ScribeFire Trial Run
Apr 6th, 07 | 1 remarkAbout this time last year, I installed the Performancing for Firefox extension, thinking I might have just found a great alternative to opening my Wordpress admin panel every time I wanted to write a post (I’m all about convenience).
I never really used it. It seemed buggy and cumbersome. Or maybe I was just too lazy to seriously evaluate it!?
I’m taking a second look now at ScribeFire (formerly Performancing for Firefox). It’s a blog editor which sits quietly in your status bar, one little click away, allowing you to post to your blog without having to open and login to your dashboard. It includes a full set of html formatting tools, and a code view if you prefer that. What I like best is the entire editor only takes up as much screen space as you decide, and hides with another click. You don’t even have to save it (if you don’t change the default settings). Hide/show… it will still be there. It will even remain across sessions if you make use of Firefox’s Session Manager. Good stuff. You can also post your entry as a draft, so if you want to go back later and tweak your content within your normal editor, you can do so.
One very small but significant improvement which could be made, is the ability to add a title to your links when entering them into the pop-up dialog. As it is now, you must switch to code view after adding your link, and hard-code the title in. The interface is a bit clunky, and the Page Tools feature in particular doesn’t seem to be working. It’s supposed to return some basic information on linkage (provided by Technorati), but every page I checked (one of which was Sitepoint) returned a result of
“0 links to this page, and 0 blogs linking to this page in Technorati”.
I find it hard to believe a high profile site like Sitepoint has no links to it’s homepage. Other than than those minor oversights, Scribefire looks like it has the potential to be a very useful tool, and if you’re posting multiple entries a day this plug-in could save you a lot of time.
*Edit: Seems the image uploader doesn’t work properly either. It will try to upload for you using the FTP settings you enter, or by URL, but I still had to go back into my Wordpress admin and add the image so it wouldn’t show up as broken. Also, this extension does not support tagging yet. Bummer.
Sounds like a useful extension. I’m on the Mac and find when I am writing on my blog through the admin panel Firefox really slows down. I am going to give this a go see if it works any better. Thanks
Aug 22, 07 | 10:42 am