day One: Breakout #4 Session Technical: Blogging Workflow Tools and Tricks.

Are you inundated and overwhelmed? Do the words Information Overload particularly resonate? Did you know there are tools to facilitate working with feeds, hyperlinking, adding and resizing images, creating captioned cartoons, posting to multiple blogs simultaneously, creating those daily link posts and more? Improve your blogging efficiency processes with a handy look at these tools…most of which are free or open source.

Barb Dybwad (who blogs at Weblogs, Inc. at AOL, Joystiq, geeked., and Engadget)
Gina Trapani (who blogs at Lifehacker)

1. Backend tools
2. Content creation tools
3. Handling info overload - handling RSS readers, etc.

Back end tools

Typing same text over and over again - TextExpander or Texter, AutoCopy for Firefox, and CoLT for Firefox.

Automate repetitive work - Link roundup maker and ImageReady to process (resize, crop and sharpen) images

Markdown - Converts text to HTML

Browser-based image tools - Resizr and Picnik (filters, resize, crop, correct colors, red-eye fix - all online, eliminating need for Photoshop)

Blogging from Firefox - Scribefire

FTP - SmartFTP , Transmit, FireFTP

Desktop blogging client - Ecto

Q: Do these tools help you see what you're writing before you post?
A: Not really.

Q: Can you publish in a draft format before you go live?
A: Yes.

Q: Transferring stuff from Word - ends up with weird formatting and symbols.
A: Use a text editor or TextWrangler instead of writing into Word. Use NotePad or WordPad in Windows.

Q: Planning a vacation or when you're sick and cannot blog. What do you do besides preposting, especially when you cover current events.

A: Don't feel too guilty if it's a personal blog. Figure out a way to do short posts. Find guest bloggers and co-editors to cover you. Future post. Evergreen content that you can post whenever.

Content Creation Tools

• Post your del.icio.us links and set it up to post daily
• Mobilize your blog
• Multi-bookmark submission tools - add submit buttons to your post and multi-submit posts for promotion (Onlywire.com)
• Fun stuff - make your own lolcats, church sign generator, warning label generator
• Blog widgets and badges

Sources for republishable content

• everystockphoto
• Creative commons tabbed search tool
• Yahoo Creative Commons search
• Flickr Creatice Commons search

Information Overload

• Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy
• Stop getting hung up on not reading all your feeds. Try to use a daily and a sometimes folder. Be ruthless about your time and attention.
• Foxmarks to bookmark in FireFox.
• Don't look at everything. Set up keyword filters to get only what you need at that time.
• Use Zaptxt for critical IM and/or SMS notification.