T-Jay's World!

I have a handful of addons for Firefox I consider necessary for enhanced and safer browsing and while I had tried a few other addons from time to time, I often found myself returning to the handful I've been using for several years.

Now, I'm not saying that any of the other addons I tried were particularly bad, some were actually very well done, I just often didn't really see the longterm need for them and after a few days the novelty of a lot of them had worn off.

It wasn't until I decided to revive this blog, that I started looking at some of the newer addons in the hope it would make my blogging or the creation of posts easier. It was during this time that I came across an article about promoting your blog using as many social networking sites and services as possible. I wrote about that in a blog post a few months ago → Blog Promotion - Take No Prisoners...

Overall, I think I had a look at about 20 different addons, and out of those 20, Apture stood out by a long way.

Apture in a nutshell integrates the ability to create links and embed content into your blog posts without the need for code. For those wondering how that's special, let me explain further. Not only does it make it easy to create links or embed content into your posts, it actually adds buttons for each, right on the blogger compose toolbar.

The ability to create links to previous posts is made much easier with Apture. A walkthrough showing how to do it is available here.

Links created with Apture have the added ability to be opened within an Apture window without leaving the page or even losing the page your on. By holding your mouse over the icon before a link, it pops open a small window with the contents of what the link refers to. This is shown with the little person icon next to Twitter below (either click the X or somewhere outside the popup window will close it):




Embedding media is just as easy. Not only can you embed videos from a variety of sources, or images, you can now also add stock charts, Google Books content, Word, Excel, Powerpoint & Text documents.

 I've only been using it a few days myself, so I haven't discovered every little trick available with Apture, but with so many bloggers wanting to find that something special to draw more readers in, this addon will definitely spice it up in a good way.

For those also wondering, Apture is available on Internet Explorer and other browsers, & can be used in WordPress and many other blogging platforms including the Blogger interface.

I certainly recommend giving this a try for a week. Besides, it's free. So you have nothing to lose...


'til next time,
T-Jay

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