Tag: Howto

Bob’s Blogging Tips: Instapaper’s Read It Later Bookmarklet

~ Bob Hayton ~ 2 Comments

Over the years, I’ve covered quite a few blogging tips. I’ve been meaning to blog about this one for quite a while.

As you find time throughout your day to surf the web, I’m sure you make the rounds to a few of your favorite blogs (like mine!), or check out your Google Reader. If you are being swept away by Twitter, like I am, you probably find quite a few interesting articles or links shared by your Twitter contacts. Invariably there isn’t time to finish reading everything that seems worth reading. What are you to do?

I’ve found a tool which helps me keep track of what I’m interested in reading. Instapaper has a “read later” bookmarklet. Once you sign up for a free account, you can drag a button to your favorites toolbar. Then when your browser is open to a page you want to read later, you just click the “read later” button and it is saved to your Instapaper account.

When you login to your account, you see a list of all your unread links. You can read them, save them, organize or delete them. I’ve found this quite helpful when I want to blog on something but don’t have time right then and there.

There may be other tools similar to this, but I find this one extremely easy to use. Let me know if anyone else uses this or has some other option which might be as good or better.

Following Comments with Co.mments

~ fundyreformed ~ 7 Comments

From time to time, I like to post blogging tips. Today is one of those times 🙂 .

If you are like me, every once in a while you put your toe into the discussion area beneath a blog post. And yes, at times I jump in with both feet. Now commenting can be fun—and with fundamentalists, sometimes it’s outright scary! Hey I’m a Calvinist so debating shouldn’t scare me, but it can and does zap me of energy and will power, every once in a while.

So if I happen to forget about some discussion I was having, a day or two could go by without me responding to a response to my comment. Or I may have enjoyed reading the discussion and wanted to follow it, but with the hustle and bustle of life, I’ve just simply forgot about it. Or worse, I can’t remember where I said that, or what it was that I was reading.

I’ve been looking for a tool to help with this problem for some time. I know with certain blog types, I can subscribe to the comments of a particular post. but I wanted all my current conversations in one place.

Well recently, I stumbled across Co.mments. And I found my solution!

Co.mments lets you easily track conversations on just about any blog. You can add a button to your browser toolbar, and just click “Track co.mments” when you are on a post you want to track. It doesn’t seem to work with forums as well, but it works great with blogs.

You receive email updates with the comment(s) already in the email. Plus there is an option from within the email to remove the conversation from your tracking page. The only drawback is that you will always get an email with all the comments that were there before you started tracking new comments. Perhaps they’ll fix that ultimately. It’s still a great tool, regardless.

So check it out. Start tracking co.mments today!