5 Essential Google Chrome Extensions for Fanatic Bloggers

Posted in Cloud Computing, My Journey, Software, Team Tutorials

This is a question I receive a lot lately: “How the hack? Can you blog so many unique content in such a short time?!” First of … learn how to type!

2nd .. I’ve been a long-time user of Google Chrome (and computers in general). It’s the best Internet Browser for both Mac, Linux and

the Windows platform bar none IMHO

Unique Chrome Features

Let’s first have a look why Google Chrome is the best browser exactly for Fanatic bloggers, location independent entrepreneurs and digital nomads. A few very unique features of Google Chrome that Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Opera lack … seen from a practical perspective.

Automatic upgrades

Internet Explorer and FireFox, always need your permission to download the latest and greatest version. Chrome updater installs itself as a system service, and just install the latest version whenever there’s a new release. Also … for all the updates, media containers and plugins. It’s all done for you in the background. So — for example — you’ll never have to worry again about Shockwave /Adobe Flash Player.

Syncing bookmarks

After you installed Google Chrome. You have the ability to signup with your Gmail account. When you do so, all your bookmarks will be synced in the Google Cloud. So even after a reinstall, crash or system migration? You just re-login and et voila! You still have everything!

Sharing bookmarks, history, tabs with mobile devices!

If you have an Android Tablet with Google Chrome App, either iPad/iPhone Google Chrome App or maybe Chrome on your laptop as well? Then you can actually share everything, anywhere, whenever. Safari recently got this too (with iCloud), but Google has had it for ages … but more importantly, it’s completely platform independable!

Zooming

Believe it or not. The past few weeks I’ve been blogging from this crappy PC configuration on a 14″ (!!!) 1024×768 Nec MultiSync LCD. So my screen estate ain’t always perfect. Which is why I love the zooming feature by pressing the CTRL key and scrolling up and down with my mousewheel to zoom in and out. Infact my Empower Network Blog doesn’t even fit in 1024 pixels, so my zoom factor is usually 67% of original size. On itself this feature ain’t unique, but … ah well it’s something you have to experience yourself!

Omnibox Search

Not enabled by default, but easy to configure in Chrome’s settings. When enabled I can type keywords into the address bar with auto completion. So don’t have to visit google.com or Google’s Keyword tool to know what keywords probably rank pretty high!

Installing Google Chrome

Like it so far? Good! This entire article is basically a step-by-step howto. You can read through it, and decide to do nothing with the information I’m sharing. OR you install Google Chrome right now, so you can experience for yourself why I’m in Love with IT!

Windows

Install Chrome on Windows can be done in two ways. Through the Google Chrome website OR — the method I prefer — by unattended install. Visit this link: http://ninite.com/chrome, download the file, fire it up and when it’s finished you’ll see the Chrome icon on your desktop!

Mac

Visit this link , download, double click and drag the chrome icon to your applications folder.

Linux

Haven’t used Linux in a while, but I know there’s both Chrome and Chromium (open source derivative) that’s easy to download from every major distribution: Ubuntu, Redhat, CrunchBang, Debian, SUSE, etc. etc. When you run Linux? You’re probably tech savvy enough anyway to install it.

5 Essential Extensions for Fanatic Bloggers

Trying to explain this to you is going to be difficult. So instead I will show you what my blogging environment looks like (before applying any extensions) or custom settings

On average I have … well actually I don’t know how many tabs I got opened :-). I just know they are a LOT. Let’s say 40? Makes it impossible to find back specific tabs.

1) Vertical Tab Navigation Menu

This neat extension allows me to open up all tabs like similar to Windows Start menu. Basically like a dropdown menu:

2) Automatic Bookmark sorting

Many tabs, means many bookmarks. I have the bookmarks bar opened by default. However without a system, it’s going to be a mess to navigate.

There are many bookmark sorters, but learn here why I’m using SuperSorter. I’ve got many folders (and nested folders with links in them) that are automatically sorted now. More importantly I have a separate “Empower Network” folder with shortcuts to “add new blogpost”, “list of all current blogposts”, etc.

3) Streaming Radio

Yeah … this has little to do with Blogging, or does it? I can’t blog without Music. I usually listen to DI.FM … there’s a Beta plugin of it. Kinda buggy though. So instead go here.