Matthew posts a useful little tip for bloggers who are Firefox users – he’s been experimenting with the tabbed browsing feature to speed up his blogging workflow.
My Blogging WorkFlow – I use Safari as my browser of choice and similarly use tabs in conjunction with Bloglines to speed up my blogging process. In short my blogging workflow goes like this:
- Open Safari – open Bloglines in the first tab.
- As I work through my RSS feeds if I see something of interest that I might like to post I open it in a new tab
- I open up to 10 tabs at a time – usually on a similar theme. ie I have a folder for each blog I write and work through them one at a time.
- I then sort through each item – looking at them in each tab and decide if they are blog worthy or not. I close any that don’t make the grade.
- With the remaining ‘worthy’ posts I then post them using ecto. Sometimes this might entail grabbing a quote from the open tab (ecto does this with one click – it even automatically includes a link back to the source) and then adding a comment or my own opinion to the piece. Other times it is piece that is totally my own content with a link back to the post that inspired it.
- After each post I close down tabs.
This workflow is quick, clean (I only ever have one window open) and a simple process that is hard to mess up.
Other Uses for Tabbed Browsing – I also use tabbed browsing in a couple of other ways. I have a start up/stats folder that I open every month that automatically opens up all of my statistics pages in tabs. This includes a sitemeter counter for each of my blogs, my adsense stats, some overall domain stats pages and affiliate earnings pages. I open this collection of bookmarks in tabs first thing every morning and once or twice per day just to keep a finger on the pulse. It means I only take 4 or 5 minutes to check the performance of every blog and income stream.
I also have a similar collection of bookmarks for all my blogs front pages, another one for all my income streams stats pages and another for my top 10 or so sources of information that don’t use RSS.
What is your Blogging Workflow like?
Firefox has a neat trick where you can open a whole folder of bookmarks in tabs. The first thing I do in the morning is open two FireFox windows. In one I middle-click on the folder containing my bookmarked stats pages and it opens the billion or so windows that stats entail. In the second window I open my Digital Point keyword tracker, Adsense, Gmail, Slashdot (for fun), all the unread ProBlogger entries, and Google news.
Once I finish with those two windows I’m able to start my day. For reading post-worthy RSS feeds I generally use a non-web-based aggregator for Linux.
Darren, how do you decide which news to post? Is your only criteria that it be relevant to your site’s theme and not redundant or do you have a higher standard than that?
Yep that’s what I meant in my post above Danger – I open a folder of in tabs (ie my stats folder, my blogs folder, my earnings folder). I don’t think i really communicated that too well in the post.
In terms of which news to post – there are probably a number of factors:
1. does it relate to my blog’s focus?
2. is it well written and legitimate information?
3. is it out of date information?
4. have I already written something on this recently?
All of these factors come into play
Darren, do you have a web cam over my keyboard? Other than using firefox insteand of safari, I do things the same way as you. I experimented with clipblogging some of my stuff, but found it was just more work than was useful.
I use FireFox and tabs in a similar way to you. Though I post using the online interface of MovableType, not Etco, because I have gotten used to writing in a web browser (like I am doing now!). It works for me. Bloglines and email both help me get lots of tabs going.
Often times I’ll open up stories/prs that are iffy and keep them all in one window in multiple tabs. I’ll put it in the dock and look at it a few times throughout the day. Usually at least one of these gets posted.
I use Bloglines’ “clip to folder” feature rather than opening up everything in tabs. I clip items to folders for each weblog as I come across them, then later I open the folder and start blogging. Darren manages to post far more than me, though, so maybe I should use tabs.
Darren: Thanks for the suggestion to open a folder of statistics pages in tabs–BRILLIANT. I’m going to set that up right now, then spend an hour smacking myself in the head for not thinking of that a year ago…
I do the same sort of thing (I use My IE). I go to Bloglines, click on the posts that look interesting (which creates a new tab for each), then I review each in detail. But instead of looking at them only for post content, I specifically look for ones that 1) will teach me something (which you usually do) and 2) ones that I can leave valid and useful comments on.
Since I run four blogs, I often go through 20-30 articles that meet my criteria and I usually read 5-10 and comment on 5-10.
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links: