Competition between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome has been intense since the day Google released their official browser. Chrome is the only browser to hit the market and became so much successful in a short span of time. It has outperformed Apple Safari and Opera in speed and surpassed the extensibility of Firefox. Many Firefox users have been flocking away from Firefox since Chrome launched its Extensions. Many bloggers, including me, have done the same because of the effective and multipurpose extension Chrome is supporting. Today we are featuring helpful extensions especially for bloggers, which can make blogging a really fun and pleasing experience.

1. Zemanta

Using Zemanta, you can enhance your blogging experience and make it fun. It expands regular blogging dashboard giving you content suggestion about the text you are writing, images, links, articles and tags in a simple interface located in the sidebar. It supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and other popular publishing platforms. It has a spam-free database of 10,000 news sources and blogs; it will filter the copyright images before suggesting them to you.

Its main information sources are:

• For Links: Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon etc
• For Videos: Youtube
• For Images: Flickr, Getty
• For Articles: BBC, CNN and thousands of blogs.

2. Google Reader Notifier

Feeds are very important part of life for any blogger, if you want to remain updated with the world easily then you should use Feeds feature of any website or blog. Google Reader is a very popular Feed reader. If you use Google Reader and love fast feeds then this extension is for you. It displays the Google Reader unread feeds count on a small icon next to your URL bar. Clicking the icon shows a preview of your reading list in a pop-up. If you want to open Reader in new tab then you can configure it from the options page.

3. Untiny

There are lots of people like me who are always afraid to open a shortened link, scared of any virus attack, but we can overcome this problem by using this extension. You just have to enter the shortened link and press the extract button, original link will be displayed.

4. WiseStamp

Signatures in any email are very important for bloggers for contacting with fellow bloggers because it looks professional. This extension allows you to create multiple signatures which can be selected as used in Gmail. It will add IM and Social Profiles like Facebook, Twitter and more below your sign.

5. DayHiker

DayHiker is a Google Chrome extension for Google Calendar. It displays schedules and tasks in a toolbar from your Google Calendar. It is a small but useful extension to manage your schedule and tasks. It has countdown and reminder badges with alarm clock which will help to manage your time effectively.

6. TPGoogleReader

Installing this extension is much recommended if you are feed geek. Using this extension you can work with feeds with leisure. It will help you in both reading and subscribing the feeds. When a website has a new feed, the icon of this extension will turn green to orange, click it to open a popup menu to see the list of feeds available on that page then click anyone of them to read it in Google Reader. It can show the number to unread items still in your Google Reader account. You can configure its Icon click, double-click and triple click actions from the option menu.

7. Split Screen

Some time your monitor screen become small in front of your work load. This extension allows you to overcome this obstacle and splits the browser in two parts; each one can open a different webpage. You can enjoy browsing two websites at the same time by using this epic extension giving to dual view in your browser.

8. Chrome Chikitizer

Well URL shortening has become very famous since last some years and there are many sites providing this service. This Google Chrome extension named "Chrome Chikitizer" dose the same task effectively and directly from your chrome browser.

9. Shareholic

It is a saying: "Sharing is Caring". So every blogger should share the useful knowledge he/she has or amazingly informative web pages with his/her colleague and friends. The easy ways to do so is to install this extension. It is the easiest way to share interesting web pages using Facebook, Twitter, Email, Gmail, Bookmarks and many more. You can choose from 100+ supported services which can be configured from option menu.

10. Drop.io

Most of you people may be familiar with the drop.io service, which assists you to get images, movies or documents from WebPages. This extension uses drop.io and allows you to create drops as well as scrape all media of all kind off of any website and throw it into drop. For example if you are browsing Google Images and you click Drop All Images, this extension will upload all the images to your drop and access then easily in future. You can customize whether the extension always create a new drop or you can set a single default drop for it to be used always.

11. Google Images Large Images

Tired of using Google Images with a very small preview images? Use "Google Images Large Images" extension to over-come this obstacle while browsing Google Images. It will show the actual image size on mouse over which will help you to determine the original beauty of that specific image.

12. Chromed Bird

Although there are many Twitter extensions for Google Chrome but Chromed Bird is the most powerful I have used till now with many features. Using this extension you can use tweet anytime without visiting twitter.com, you can add/remove timeline tabs, create custom search queries that will be updates automatically, preview image links by hovering them. Many more important features are also present in this extension to make your tweeting experience more fast and interactive.

13. TwitterBar

TwitterBar is a Google Chrome Toolbar which enables you to tweet directly from the current page you are going through. The Page's Title and URL are automatically entered into the textbox, it also use an auto URL-shortener which can be changed as per your requirements from the Options button on the page locating extensions.

14. SEO Status Pagerank/Alexa Toolbar

For regular bloggers it is very important to monitor the SEO status of any blog or website of his/her interest. He/she will know the performance and ranking of the websites of his interest in the eyes of Alexa and Google. The SEO status toolbar is a simple, light-weight and very fast facility of checking Google Pagerank and Alexa Rank for any website or its every page. One other advantage of using this toolbar is that, it will increase the Alexa Rank for the sites you visit just like IE toolbar does.

It don't rely on any third-party website to collect information, it take the data directly from Google and Alexa hence providing accurate and reliable SEO status of any website.

15. AddThis

AddThis is the most popular bookmarking and sharing service around the globe. Using this extension you can share a webpage or an article to more than 200 website which includes Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress etc. You can email the current page to any of your friend or family member using this extension; it also provides Print option which enables you to print the page you are currently viewing and you can also translate pages in different languages.

16. Image Cropper

Image cropper extension allows to crop images from any website. It can crop images in img HTML element, CSS background images for any HTML element and images in PNG format. Important point is, you cannot take screenshot of a webpage or crop it according to your desire, it can crop images present on web pages only.

17. Facebook Notification Checker

Facebook notifications help you to interact with your fellow bloggers and friends with ease. This extension is developed to make it easier for you, once you have a new Facebook notification this extension will tell you via a red notification icon. Support is also added for notifying for new messages and friend requests.

18. Google Dictionary (by Google)

Not everyone can master any language even it is his/her mother language. So there is always a need of a dictionary, and how good that will be if you have a dictionary in the same page which you are reading. Now this is possible if you are using Google Chrome, by installing this extension you can get meaning or definition of any word in a small pop-up bubble just by double clicking it.

This extension also offers a address bar dictionary from which you can view complete definition of any word. It supports many international languages like French, German, Spanish and more. But note that, it is a dictionary not a translator; i.e. if you are trying to find meaning of a Dutch word in English, it wont happen.

19. RemindMe

Every one hate to miss some important task, I presume so that you. So better set reminders about the tasks and chores to be done in future. This Google Chrome Extension allows you to setup reminder while you are browsing. Remind yourself of online work to be done later or remind yourself of the jobs you need to complete on a specific time. You can also sync the reminders between your different computers using Chrome built-in “Synchronize My Bookmarks” function.

20. Ibrii

Ibrii is a very amazing tool to snip every type of content like images, videos, text from any website. One big advantage of this service is that, it provide the facility to share distinct and trenchant elements unlike other service by the use of which, you can only share the whole web page on Twitter or Facebook. Users have the facility to create permalinks which can be later used or shared on instant messaging or on other social networking sites.

21. Chrome Editor

Coding is a very crucial and significant part of a blogger, people find it difficult to switch between the browser and code editor so this extension is made which allows you to code right within the your browser. I can locally save a code reference for later use on your computer. It has some predefined basic codes like HTML 4 DTD, HTML 5 DTD, CSS and jQuery Functions.

22. Digg for Chrome

This official Digg extension makes digging easy and fast. You can Digg directly from your browser, it views Digg count for any URL which is displayed in the right of the browser's address bar. As Digg is one of the largest source to find information of your interest, this extension has a random button that allows you to discover new content from the web.

23. Wordpress Comment Notifier

This extension will check for pending comments on your Wordpress blog and displays it as a badge. You can unapproved, Trash, Reply to or mark as spam without opening a new tab. This extension is very handy for bloggers owing more than 1 blog as it can add multiple blogs.

24. ChromePass

ChromePass is a small password recovery tool that allows you to view the user names and passwords which are stored by Google Chrome browser. It will show Origin URL, Action URL, User name and Passwords as well as their fields and the time at which they were created.

Any thing missing or any suggestion? Feel free to inform us about your thoughts in comments :) .

For sites with multiple writers, it's nice to have a place for them all to interact privately. Though there are solutions like Yammer and Teambox, they require your writers to register and log into another site.  I  can only guess as to how busy some people are! With this post I'll show you how to make your own Private Social network for your writers using BuddyPress.

WordPress 3.0 is required for this guide, as we'll be putting WordPress 3.0's new multi-site feature to good use, along with BuddyPress. For better integration my Past guides on BuddyPress should go down a treat.

Useful Links

• The Beginner's Guide to BuddyPress (Open Source Social Networking)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-1)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-2)

Making the new Section

For the private section, what we'll really be using it another WordPress site. Thanks  to the wonders of Multi-site it will use one database, so users don't need to re-register.  So we'll have an extra section which is technically a separate site…  It's up to you whether to use a sub domain such as social.example.com or a directory: example.com/social. I've went with a directory as for my own setup a sub domain wasn’t needed.

Making it Private

Depending on the content you plan to post in this section you may not want it private, if so  you can skip this part.

By making the site private I mean that visitors need to be logged in, in order to access the site.  Absolute Privacy does a great job at making a site private, redirecting logged out visitors to the log in page, though this can be changed to any page you want.

To be extra sure of your privacy you should edit your robot.txt file to disallow your private section.

Guide to editing your robot.txt

Editing your theme file

Again what you do here depends whether you'd like the private section to match your main site, or whether to have it looking totally different.

For this section firstly refer to my two past guides

• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-1)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-2

Going that bit further

Once you get this far, you should have BuddyPress setup working, privately or not, with its design built to suit your needs/tastes. You could finish up now, though if you want to add a bit more class to this read on!

To make it that bit easier for your members to access this section we can put a link on the main site linking to the private section. Though instead of letting anyone who visits the main site see the link, it'll only be visible to logged in members.

 <?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {     echo '<a href="#" class="private">Private</a>'; } ?> 

You could change this so that when someone not logged in visits the site they see a "Write for us" link. Or even a nice welcome!

 <?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {     echo '<a href="#" class="private">Private</a>'; } else {     echo '<a href="#" class="write-us">Write for us?</a>'; }; ?> 

Changing the look of the login page

Though the default WordPress login looks fine, and works great. Though it would be nice to remove the WordPress branding from it, and make it look like its part of the site too.

WPFuss have a great code snippet for changing this logo, all you have to do is add the code to the functions.php of your theme

Customize The WordPress Login Screen Logo Without a Plugin

Don’t want members? Have writers instead

Instead of calling your writers "members" on the site, we can call them anything you wish. For instance if you wanted to called writers, as they are writers!

Add the following to your wp-config.php or bp-custom-php

define( ‘BP_MEMBERS_SLUG’, writers );

or if you're a business:

define( ‘BP_MEMBERS_SLUG’, employee );

to change it to Employee.

Note: The above code only changes the slug, which is the URL i.e example.com/members to example.com/writers.

Some other alternatives.

  define( 'BP_ACTIVATION_SLUG', 'activate' );  define( 'BP_ACTIVITY_SLUG', 'activity' );  define( 'BP_BLOGS_SLUG', 'blogs' );  define( 'BP_FORUMS_SLUG', 'forums' );  define( 'BP_FRIENDS_SLUG', colleagues );  define( 'BP_GROUPS_SLUG', 'groups' );  define( 'BP_MESSAGES_SLUG', 'messages' );  define( 'BP_REGISTER_SLUG', 'register' );  define( 'BP_SEARCH_SLUG', 'search' );  define( 'BP_SETTINGS_SLUG', 'settings' );  define( 'BP_XPROFILE_SLUG', 'profile' ); 

To change these component names everywhere on the site, the recommended way is to use the .po file. Though they are usually used for translating WordPress to another language we can easily use them to change the names.

You can find this file, buddypress.pot   in /buddypress/bp-languages/

You'll need to rename it to buddypress.po in other words: remove the "t" at the end.

File Sharing

With a simple to install plugin you can have let  your team share files or documents easily. It would be a simple alternative to the likes of drop box, your team can add the file right in the discussion!

Forum Attachments for BuddyPress allows members to upload file attach files to their posts in the forum. Simple yet effective.

Announcements

As you’re using WordPress for all this collaboration why not use the blogging features of WordPress too?  You could use the blog posts to replace memo’s or emails. It’s much easier to talk as a group on a blog post than in an email!

Conclusion

Once you have this setup, you and your team, no matter what you do, now have a private place to collaborate together.  You can turn off what you don’t think is needed, say for instance the activity feed, or profiles may not be helpful for everyone. They may even prove to be a distraction for their work!

Alot of you may find you only need 1 group for your private area, be sure to turn off Group Creation in the BuddyPress settings. Though to keep things organized, a group for different topics could be very helpful. For example here on 1stWebDesigner, we could have a group for each of the main categories,