I’ve been using Peformancing for FireFox, shortly to be rebranded as ScribeFire, for my last few posts on hyprtext, and my initial impressions are pretty good. It certainly fills the gap left when my switch to Ubuntu meant I could no longer use my beloved BlogJet.
It works, as I am sure most people know, as an extension to FireFox, that allows you to create blog posts by either clicking the little icon at the bottom right of the browser window, or by using the right-click context menu’s ‘Blog This’ option, which will insert a link to the current site into the editor, along with any text you have selected. Nice.
The Good
- Setting up blog accounts is very easy, and most settings are automatically detected
- FTP settings are easy to complete, making the posting of images very simple
- All the little extras are there when making your post: technorati tagging, automatically adding a post to your del.icio.us bookmarks, trackbacks, etc
- All the standard formatting is there, and it works very well, unlike quite a few rich text editors I could mention…
- You can save draft posts as ‘notes’ and finish them off later
The Bad
- Deleting notes doesn’t seem to require a clarification. I lost the first draft of this post that way.
- I can’t edit the way some automatic content appears. For example, in my Technorati tags, I’d like the “Technorati Tags: ” bit to appear in bold.
- The way line breaks are handled is a bit different to others – and the HTML view doesn’t insert <p> tags so it’s a bit tricky to know exactly what’s happening there
The Ugly
- I can’t add alternate text to images, or text links. This is very bad for accessibility.
In conclusion, I like PfF/ScribeFire and I’ll be using it as my blog editor from now on. Most of my ‘Bads’ were pretty pernickety, but those alternate text issues need sorting out quickly.
Technorati Tags: performancing for firefox, scribefire, review, blog editor