Blogging Within Firefox With ScribeFire on Blog24

Blogging Within Firefox With ScribeFire

Posted by Chris
On September 10, 2008
Categories: Blogging, Featured, Software

I must stress that this is a test for the Firefox blogging plugin ScribeFire ~~and therefore some formatting may be unusual~~. I take that back — formatting was perfect!

ScribeFire is a plugin for Firefox which will turn the popular web browser into an editor for bloggers. ScribeFire supports many blogging services including; LiveJournal, Tumblr, Xanga and MySpace. Many blogging platforms such as WordPress, Moveable Type and Drupal, are supported too.

ScribeFire, an extension of Firefox ®, enables users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

scribefire.com

Installing ScribeFire

The process of installing the ScribeFire is as easy as adding any other Firefox plugin. Once installed and you have restarted Firefox you are ready to set up ScribeFire to work with your blog.

Adding your blog’s details is very simple with the ‘Account Wizard’. Just enter the blog’s URL and click continue. You will be asked for your log in details for your blog and after a few seconds you will be ready to write new blog posts within Firefox.

Overview of the Editor

The editor will probably look familiar as it looks fairly standard. There are tabs to change between the standard editing mode and source editing and a third that allows you preview your blog post within your blog’s template. The third option sounds great but I’m not totally convinced that it is actually working, perhaps it will next time ScribeFire is used.

Apart from the standard text formatting buttons there are buttons to add links and images and a useful addition to add images from Flickr which opens a search window. Adding Flickr images is very simple. However, this useful search feature does not seem to be limited to photographs that you are legally allowed to use. Any time I use Flickr I limit my search to those that are covered by the Creative Commons licence using Flickr’s advanced search.

Adding images to a post is otherwise really simple. You can either use the editor button or simply drag an image from the browser window or your computer. Selecting an image by clicking on it then ‘right clicking’ on it brings up a menu from which you can select ‘Element Properties’ shown below.

The same contextual menu can be used to format selected text too.

To the far right of ScribeFire’s editor’s menubar their is a drop down menu, represented by a small triangle. This menu adds further options for formatting your post (justification and an option to add YouTube hosted videos, much in the same manner as the Flickr button.

Post options

To the right of the main editor is a tabbed area where you will find the Categories tab which lists all of the Categories that are set up on your blogs. Check the ones you want to publish your post in and, optionally, add a few tags below. The last tab, entitled ‘Options’ allows you to modify the timestamp, add Technorati tags and TrackBack URLs and has the option to enable Pings too.

The first two tabs entitle ‘Blogs’ and ‘Entries’ are fairly self-explanitory. The former is where you can add, edit and remove your weblogs details. The latter, ‘Entries’, lists all your blog’s posts allowing previous posts to be edited too. Until published your ‘posts’ are stored as ‘notes’, a list of which you will find under the ‘Entries’ tab too.

In fact you could use ScribeFox just for taking notes. Being able to drag text and images to the editor and saving them as notes could prove useful for some.

Publishing your post

Once a post has been completed it is a simple matter of pushing the publish button. A neat feature is the option to publish as a draft (if the blogging host or platform allows it). Also, as I am using WordPress there is also the option to publish the post as a Post or Page. (This will make sense if you use WordPress too.)

Options when publishing

Summary

If you are a blogger then I would highly recommend this plugin for the Firefox — at the very least give it a try. If you like, or need, to take notes while browsing the web then ScribeFire would suit that purpose too.

Using ScribeFire is easy and intuitive with its familiar editor layout. There are features that I have yet to use, but it will give you something to discover when trying for yourself.

A long time ago I tested a couple of blogging plugins for Firefox, I quickly uninstalled them as a I was not impressed. ScribeFire is different, it is a blog writing and note taking plugin that I will use in the future and will remain installed.

If you use ScribeFire or another Firefox pluging that enables blogging share your experiences and thoughts via the comments. Also feel free to recommend other blogging software, a particular favourite of mine has been Ecto for Mac, but having a blogging tool accessable within the browser seems to make sense to me.

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