How to Become a Better Blogger with Blummy

Blummy is one of those gems that few people know about but it is absolutely indispensable if you customize it to your needs. I wrote about it awhile back but it's worth a deeper look.

Regulars here know I have a crush on bookmarklets. These are basically bookmarks that streamline regular tasks. For example, Sphere and Technorati have bookmarklets that will show you who's linking to the page you're on. There are tons of bookmarklets out there. After awhile they pile up and become cumbersome to dig through. That's where Blummy comes in.

Blummy lets you create über bookmarklet that with one click brings up all of your favorite bookmarklets at once. It's very slick. You can basically ditch all of your bookmarklets for just one from Blummy. Even better, you can share your creation with the community and also add your own bookmarklets using a wizard. Here is a screenshot from the configuration page.

Now, let's put Blummy to work. Once registered you can cull through all of the options and drag and drop the bookmarklets you find handy and skip the rest. If you dig through the preferences you can find all kinds of great customization options. I have added several bookmarklets to my personal blummy: citation lookup tools from Technorati, Google Blog Search, Wikipedia, Flickr and del.icio.us, plus a site tool from Alexa. Once you're finished customizing all you need to do is drag the Blummy bookmarklet to your favorites toolbar and you're ready to go. Now let's see it in action.

This morning I read on TechCrunch that meebo launched a new tool that you can use to embed chat capability in any Web page. Being the curious dude that I am, I click my Blummy bookmarklet to see who's blogging about this post. This brings up my handy little friend. Now I am one click away from searching all of the major services to see who is blogging about this post. This helps me become a better blogger because I can more easily see where I can add value to the conversation. (Note the top part of the screen grab.)

Even if you're not a blogger, Blummy is an essential tool in your arsenal. Spend some time customizing it and put it to use. You won't be sorry.

Tags: blummy, bookmarklets