ScribeFire — Blog Editor for Firefox

Call it serendipity, or just dumb luck. While checking to see if a couple Firefox addons I use were updated to Firefox Beta 3.0b5, I stumbled across ScribeFire. According to the author,

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

ScribeFire is feature-rich: The toolbar ribbon includes "wysiwyg" and source editing, as well as a preview button. The screenshot below shows the other options available.

Note the buttons to allow inserting Flickr images or YouTube videos, as well as standard links and images.

Uploading graphics is a snap — the extension gives you the option to upload via FTP or your blog’s application programming interface (API) (or maybe that means "automatic publishing interface"??).

There are other settings you can adjust to your preference:

This article, of course, was prepared exclusively with ScribeFire, using the "split screen" mode. The top half of my screen is a browser window; the bottom half is the editor. ScribeFire allows you to save documents as notes, pages, articles, or to save as drafts. You can also open up multiple editing tabs.

The Preview function doesn’t provide a true representation of how the article looks in your blog. If you check the "Draft" checkbox, when you upload your document, it is saved as an unpublished draft, which is quite convenient.

One of the biggest pros I see is that ScribeFire is considerably better (in my judgment) than the default WordPress editor (and may well be an improvement over Blogger’s, too). You can see if ScribeFire supports your platform here.

WordPress users, if you’re currently using an editing extension, you might want to compare with ScribeFire. You may find a Firefox extension an easier way to blog.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention I use a commercial WordPress extension for my editing, which continues to be superior to ScribeFire; however, it’s nice to know there’s an excellent and convenient fallback in ScribeFire, in case a future update to WordPress once again renders my editor unusable.