WebProNews

The Firefox browser is an amazing product in its own right that's packed with great features like tabbed browsing, but it's even more powerful when you install optional extensions. Here are three that are well worth the install for both busy blog readers and writers...

Most avid blog readers and writers fill out online forms - lots of them. This is especially true for avid commenters. But when you're writing in such a public forum and your name is attached to it, spelling counts...a lot! That's why I use SpellBound. It adds a customizable spell check function to Firefox. I run it everytime I am filling out an online form.

If you haven't discovered Bloglines, make it a point to do so. Bloglines is a powerful Web-based RSS news reader/aggregator. It's one of my favorite online tools. One of the site's great features is that it can alert you whenever one or more of your favorite blogs has been updated. The Bloglines Toolkit puts these alerts right in your Firefox status bar. It also enables you to check to see who's blogging about any Web page you're visiting. This feature alone comes in handy again and again. It lets me know if I am blogging about something before anyone else has!

Last but not least is ScrapBook. This incredible extension lets you save all or even just a tiny part of a Web page to your hard drive for offline viewing/searching...with all of the formatting intact.

I use this to cache all of my Bloglines feeds to my hard drive for offline-viewing when I am traveling and away from a live connection.

These three are just a sampling. Other productivity enhancers that are worthy of a look are the Google PageRank Status and SearchKeys.

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.