11 January 2009

Using ScribeFire: An Official Unofficial Review

1908.(I don't know where the 7 missing posts are, and am uninclined to look for them now) For the last month or so, in my endless quest for a more blogger-friendly way of making my posts happen, I have been using ScribeFire, which is a plugin for Firefox.

I must say, I'm most pleased with it so far, and am continuing.

Originally, like many Blogspot bloggers, I used the Blogger interface and it was acceptable. But one day, before I was redirecting my RSS feed to Feedburner, I happened upon Adobe Contribute CS3, which for a long time hit it out of the park ... not only does it allow you to compose and save entries offline for polishing when necessary (all my discourses happen perfectly alla prima, so that's not a worry with me so much) but has a grand WYSIWYG interface. What more could you want?

I had to reluctantly give up on Contribute though. Once you redirect your RSS feed, Contribute won't edit entries any more. And when you do un-redirect, it changes the post time to something strange and random.

After that it was Qumana, and I was satisfied with that for quite some time, though version 3.0.0 still doesn't work in OS X 10.4.11. I queried the developer and they spotted me a beta of the next incremental version, which was nifty, but it didn't implement Blogger categories, and since I'm lazy, a lot of entries went unfiled thereon. Further queries to the Qumana help have gone unanswered.

Knowing there were plugins available for Firefox, I finally gave in to the urge to find them and try them. ScribeFire seemed the most highly reccommended, and I tried it at first. At the beginning of the learning curve, I wasn't that impressed, but as I've used it and learned its ways and means, I've become very impressed indeed.

The one thing that has caused me to love SF is my own Holy grail: it allows me to manage Blogger categories and Technorati tags from it with an intutitive interface. Now no post I make should go untagged or unfiled, unless I'm having a really, really, really lazy day.

I can also now, finally, upload illustrations through the plug in. No longer do I have to upload to Photobucket and link (unless I want you to see it bigly). I love anything that saves me a step (new users will note that if you're not FTP-hosting your blog, you'll be using the "API" button on the upload dialog sheet, as it uses the Blogger API to embed the illo).

Text styling is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, although you have to do this with a mouse click (if there's a way to force the keyboard to be recognized for this, I've not yet found it). It's all in a very word-processory interface, so you already at least know how to use that part (scaling up/down the text is found in an unexpected place, but that's a minor flaw, if one considers it a flaw). Any entry in process can be saved as a note. It also has advertising and monetizing features, if that's where your proclivities lie.

In all, I'd recommend any frequent blogger who uses Firefox to at least give it a try. After you get into the plug in you'll see how it can make your blogging a bit more efficient and powerful, which I think is what we all want.

Either look it up in the plug-in finder via Firefox's interface, or go to http://scribefire.com.

Either way, I think you'll be happy. I'll be using this for a while.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

No comments: