Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Three Blogging Tools To Check Out

lolcat blogging

It's not that blogging is terribly difficult (most of the time...), but when I find some tools that are useful or make blogging easier, I want to share them! Here are three apps and websites I've stumbled across recently that have made my life just that much better:

  • Lazarus (Browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) Has this ever happened to you: you're writing a post and you're almost done when you accidently hit a button and your post goes poof! into the internet ether. All you can do is stare at the screen in shock and horror as you silently scream. I know this has happened to me several times and it's a horrible, horrible feeling. Fortunately, there's Lazarus, which is a form recovery tool. Basically it saves anything you type into a form on your browser, which means if you accidentally hit delete, a post gets eaten when you submit it, or you hit the back button without saving, your work is still recoverable. Lazarus has saved my life more than once since I downloaded it. Also! It saves different versions of the same form, so if you're editing and decide you want to undo all your edits, you can easily go back to an earlier version.
  • WordCounter.net (website and add-on for Chrome and Wordpress) I started using Word Counter for when I was writing press releases, which have very specific word count requirements (for some reason Pages, my word processing program, doesn't count words accurately). But it doesn't just count words! It has a keyword density tool to tell you how many times you use certain words, which is very useful for SEO; and it tells you your average sentence length, which can reflect the readability of your text. 
  • Coffitivity (website and app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone) I actually heard about this tool from our fearless BBI team leader, Becca. Science shows that light background noise, like what you find in a coffee shop, helps people concentrate better than total silence. Coffitivity provides just such coffee shop sounds to help you think and be creative. Whenever I'm struggling to focus on my writing, I pull up this website and it really does help! They've even updated it recently so there are different types of background noise, and you can submit recordings from your own favorite places to write.



Have some blogging tools you love? Please share in the comments!










4 comments :

  1. Ohhh I heard about Coffitivity from composer Eric Whitacre's Twitter feed, then forgot to bookmark it and couldn't remember the name. So glad you mentioned it here!

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  2. I recently started using Cold Turkey when trying to force myself to write reviews. It allows you to block certain social media/websites for a specified amount of time. Nothing like forcing yourself to stay focused!

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  3. Great list! I used to use Coffitivty, but then my hearing aid broke. So now I am Deaf as a rock.

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  4. I have not heard of any of these Tasha! Thanks for sharing!!

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