High Performance Firefox
At last, a post about Firefox extensions. I don’t know about you, but some selected FF extensions have become a necessary part of my everyday internet life : I just can’t live without them. And for today, the last day of 2005, I’ve decided to post a short review of a brand new (well, almost) Firefox extension, the almighty Performancing.
Performancing is a double-sided coin : either you love it, or you hate it. Nevertheless, I don’t fall into neither of these sides. The main purpose of this extension is to help you blog easily and effectively by just using Firefox, bypassing altogether your selected blog software.
When installed, it shows a notepad icon on the bottom right side of your window, and by pressing on it, the main window of the extension appears, conveniently placed on top of the page you were viewing, as a layer.
By using Performancing you can blog directly to all major sites offering blogging host (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Livejournal, MSN Spaces) or you can specify a custom blog, if you happen to host your blog in your personal site. After creating an account and setting all the options you need, you can write and edit your text in a WYSIWYG editor, just like Microsoft Word. For hardcore (sic) bloggers, you can also view source, while there is also a “Live view” button.
Performancing also offers many useful functions, as multiple blogs support, full categories listing, post history and also a notes feature that is quite useful. It also offers the chance to conveniently add Technorati tags to your posts, use CSS or HTML for styling, inline ‘Blog This’ option to Firefox context menu, and many more.
That’s where the objective stuff stops. Stating subjective and personal opinions now :
Five Things I Loved About It :
- On-the-fly blogging is cool : no more Ctrl-T, search for Wordpress write post bookmark, click, write, click again.
- Easy to use editor : very intuitive and convenient, at least for people that weren’t abducted by aliens since the first beta of Microsoft Word was published.
- I love the fact that the window is layered on top of browser, it makes blogging process a really fast one. No more switching tags as crazy.
- Multiple accounts and ability to post to your custom blog and all the well known blogging services? Bliss!
- Technorati support is always a plus for me.
Five Things I’m Skeptical About :
- It generates somehow messy code. When I tried to edit a page written by Performancing with the default Wordpress editor, all hell broke loose.
I didn’t search for it very much, but it doesn’t seem to support post editing. And I always edit my posts.Wrong, it does support post editing, my bad.- In “History” tab, it only shows the latest 10 posts, why?
- Did I mention messy code generation?
- Somehow tacky icon and interface. (OK, that was the only other thing I could think of, my design self is overreacting there)
I’m sure you’d love to check it out, you know the process : download it here, tell firefox to trust those hard-working guys, and give it a try.
Then tell me if you liked it or not! And correct me if I’m wrong at my above assumptions.
