Manage Your Hyperlocal Blog with RustyBudget
by Matt on Apr 6, 2010 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS
I’d like to introduce you to a hidden gem of a tool that I think most hyperlocal bloggers could use in some way to make blog management easier. It’s called RustyBudget and I’ll get the disclaimer out of the way up front: My friend and Search Engine Land co-editor, Barry Schwartz, created the tool. (Well, his company did.)
But more importantly, this is the tool that Search Engine Land uses to manage its daily news coverage, and I’ve recently started using it to manage content on my blogs (Hyperlocal Blogger and Small Business Search Marketing, my wife’s main real estate blog, and our four hyperlocal community blogs.
How RustyBudget Works
I think the first thing I’ll do is show you the dashboard for my wife’s and my blogs. It might help if we start with what the final product looks like. (You can click to see a larger version on Flickr.)
As you can see, we have an INBOX which is currently empty, and we have several folders — Cari’s Blog, Hyperlocal Blogger, Kennewick Blog, etc. Each folder contains links that we’ve saved. When I find an interesting link, I send it to the INBOX and then move it to the appropriate folder for future action.
While we have separate folders for each blog, you might have separate folders for each author, or maybe even for each Category on your blog. It’s up to you; you can make whatever folders you want (and choose the colors yourself, too).
How We Got There
Let me show you step-by-step how those stories/links ended up in the folders. It’s pretty simple, actually.
1. Bookmarklet to Save Items
RustyBudget provides a number of bookmarklets that you can drag to your browser’s menu bar. We used the bookmarklet for our INBOX, so whenever we land on a story/link that needs to be saved, I just click the bookmark and send it to our INBOX. You can see I have a bookmarklet for Search Engine Land’s dashboard and one for our dashboard. I could, if I wanted, have a bookmark for each folder, but I’ve chosen to use a main INBOX and then file things later.
The tool also recognizes if a story has already been added. When that happens, you get a message like this:
So, it’s pretty smart that way. And convenient when more than one person is adding stories into the system.
2. Manage the INBOX
Saved items are listed together in our INBOX, like you see above. Each story is listed alphabetically. The “CLR” link in the upper right will delete all the items. The “ADD” link lets me add a URL directly, without using the bookmarklet. When I hover my mouse over any headline, several edit options appear, like this:
3. Editing an Item
In the image above, the “blue pen” icon on the left is the edit button. By clicking that, a new window pops up to let me manage that headline. As you can see below, this is where I send it to a different folder. I can also change the headline, link, assign a due date, and more.
Two images above, did you see the hand/finger icon? If all I’m doing is moving the story to a different folder, I can click there and drag it to whatever folder I want.
And that’s it. After I’ve moved the stories into their correct folders, I have a nice, organized look at what needs to be covered on each blog.
Other Features
There are a few other little details that I like about it — one is the ability to export all the links you’ve saved as CSV, XML, or HTML. So, for example, the next time you see a “Hyperlocal News Roundup” post on this blog, I’ll have saved those links in the Hyperlocal Blogger folder then exported them as HTML for inserting into WordPress.
I’ve skipped over the admin side of things, which is where you create new folders, name them, choose colors, and so forth. Take my word that the management side is easy, too.
What It Costs
RustyBudget is FREE for accounts with one or two authors. After that, it’s $4 per month per author. If you have four authors, your first two are free and then you pay $8/month, for example.
Since it’s free, why not give it a try? You can get started at budget.rustybrick.com. It’s a tool that I think will make your hyperlocal blogging efforts a little easier to manage.
If you try it out, let me know what you think! Or use the comments to ask any questions. If I can’t answer them, I’ll invite Barry to come help.
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8 Responses to “Manage Your Hyperlocal Blog with RustyBudget”
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Matt – Thanks for this information. Barry has done a real nice job with this tool and I am looking forward to it making me more efficient and effective.
Can it get coffee for me as well?
Great stuff.
Frank
A google calendar shop, here, but I’ll give it a look. Thanks for the tip.
Thx Justin. I don’t think RustyBudget is something that would compete with or replace a calendar tool. It’s more about general blog management, than about specific scheduling of stories, resources, upcoming events, etc. They might even be complementary for all I know, but I’m not a calendar user so couldn’t say for sure.
Thanks. I am working on trying this out. I think this is a neat idea. When you create the news round up posts – are you able to just copy and past the links right into your post?
Yep, I just use the Export tool and it creates a nice, little HTML file for me and I cut and paste from that.
Thanks! I think this will be very helpful.
[...] to Matt at HyperlocalBlogger for his post on RustyBudget – which I am now using to track and organize links for future posts like this. What other [...]
Whoa! This looks very helpful and useful…going over to try it now! Thanks for the heads up!