Darren Beale

I’ve been playing with my Firefox extensions this morning as I recently re-installed windows at home and wanted to make sure that it had all of the essentials that I use at work. So this led me to ‘waste’ 15 mins browsing the Extensions repository and I came up with a real find, Performancing:

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox

• Works with all major blog software
• Easy WYSIWYG Editing
• Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support

Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little
pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the
blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger
blogs.

As the text says I have a blog editor in my browser that I can tap away at whilst surfing using the same window.

It also allows one to drag and drop formatted text or images from the browser window above or there is the fallback option to selct text, right-click and ‘Blog this page’ from the relevant context menu.

Set-up was a doddle I just selected ‘Custom blog’ then ‘Wordpress’ and I then had to specify the URL to the XML-RPC script that comes with Wordpress. As a nice touch it prefilled this with a default URL example for Wordpress which saved me having to look-up what the page was called. Other than that I simply specified my username and password and here I am writing my first entry.

It’s hard to fault quality software like this but a few niggles were:

• There is a, beta admitedly, spellchecker (Yay!) but I couldn’t get it to work, probably my fault;
• The cursor keys didn’t always work in the editor window, up and down would scroll the browser pane above (and the editor window *definitely* had focus);
• There is superbly thought out ‘upload image’ option for inserting images and unfortunately it doesn’t support scp

Here’s a screenshot:

That URL again: http://performancing.com/firefox