Behind the scenes:

Back end tools to help speed up and streamline your blogging.

Blogging from Firefox with Scribefire

• ScribeFire is an add-on for Firefox that lets you seamlessly blog from any page you happen to be on.
• Easily drag and drop images from a web page into ScribeFire to republish; saves time switching to an external image editor and FTP client
• Here's how to get started with Scribefire.

Blogging desktop client: Ecto

• Ecto is a full-featured blogging desktop client for Mac and Windows. It makes posting to multiple blogs incredibly easy, among other great functions.
• compatible with Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Drupal and more
• great way to compose blog posts while offline for easy upload later
• ecto also integrates with NetNewsWire so you can easily create a draft post from an item in your newsreader
• here's the Ecto documentation.

Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-html conversion tool that works similarly to TextExpander and Texter (and can be used in conjunction with these tools). It allows you to write more naturally and later convert your text to properly-formatted HTML.

• You can use Markdown as a script within BBEdit or Textwrangler (Mac) to easily convert text to HTML; Markdown filters are also available in the compose window of Wordpress and Movable Type.
• There's also a way to use Markdown for Windows users.
• More about Markdown.
• Markdown syntax.

Type your posts faster with shortcuts

• TextExpander and Texter - easy text expansion for common blogging markup, like href's and blockquotes (Self-promotion alert: we developed Texter in-house at Lifehacker)
• AutoCopy for Firefox (never Ctrl+C again!)
• CoLT Firefox extension (copy entire formatted links with text AND HTML)

Browser-based image tools

• Resizr -- lets you quickly resize and rotate JPG images from a file or a URL
• Picnik -- much more full-featured web-based photo editor. Can resize and rotate, crop, add effects, and more.

Skitch

• Super easy application for quickly manipulating screenshots and found images an publishing them elsewhere without resorting to using multiple applications
• Skitch is Mac only and only available in closed beta for the time being
• Made by the same folks who made Comic Life which we'll talk about in the next section

Multiple clipboard tools

• These applications allow you to store multiple clippings at once, saving loads of time switching back and forth between applications when cutting and pasting
• On the Mac I recommend CopyPaste-X. The full version is only $30 and a free lite version is also available that is fairly robust in its own right.
• On Windows there are a number of options -- ClipCache Pro, ClipMate Clipboard Extender and AccelClip are three well-reviewed options to try.

Automate repetitive work as much as possible

• Templatize your posts and make generating them easy, like Lifehacker's link roundup posts get created by our "roundup maker" (here's one for use in conjunction with CoLT, here's a screengrab of the roundup maker in use)
• Automated droplets perform repetitive actions: like Transmit auto FTP or ImageReady image processing (resize, crop and sharpen droplets.)

Get Your FTP On

• SmartFTP for Windows (free) / Transmit for Mac ($30)
• FireFTP in-Firefox client

further topics:

• images that don't suck anyone's bandwidth
• blogging with Flock
• multiple blog pinging service tools: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/09/one-click-multiple-blog-services-pinging (pingomatic etc.)
• Wordpress plug-in to add tagging to your blog (jerome's keywords)
• firefox search plug-ins: dictionary search, etc.
• post page bookmarklet -- highlight text and start a blog post
• blog from phone via Flickr
• google notebook
• Collaborating with guest bloggers using Google Docs, Zoho or Approver?