Blogging Tools: ScribeFire Review
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010I’m skipping over posting by email because I’ll never use it and I don’t want to take the time to figure it out.
ScribeFire sits down at the bottom right corner of your browser window until you click on it. When you do that it will either slide up, covering the bottom half of whatever page your on; open in a new tab; or open in a new window. The default is sliding up and I must say I enjoy being able to look at two things simultaneously. I can see this being especially useful if I am posting about another website.
If you close out the ScribeFire window, you won’t lose what you were writing. If you close out the window you were writing in, and open ScribeFire in a different window, you won’t lose what you were writing. If you quit FireFox altogether, you still won’t lose what you were writing, but it will come back up with some funky line breaks.
I can’t speak for how this will work in Chrome, because I don’t use Chrome. They do have it for Chrome though.
ScribeFire has some very nice features. You can edit all of your blogs from the same window; just select which one you’re working on at the moment. You can add the post to a category, view and edit other posts from the blog and drafts, tag, timestamp, add Trackback URLs, and a lot more, all from a little side options menu that’s convenient and doesn’t take up too much space.
Plus, from one of the tabs on the left, you can share your blog post with just about every tool there is for sharing websites EXCEPT TWITTER.
Setting up Scribefire to work with your blog is very simple, and, unlike Word, it will tell you what went wrong if something goes wrong. This is how I found out that I hadn’t enabled remote publishing.
The formatting toolbar is simple, but it gives you pretty much everything you need, from §pecial ©haracters to embedding a youtube video.
There are a couple things wrong with ScribeFire and they are real pains in the ass. Namely, the Live Preview option and publishing images.
The Live Preview option posts a temporary post to your blog so that it can get the formatting. I don’t know what this means, and I don’t know what this does, because after about two minutes I gave up on waiting for it to load.
I’m normally very patient, because I’m normally using dial-up. Right now I’m using the school’s internet connection, which is very fast, and it still took forever.
What it took forever with, though, is this:
If you copy-paste an image into your post, be prepared to spend at least five minutes staring at this annoying little box. And you won’t be able to visit any of the other tabs in your window while this is happening. You have to open an entirely new window.
After a full five minutes of waiting, I eventually gave up on posting my blog post from ScribeFire. Even my dial-up connection can upload images faster than this. It isn’t like they’re big files.
So, since I think images are very important to good blogging, I probably won’t be using this for anything more than quick, image-less notes. Which is a pity, because I was growing rather fond of it.
