ScribeFire - A Firefox add-on and a blogger's friend or foe?

Filed under: Design, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Blogging, Productivity, Mozilla, Social Software

ScribeFire - A Firefox add-on and a blogger's friend or foe?

by Dolores Parker Apr 24th 2007

ScribeFire, (also known as Performancing in Download Squad's previous coverage) is a Firefox add-on which boosts the convenience factor of posting to your blog(s). It allows you to post right from the Firefox browser and bypass your native blog's access management. You can download it from the Firefox Add-ons website. It works with Blogger, Wordpress, Drupal, TypePad, LiveJournal, and Windows Live Spaces. The software adds a little orange notebook in Firefox's status bar. When you click, it opens a split panel blog editor app, (with rich/source editing tabs) and shows an account wizard launch button.

From the account wizard launch button, you can add the url's of your blogs with their passwords (uh, triple good luck remembering them). ScribeFire will then list your blogs in a side window, where you can select the blog you want to post to.

ScribeFire has a notes feature which allows you to make quick notes to easily refer to later. It also allows you to manage your Del.Icio.Us bookmarks and provides information from Technorati about webpages you visit.

Tip: Do not switch from the Blogs tab to the Notes tab, without first saving your post as a draft under the Publishing Options button. If you do, all your text will be lost, which is not a good thing since you are using ScribeFire as a convenient way to post to your blogs. A convenient SAVE button would be a nice feature.

Hot Tip: To rid yourself of the annoying "powered by ScribeFire" added automatically to your posts, you can turn it off in the Settings tab's Publishing features.

Once you get oriented to using ScribeFire, it does seem like a convenient way to post to your blogs, especially if you have several. What do you think? Is ScribeFire a friend or foe to bloggers?

[via Linux.com]

Tags: blogging, firefox, internet, utilities

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Peter Wood said 3:30PM on 4-24-2007

ScribeFire certainly isn't as handy as Ecto, but is very useful when working on other people's computers or in a work environment. I keep Portable Firefox on my usb drive and add ScribeFire to that. Not only does it give me a great way to blog while I'm at work, but I can save drafts and notes on sites for later use as well. The integrated Technorati tags and Trackback sections (both found by clicking on the "Publishing Options" button) are a huge bonus.

dp said 4:22PM on 4-24-2007

Friend, mostly. It's a bit like Notepad for HTML. I use it for a range of things. The Ctrl+S feature does a nice job of saving my changes to the Notes file. I keep hoping they'll add more features to it, and it's of no help when I want to post to any of the alternative Drupal functions like Page and Forum. Overall I am happy with it. As a Firefox extension, it's better than Live Writer and Diigo for blogging from a given page.

Owen said 9:26PM on 4-24-2007

It's a foe, obviously. It doesn't support true Atom publishing protocol except as blogspot uses, and so it won't connect to any blog application that uses this more modern and well-documented standard.

dingo said 7:10AM on 4-27-2007

Total friend!

Memo Cordova said 12:21PM on 4-30-2007

It does what it does, and it does it well--it's a no-frills extension. Then again, if I could synchronize ScribeFire in my thumb drive, work computer, and home computer to keep updated of everything I write in each...then you'll have a lover, not just a friend :) (Unless I'm missing this feature somehow?)

Mike Power said 1:14PM on 6-06-2007

I've used Ecto and MarsEdit and some others. They all have lots of features but nothing (for me) is as easy and convenient as ScribeFire. I have over 3,500 posts on my site, with a good 2,500 of them posted via ScribeFire. Of course there are things it doesn't do and if you need to do those things - well, you need another app! For my needs it has been convenient, reliable and utterly dependable, and the split-screen layout is a joy.

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