The Little Plug-in That Helps Me Blog Faster

This is something I’ve been meaning about to tell you about for sometime now – a little technique that I’ve developed to help me blog faster. I have three sites on the b5media network, and for them, I’m producing a minimum of 75 posts a month in order to keep my traffic up and fresh content available.

There’s a lot of content to produce; a lot of information to opine on, comment on  is a lot of content to produce, and finding fresh ideas, fresh thoughts on a weekly basis can be tough. Not only that but I’m affected strongly by “shiny object syndrome” – I spend a lot of time wandering around the internet, following links and hoping and praying in the back of my head that I don’t lose the thread 100% and that my browser doesn’t crash.

What I’ve discovered is that by following links and opening whichever window I’m interested in at the time can lead to some really interesting articles that I wouldn’t have found, and might not be able to find my way back to, without one lovely little Firefox Plugin: Tab Kit.

ScreenShot Tab Kit

I absolutely love this little plug-in. Basically, it allows you to open several tabs, colour codes the parent and child tabs and makes which you’ve read and which you haven’t.

The official description of what it does includes:

Tab Kit makes tabs more efficient for power users, allowing a wide variety of tweaks, all of which are optional, notably:

- Group tabs, by domain or opener (parent) tab, manually or automatically
- Multi-row tabs
- Vertical tab tree (with splitter)
- Sort tabs, by address, last loaded, last viewed, order of creation, origin or title
- Control new tab position and close order
- Easily duplicate tabs and copy/move them between windows by dragging
- Scrollwheel tab switch
- ‘Mouse rocker’ to go back/forward in history
- Highlight unread tabs (and emphasise current tab)
- Scrollbar instead of scroll arrows in over-long Bookmarks and All Tabs popups
- Open Selected Links feature

For me, what this does is allow me to trip across the internet, free to follow as many tabs as I want, as many as windows as I want. I know which ones I opened off which article.

Once I’ve opened as many articles as I’m interested in, I skim them, making sure I’ve got something to actually talk about, and then open as many Text Edit windows (or Notepad, depending on your operating system) as I’ve got stories to write about. And then off I go, cutting and pasting as need be – depending on which part of the story I want to quote, copy the links and off I go.

I’ve managed to knock off 5 or 6 posts in a couple of hours this way without issue. For me, that’s a week’s worth of posts for one of my sites, leaving me with 4 other days of the week to do everything else I’ve got going on!

Do you have any power blogger tips and tricks? What’s your favourite firefox or wordpress plugin that makes you more efficient?