Blogging
Four Helpful Chrome Apps for Bloggers
Do you use Google Chrome as your browser? Once I started using Chrome it quickly become my new favorite. My experience has been that it’s the fastest and most reliable browser that I’ve used so far. I’ve bought a Chromebook too . . . so yeah, I’m using Chrome a lot!
I’ve been looking around the Chrome Web Store a little more lately and exploring what apps are available. Although they call it a “store”, so far every app I’ve investigated and/or downloaded has been free. I started out being rather unadventurous – I downloaded the Weather Channel App and a Solitaire App. Pretty ordinary stuff.
But then I got to wondering . . . Might there be a few apps out there to help me as a blogger? After browsing around, these are the four Chrome apps that I’ve downloaded that may be of interest to other bloggers that like to use Chrome too.
Here’s a brief description of Helpful Chrome Apps for Bloggers
If you use Adsense to monetize your blog, I think you’ll find this little app to be a nice convenience. This app describes itself as a “simple and fast way of checking your Adsense account in Google Chrome”. It puts a little icon in the top corner of your browser that when clicked, gives you a quick little popup box showing the current stats for your Adsense earnings. My favorite feature is that the app icon always has visible with it your current day’s earnings so that anytime you are in Chrome you can see at a glance how your earnings are doing without having to go to your Adsense account page. You can adjust that setting for how often you want it to refresh (I left mine at the default of every 10 minutes).
If you’re a blogger who writes any type of tutorial that can be helped along with a screenshot of a web page, then I think you’ll like this Nimbus Screen Capture app. When you click on the app icon, you get several options to choose from (visible part of page, selected area, etc.) Once you make that selection a new tab will open with your screenshot that also includes editing options. You can add arrows, boxes, and text to your screenshot image as needed. I’m still playing around with this one a bit (I’ve had a couple web pages where it didn’t seem to work). But for the most part, I’m really liking the editing and enhancement options that are immediately available to use after taking the screenshot.
This app is a lot like the Quick Adsense app. It gives you a little icon up in the corner that when clicked gives you a popup box with a quick overview of your Google Analytics. This icon always displays with it the current number of visits to your site for the current day so far (if that is the setting you have selected). Again, the convenience of this app is that it makes it super easy to take a quick peek at your Google Analytics for the day with having to go to your Google Analytics page.
For this app I’ll be honest and admit that usually I don’t focus too much on my blog’s page rank (a number between 1 and 10 . . . 1 being low and 10 being high). However what I liked about this app is that not only does it immediately display a site’s page rank on the icon, you can also click the icon and get a popup box with lots of other stats. I thought this might help me learn more about my own site and how it’s ranked and indexed. It’s also a way to look at other sites, hopefully with the intent to increase knowledge about page ranks and not to compare yourself and feel bad.
So these are my current app additions to Chrome to help me see statistics faster. If you’ve found a helpful Chrome apps I’d love to hear about it too! Feel free to leave me a comment below.
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