It's amazing how quickly blogging (posting personal or professional
journal entries on the Web) has become popular. Just as personal Web pages exploded in
1996 and 1997, blogs have become medium of choice for Web publishers of
all stripes. While many blog hosting services are online, it can
sometimes be a chore to log into the service and post an entry about
some new Web site that you've found. But BlogThis and JustBlogIt make
the process of blogging easier.
BlogThis works with the popular Blogger hosting service. When you
find a Web site, or item on the Web, that you want to blog about, you
just right click on the page and select BlogThis from the menu that
appears. From there, a small window appears and you log into your
Blogger account. Once logged in, you're presented with the Blogger
editor. You just type your entry, and click Publish.
The concept behind JustBlogIt is the same as for BlogThis. The only
difference is that JustBlogIt works with several blogging services, including
Blogger, LiveJournal, Radio Userland, Movable Type, WordPress, and
TypePad. If you have blogs on more than one service, you can configure
JustBlogIt to allow you to choose the blog that you want to post to.
GoogleBar
Not much needs to be said about Google. It's arguably the most
popular search engine on the Web. While Firefox has a built-in
interface to several search engines, the GoogleBar extension really
expands a Firefox user's range of options for a Google search.
How? In addition to the basic search, you can do several specialty
searches (like news, academic, image, and dictionary searches), and get
instant access to various Google services. Using the navigation buttons
on the GoogleBar, you can move back and forth between search results
without having to return to the Google page containing the results. And
a whole lot more, too.