Finally! A convenient blogging tool
February 7th, 2006 | by Digvijay Lamba |Performancing.com | Helping Bloggers Succeed
Let me start with some history. The first time I created a blog was nearly six years ago. Since then I have written a total of about 30 posts on various websites and frankly I must have used 30 different ways of doing it. Somehow, it was always just that little bit cumbersome. I wanted blogging to be at the tip of my fingers… I should be able to jot down the idea as soon as it strikes, include links when I see them and conveniently write and post it.I hate a different tool only for blogging… I already have far too many things open on my desktop. For sometime I used blogger.com’s email a blog option. It’s convenient but the lack of options kills me. I only realized what it is that I really needed when I struck gold with Perfomancing. I used Firefox and along with Thunderbird it has become my one application that does everything. Perfomancing has made that all the more true. It’s a firefox extension that lets you publish your blogs from your browser.
Let’s do a brief overview of what it does. It will patiently sit invisible to you as an extension, till the time you come accross some website/or text/or idea that you want to blog. And then F8 and viola the lower half of the browser becomes a lightweight blogging client with just the right features. It works great with blogger and supports most other popular sites. It’s also integrated somewhat with technocrati. Oh, and if you saw the website/text that you wanted to blog about, the context menu has a convenient “Blog this” option. Simple, convenient and easy to use.
To be fair, the software is still in it’s early stages and has a long way to go. But it’s headed in the right direction and the developers seem to be making the right noise on their website. Their integration has some silly things (If you create a new blog on Blogspot you have to delete the old list and re-import the entire list again). The editor, though mostly fine, sometime goes haywire and I need to edit the post manually if I try something very fancy. They do have a preview option though, to get that fixed quickly. Also, the technocrati integration is ok for most part and nothing more.
But overall, I think my blogging frequency is going to go up up and up with this tool.
So if you use firefox (and you should) then try it out. (It’s easy to install and uninstall with Firefox 1.5).
Till next time
Digvijay
Tags: Great Sites, Reviews, Software
