So I decided to test out the Firefox extension ScribeFire which you can find in the Add-Ons section of the Mozilla.com website. Due to the obvious lack of posting thus far on my Blog here at johnnyPeck.com I have taken to finding a faster, integrated tool to do my blogging as I feel it will fit my schedule a bit easier than directing any particular amount of time to posting a blog which just does not work for me.

This post is essentially a test run with ScribeFire to see just how well it would perform if it graduates to become one of my ‘common tools.’ I used the included wizard to set up the connection to my blog. You can find the wizard by selecting the ‘Add’ button near the bottom of the right hand side sidebar under the ‘Blogs’ tab. My blog is a Wordpress blog hosted on my own servers with my own domain. Setting up your connection may be more (or less!) complicated depending on your circumstances. Using the wizard, I was connected to my blog in less than 20 seconds. Thus far, I am pleased.

The interface is generally your run of the mill RTE (Rich Text Editor) with the addition of a sidebar to the right which shows various information available to ScribeFire from your blog. It implements a tabbed interface in the sidebar to show/edit/delete your posts, tags, pages, and so called ‘notes.’ I have yet to investigate whether I can use the sidebar for managing other aspects of my blog.

Whilst writing this post I was hesitant to select any of the content available under the posts tag for fear of losing what I had already typed. I copied my current content (Ctrl+C/right-click -> copy on WinXP) so as not to lose it and selected one of the available posts. As expected, ScribeFire showed the content from that post in the RTE though I saw no immediately obvious method to return to the current post I was creating aside from the Notes tab.

Within the Notes tab I did not find the current post (this post) I had been creating. This was somewhat disappointing. The only thing I found was two example notes which barely cleared up the issue. Regardless, there is a button near the bottom left of the RTE called ‘Save as Note’ which allows you to save your current work to a note. I suppose the usability benefits of such a workflow will reveal themselves more so soon enough but from a new users’ perspective this proved slightly confusing.

Well, I have to get back to writing code for a while so I will get back to this later.

Aloha.