One of the great things about blogs is that they’re often a great source of the latest news before it’s officially been announced. Time is therefore of the essence when blogging and one way to significantly speed-up your blogging response time is by adding a blogging widget to your dashboard. Mac users are spoilt for choice in this respect – widgets exists for just about every major blogging platform including Blogger and WordPress. Here are 5 of the best free blogging widgets for Mac OS to help you break the story first:
Blogger Widget
Google only offer 2 widgets for Mac – one for Gmail and the other for their user friendly Blogger blogging platform. This simple widget allows you to write text and publish it directly although annoyingly, it doesn’t allow you to add links or images.
WordPressDash
WordPress fans can use this simple widget to post and publish text although again, no images or linking is possible. You can however select which category you want to post under.
Dashalytics
If you are constantly monitoring the performance of your blog then Dashalytics offers you instant access to Google Analytics stats. Note that you need to have registered for a Google Analytics account first. Each widget can only monitor one site at a time but you can have multiple sites open to monitor multiple widgets.
Bloglines Notifier
If you use bloglines to read your RSS feeds, then Bloglines Notifier is a much quicker way to check the latest feeds. You can’t administer your account from this widget but you can see how many unread posts you have and go directly to them.
Dashcode
Finally, why not create a dashboard widget for your blog so that others can access it from their dashboard? It’s actually not as hard as it sounds with Dashcode which requires only limited coding ability but you’ll also need an image editor such as The Gimp.