A few weeks ago I wrote about ecto, a blog updating tool for Mac and Windows. At the time I was singing ecto’s praises and while I still enjoy using it, I may have just found a tool I can live without even less, ScribeFire.
ScribeFire is a Firefox extension that can update your blog from your PC desktop in the same way ecto can. It has all the basic features, such as spell checking, the ability to assign posts to categories, WYSIWYG formatting of posts and the ability to save drafts (or notes, as it calls them) for later editing, but it has several advantages that I think make it more usable and user friendly than ecto.
First and most importantly, as a FireFox extension ScribeFire is 100% platform independent and runs equally well on my Mac, My Windows Machine and all four of my Linux machines. This alone would have made ScribeFire worth looking into, but would not have kept me looking at it if it was the only thing it had going for it.
Another plus is that since ScribeFire is a Firefox extension, it’s always ready when you are. The activation icon sits happily in the status bar waiting for a click from you, at which point Scribefire will happily launch and let you post on whatever topic you like with the page still visible. If you need to do more research, just click the utton again and ScribeFire falls back to the status bar to wait patiently for you to continue.
Another advantage over ecto is ScribeFire’s ability to edit blog pages as well as posts. While this might not be necessary all the time, it’s handy if you just want to quickly update a page that you already have posted.
Just like ecto, ScribeFire will allow you to highlight text inside any webpage and launch a new post with that text quoted in the new post. The advantage of ScribeFire is that the formatting used to do so is customizeable, which leaves you in control of your citations, rather than leaving it completely up to the software.
On the downside, even though ScribeFire will allow you to add tags to your posts, it does not store the tags you already have. this means no auto tag completion and allows for the possibility of mispelling a tag name. In my installation, the post preview function is not working properly and ScribeFire has no facility at all for adding custom fields in WordPress. These are small issues to me, but may have more significance to you.
After only messing with ScribeFire for a few hours, I have to say that I’m impressed. For the moment it’s my new tool of choice for most things, though I’m not quite ready to give up completely on ecto, which is a more mature tool.
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I use scribefire and must admit I wouldn’t be without it, even without the tag thing. I didn’t know it crossed over to Linux though, which is a plus since I just converted an OLD laptop over to that for sitting in the garden (and thus having a toddler drop it, drop things on it).
Nice blog btw. Useful info.
Mina,
If anything, it works more predictably under Linux than under Mac OS. It’s a definite plus to have around, especially if I need to blog something I’m reading at the moment. (which I haven’t been doing lately, but I’ll explain why in a post tomorrow.)
Thanks! I like my little, neglected slice of the web. It keeps me company when I’m lonely.