I’ve been using Blummy for quite a few months now, but have never thought about blogging about it until Steve Rubel made the plunge earlier this month. For those who’ve never heard of it, Blummy is literally a bookmarlet on steroids, which allows you to combine multiple bookmarklets (and even create custom ones) into a single Ajax-ified Blummy bookmarklet.

Who’s Blogging on This?

From what I can see, Steve basically uses Blummy to see who’s blogging on a particular post he’s reading, and this helps him to “…become a better blogger because I can more easily see where I can add value to the conversation.” So, this is how his Blummy bookmarklet looks like fully expanded:

He’s combined the search bookmarklets from the key social services, from del.icio.us to Technorati, such that it takes only two clicks to find out who’s blogging on the post he’s reading. One: Click the Blummy bookmarklet. Two: Click the service you want to check. This is part of my Blummy arsenal as well, but is by far the less popular use of Blummy for me.

Image Uploading

This is a screenshot of my Blummy bookmarklet.

See the Flickr It over there. That’s what ~60% of my clicks go to. When you click on that, all the images on the page you’re on become selectable, and any one you select instantly gets uploaded to your Flickr account. Combined with your favourite way of viewing your Flickr photo stream, it becomes a real time-saver - especially for product bloggers that use pictures from other sources in every post.

Subscribe with Bloglines

For some blogs, feed subscription options, i.e. feed chicklets, are notoriously hard to find, and some only provide the standard .xml or /feed link without a way to automatically subscribe to it using your favourite feed reader. Here’s where Blummy can come to the rescue. When I press the “Sub with Bloglines” link on my Blummy bookmarklet (as shown above), I can automatically subscribe to whatever feeds are present on the page. This form of autodiscovery is common for desktop-based feed readers (e.g. FeedDemon), but to my knowledge, not for web-based ones.

And if multiple feeds are present on the page, e.g. asides feed, main feed, etc., you’ll be prompted to choose which feeds you want.

Post Submission to Social Services

I use del.icio.us, and more recently, Diigo, for my social bookmarking and annotation. And from Blummy itself, I can fill in all the fields I need to make a complete submission to del.icio.us. Here’s what I mean:

While there are Firefox extensions available for most social bookmarking services, I already have too many extensions enabled for my own good, so putting it in Blummy helps. But that’s a story for another post.

Tip: Speed Up Your Blummy

I’ve had to handle slow internet connections in the past, so I always try to ensure that everything I use is as optimised as possible. The same can be done with Blummy. You see those favicons on the various sub-bookmarklets within Blummy? You can actually disable them from the Preferences section, and save the loading time involved. This is how my Blummy looks after doing that:

Overall

I’ve found Blummy to be indispensable for me. Of course, it’d be better if I could place the individual bookmarklets on my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar, but there’s only so much space for all the tools bloggers have at their disposal these days (and all their bookmarklets). When customised to your needs, I’m sure you’ll find it a great tool to have as well.

P.S.: If you have been using Blummy, what have you been using it for?

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