How to Write Rich Posts for Your Blog Without Logging In To It

August 3, 2009

in Featured Posts, Social Media, Work & Career

I’m a big fan of gMail. I’m also a big ‘plug in’ fan. Whether it’s for Ableton, Wordpress, or Photoshop (some of my creative tools of choice), I love flexibility and keen ways to manipulate ‘things I make with computers’.

Here’s 2 Firefox addons I use in conjunction with Posterous and gMail to write rich posts without logging in to my blog.

Zemanta

I use Zemanta on this blog and it’s great. It ’suggests’ links and images to paste into your posts via a clickable sidebar. Simply click any images or links that appear and it automatically pastes them in – no messy HTML. And now you can do it from your gMail. Sweet.

How:

Get Firefox
Get a gMail account
Install the Zemanta for gMail Firefox addon

Xoopit

Xoopit rocks. Aside from matching the email address of folks I’m emailing to their Facebook account (and having their status updates appear in a sidebar), it gives me options for searching, browsing and sharing files – images, music, pdfs – you name it (see screenshot).

How:

Install the Xoopit for gMail Firefox addon
Configure it
Relaunch Firefox and log in to your gMail to see it working.

Posterous

Posterous is new to me. But I already like it. Edward Harran is already making great use of it. From my gMail, I simply send an email to post@posterous.com and it posts that email (even auto-removing my signature) to any combination of social networks I like – instant, multi-outpost broadcast from your email client – rad. You can even mix, match and specify which social networks to post to by tweaking your “To:” field

Post Everywhere?	post@posterous.com as usual
Twitter?	twitter@posterous.com
Flickr?	flickr@posterous.com
Facebook?	facebook@posterous.com
Any other blog?	blog@posterous.com
Posterous only?	posterous@posterous.com
Combine them!	flickr+twitter@posterous.com

“You can also address an email to #{text}@posterous.com and it will post to any site where the url contains that text.

#apple@posterous.com will go to apple.wordpress.com and flickr.com/apple, but NOT banana.blogspot.com”

You can even reply to comments via email. So. Cool.

How:

Sign up for a Posterous account
Sync your blog and social networks
Send emails to them and play!

Okay that’s it. I wrote this blog post as an instruction on how to write rich posts to your blog without logging in. Was it clear? make sense to folks reading? Let me know.