31 Days of Progress Day 9 :: Friendly Blog Tips

Category: Living & Learning
Goal: Use Time More Efficiently
Baby Step: Find tools to make blog reading & writing quicker

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Today I just wanted to share a couple of simple tools that I have found very valuable while reading my favorite blogs.  Like you, I have to budget the time I spend on my computer.  I read lots of great blogs and web sites every day.  There are ideas I want to remember, or recipes or tutorials I want to try, but I don’t have a lot of time to catalog those sites and pages for future reference.  I used to bookmark sites to revisit them later, but that just led to a huge and complicated hierarchy of bookmarks! Pinterest is fantastic…but personally I save it for more visual inspiration.

I still see people comment on recipe blog posts that they wish the author had a “print-friendly” version of the recipe.  As a blogger, I tried creating a separate page for each recipe I posted…and that works great for some, but frankly I find it a lot of extra work I just don’t have time for right now.  I found

and it truly has become my friend, helping me save and print ideas for later.  PrintFriendly is great for bloggers and blog readers.  As a reader, you can install a bookmarklet in your browser toolbar.  When you want to print a page or save it for later you just click on the bookmarklet and you have the option to print it…or create a pdf file to save on your computer.

For bloggers, you can use a PrintFriendly button on your site.  You can code your blog to have it in every post…or, like me, you can add the code to just the posts that contain a recipe or step-by-step tutorial.  I generally use Windows LiveWriter to write my posts {another time saver}, and have the code for my PrintFriendly button saved as a text template to easily insert it.

http://cdn.printfriendly.com/printfriendly.js

 The second tool I wanted to share is Read It Later. I use this when I see a blog post or web page that I really want to look into later, but don’t necessarily want to save it to my files or create a permanent bookmark. A bookmarklet and toolbar button make it super easy to save a link to these pages for when you are ready.

Hope you find these hints helpful…I know they have helped me to be more efficient with my blogging time!

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