CakeBlast

I have been entering contests and giveaways like crazy lately. After winning a few, it is easy to catch “the giveaway bug” and start devoting a lot of extra time entering them.

Most blog giveaways work as follows:

The  giveaway entrant is first required to complete a mandatory entry where s/he must visit the sponsor site and then return to the blog and leave a comment. Afterward, there are usually several other methods of entry such as adding buttons, subscribing, following, or tweeting the contest. Generally, every entry requires a  separate comment.

Writing out a separate comment such as “I added your button to my blog,” and then leaving the blog address only takes a few seconds. But if you enter many giveaways, the time adds up and the repetitiveness of making the same comments over and over and over and ov.. it gets very old.

This is when Texter saves the day!

Texter is a text replacement utility that allows you to define “hotstrings” of text along with an optional “trigger” such as Tab or the Spacebar. No longer is it necessary to type in a comment that I am an email subscriber. I only have to hit the letter “e”, followed by the Tab key. If you learn that you sometimes use a particular string of letters outside of texter (I learned that e + Tab was not a good combo), it is very easy to change your hotstrings by clicking on the texter icon located in your Quick Launch toolbar.

Here are a few of the “hotstrings” I use.

1. b + Tab =  “I have your button on my sidebar..                                                     <a href=”http://cakeblast.com”>Cakeblast.com</a>”

2. t + Tab = “I follow you on twitter and I tweeted..”

3. tech + Tab = “I have you favorited at technorati.
http://technorati.com/faves/CakeBlast?show=blogs”

You may have noticed the html tags in my text. Texter does not convert the html, so you can enter your url into texter and any time you want to leave a link to your blog, just type your hotstring (e.g. url + Tab) and voila!

Best of all Texter is a Free Download!

In case Texter may seem confusing at first, I created the video above to try and help new users of the program. Please excuse the mistakes, I recorded my voice from a cheap computer microphone while Entering a giveaway in real time.