Blogging is more fun when it is quick, painless and still creates satisfying results. I use quite a few browser and WordPress tools and tricks to make life simpler. Some of these are built into WordPress (and might be lesser known) while others I have developed out of necessity or as a learning challenge.
I often wonder if there are new ways to use old tools or new methods to make an old task simpler or more bearable. I have a feeling that most WordPress bloggers have a few of these up their sleeve. But since these have become habits, they rarely get shared with others. I know that I would not sing the praises of “Press It” after using it constantly for four years, but maybe I should.
So if you are using WordPress, look for the little “Press It” Bookmarklet at the bottom of the “Write Post” page. Drag it to your bookmarks toolbar (or links toolbar in IE) and give it a smallish name. Now when you are browsing a page which you would like to cite in a post, you can click this link and get a small popup with a link to that page, waiting for you to add your thoughts and hit “Publish”. You can also highlight a portion of that page before clicking that link and the content that you highlighted will be copied into the body of the post. I have grown so accustomed to this little bookmarklet that I feel lost when I am at a computer where I do not have it. Consequently, I end up being lazy and losing my train of thought.
So what are your favorite WordPress shortcuts? What tool inside WordPress makes your blogging life simpler?
I have used that bookmarklet feature a few times. If you tend to blog from the same location, then it is definitely a nice feature. I love the one-click post.
However, nowadays I find that Word and drafts are my best friends. Any random thoughts I have for great posts get thrown into Word, edited, and eventually added as a draft. It gets a little troublesome though, as on average I have about four or five drafts at any given time.
Four or five drafts? Only? I was just looking into my own and found that I have a little over twenty drafts. I tend to keep short series of posts while they are being prepared. When ready, I post one every other day or so (nice to be able to plan posting in WordPress) and I can keep working on other things, just inserting a couple of news in between when I feel like it (and I have time for it).
In all my years of blogging (from lycos html diaries to blogger to WP)… I’ve never really find any shortcuts for myself. To this date I still type html in the entry (hence the extreme invalidation for XHTML) and still do things pretty much the old fashioned way… maybe I should find some shortcuts to do some stuff. I can’t get used to the AJAX interface thing on WP.com so I didn’t bother to upgrade my wordpress.. Gosh.. I sound like an old man who’s reluctant to change!
Oh yes, I delete my drafts every now and then, to clear the junk. 😀
I use both digg and del.icio.us at scottmcdaniel.com to act as a form of asides. I either digg a new link or add a del.icio.us bookmark for the sites I see and want to share. Both these services have javascript snippets I use to pull the lists with my comments on to my home page. Not only can I share the raw lists with readers but it reminds me of things I want to blog about.
Yes, Press It is wonderful. (And I didn’t even know you could highlight text that would get copied into the post field until I read this here!) I did have the problem that Press It was opening up in the same window as the page I wanted to blog about, but changing the javascript code to this fixed the problem.
My biggest tip that I enjoy is that I’ve customed quicktags.js extensively for the way I write posts. I also have a lot of CSS styles and div wrappers that I use. Now that they’re buttons and shortcuts, I don’t have to write out the code any longer. True, I’ve got to make sure I don’t overwrite this file when applying updates, but that inconvience is worth having my shortcuts.
Uploading. On Multi-User/Author Websites all images, files are stored in one single Directory by default. Some Disadvantages of this: it leads into Filename-Concurrence, and a very huuuuge Directory. In the end you’re confronted with chaos.
After taking a look at several Plugins for Uploading/File-Managing all seemed bad for MultiUser Blogs: Users can Browse other Users Images, rename them, etc.
But fortunately there is “Organizer” by http://www.imthi.com that allows seperating Uploads into each User’s/Author’s own Subdirectory. Limit the Maximum-Size of the Directory, It works with Role-Manager and brings a lot of comfort.