Blogs: Pandammonia 
The world that revolves around Caity Ross.
Scribefire
After reading Sally in Norfolk talking about Scribefire in her blog and talking about it in real life, I thought I’d give it a bash. I installed it yesterday, and today I’m writing this post using it, instead of getting ready to go shopping. The computer is having a right old chug for some reason known only to itself, so it seems unfair to blame Scribefire being slow and causing Firefox to freeze up.
If you’re wondering what Scribefire is, but you don’t use Firefox or don’t blog using one of the supported services, it will be of no interest to you that Scribefire is a Firefox plug-in designed to enable you to write posts more easily.
I shall be using it to write my next few blog posts, at least, to see if I find it better than the WordPress interface. So far, I don’t like the preview feature. WordPress has a preview button that creates a post of what you’ve written, but doesn’t publish it so you can see exactly what it looks like, whereas Scribefire has a choice of creating a published post, that it deletes afterwards, or a preview that barely differes from the WYSIWYG input, which I’m not using. I’m using the code editor, which I so far prefer, because it allows me to use real XHTML instead of WordPress’s almost real XHTML in the editor.
Another point in Scribefire’s favour is its ease of blogging a webpage. WordPress provides a BlogThis toolbar button, but it often doesn’t work, saying it’s too busy or some such nonsense, which is particularly irritating. In WordPress’s favour, I have a WordPress plug-in that shows me what all my tags are, so I don’t go round mindlessly creating new ones when there’s already a perfectly good one there. It’s easy to get carried away with tags, I think. Using Scribefire I’ll have to remember myself what tags I have and haven’t got, which is a bad thing, and precisely why I installed that particular WordPress plug-in.
So, it’s two all at the moment. It’ll all depend on what my priorities are for blogging, I suppose, which will soon be pointed out to me by this change of interface.
Update (a few minutes later): Scribefire doesn’t allow me to write a custom excerpt, which WordPress itself does. 3-2 to WordPress.
Automagically-generated possibly related posts:
sally at Tuesday 11th August, 2009 @ 8.36pm BST Europe/London
must say i hated it to begin with but never one to give in….
I am now beginning to love it but i have to use it with picasa which took some getting used to aswell.
the hard thing was getting it set up.. what worked for Geoff on his imac did not automatically work here on my laptop.
sally at Tuesday 11th August, 2009 @ 8.37pm BST Europe/London
BTW i must say i dont like the preview feature and now never use it where as i always used it in live writer
Pandammonium at Wednesday 19th August, 2009 @ 9.27am BST Europe/London
I think the score as above stands. The features Scribefire lacks or are not as I’d like are too important to me to use it all the time.
I don’t get why they do the preview the way they do. You specify you’re doing it for WordPress, and they use WordPress for their own blog, so yo’d think they’d know that WP has a way to preview the post and would be able to work with that. Anyway…