For this post, I’m trying out the new, 1.1 version of Performancing’s blogging extension for Firefox. (See the release notes.) I think there’s a lot of potential in a blogging extension, but it’s not really realized in this product.My #1 request is to make it easier to make links to pages — that being my blogging hangup — and I can see a few missed opportunities in that regard. For example, there’s a tab that shows a history of my past 10 posts. I’d like to be able to drag these in to the posting window (or at least right-click and get a “Copy permalink”) to make a link to them. There’s del.icio.us integration, but no clear way to include a link I’ve bookmarked in a blog post. Finally, I’d love a little shelf to collect links and images that I can then put into a post.
I do like its location on the screen, though. It occupies a panel below the web page, so it’s always visible as you write a post, even as you flip through tabs and search for stuff to write about. In that way, I think it may be slightly more useful to me than, say, BlogThis!, even if it is 10x uglier.
So, while I probably won’t use it day to day (or whenever I do blog), I’m certainly keeping my eye on this tool.
Waiting to publish to see its HTML generation… Should be okay, since it appears to use Midas, which is Mozilla’s rich text editor. (At Blogger we have significant code to clean up the output of both Midas and IE’s rich text editor.)
I'm sitting on the fence about this extension, for some of the same reasons you are. I'm a big fan of BlogThis!, and was even before it got it's new look, and I keep trying to figure out what it is about the Performancing extension that would make me want to switch The Way I Do Things. That being said, the Performancing extension does seem to have a nice little user base -- and invariably the people I know who use it have _not_ used BlogThis!(!) So I have to really sit down with it and figure out if it helps me/saves me time when posting. I, too, am curious as to its HTML output, because if it throws out any of the buckets of crap that other things do, well, no thankee!
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, that was a rambling comment akin to "yeah! me too."
The HTML seems okay, though it’s not like I put it through its paces.
ReplyDeleteI can see that the bottom of the window placement has some big advantages, especially on a laptop montior where otherwise I’d be shuffling windows (with BlogThis!) or switching tabs back to a posting interface.
Yeah, we could do a lot more about promoting BlogThis!. Something we might be able to do more about in the future, I believe.