Blogging from Firefox

Thanks to a fellow WordPress blogger, I was able to discover this cool add-on of Firefox, by which I can read my previous blog entries and post an entry without going to the admin page. I’m talking about “performancing firefox”.

I have written this entry right on the performancing firefox add-on. (See image above.) But I had to edit this entry on WordPress editor to publish the image in thumbnail format, which is lacking in the add-on.

Performancing firefox’s advantage is that you may blog about a site you’re on without leaving it (say you’d like to blog about a news story right in front of you). Loading faster than your blog service, the tool takes up half the browser’s window space, so that you may still see the page you’re blogging about. The frame may be adjusted, though, by dragging the resize button above the frame.

Once installed (and Firefox is restarted), a performancing firefox icon (a notepad and a pencil) sits right at the bottom left of the browser’s window. Clicking on it will pop up the editor. I registered my WordPress blog, which was fast and successful. I also did for my LiveJournal and Blogger accounts, which were also successful. Only that I learned that support for LJ is experimental and labels I use in Blogger were not retrieved. Tsk, tsk. Thank God I’ve stuck to WordPress.

At the right pane of the editor are four tabs: Blogs (in case you’ve got more than one blog), Categories (for tags you use for a selected blog), History (recent posts, from which you may select one for editing and even deletion), and Notes (for important text you may need for writing posts later).

As for publishing, the options you’ve got are: Post as Draft; Technorati tags; bookmark post at del.icio.us; trackback urls; and enable pings. I don’t know whether these options vary depending on the blog service selected. So, what I miss in the options is posting a private entry.

Oops! I tried to save this entry as a draft. Then when I checked back the History tab, there were two entries with a similar title: Blogging from Firefox. The first entry is the draft one and the other is the previous entry I published. I was expecting that there would only be one entry with the previous entry retracted from being publishing. I found out that I should have instead clicked on the “Publish as Edit” button.

It’s only dangerous to delete a post in performancing firefox. I tried to delete a duplicate entry. It was successful, but the dangerous thing is that I was not asked to confirm the deletion.

Anyway, blog services automatically supported are TypePad.com, LiveJournal.com, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing, and Jeeran. In terms of blog system types, the following are supported: WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Textpattern, Roller, MetaWeblog API, and Blogger. Quite a lot, but so sad that Multiply.com is not listed. I tried to register my multiply.com account to no avail.

There are tools you may use with performancing firefox. What I like most is the “Bookmarks” tool. I can drag the web site address to the url field, assign tags to the bookmark, and send it to my del.icio.us account right away.

I also signed up for an account with Performancing as an organization of professional bloggers. But that’s another story. I’ll blog about it later.

My overall evaluation of performancing firefox is that it is a very indispensable tool for easy blogging, which should appeal most for WordPress bloggers.

powered by performancing firefox