WordPress Gem

One frustrating experience when blogging is when you’ve written so much and hit the save button – only to find out you’re not connected to the net anymore. Worst, if it occurs on the post phase – you could lose everything you’ve just typed. The work around is to save often – but sometimes, when the connection is slow it can be very frustrating.

I found this gem – an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox browser (it may just work also on a SeaMonkey Browser but definitely not on an IE). It’s called ScribeFire – it allows you to blog offline and save it as notes locally on your browser. When you’re ready to publish – hit a button and it sends it to your blog.

Since you are editing offline – saving it as a note is almost instantaneous.

The setup is very simple – search for it by name in the Firefox addon site, install it and you will see a small notepad icon at the lower-left panel. You setup the connection to your blog using a wizard. There are 2 example notes to get you started. It also pulls out your last 10 posts/pages if you want to edit them.

I’m still evaluating it – but so far it’s a good alternative to blogging online. It has the usual icons of a WYSWIG editor and also pulls out your category list. It is not a perfect WordPress editor replacement, for example – you can not use it to edit old posts unless it is in the last 10 post you made. As for my use, it also lacks the WPG2 and XSIF extensions which is not a problem because I could always edit it after using the WP editor.

Watch out too because the spell checker does not work. It seem to be a problem with non-U.S. Firefox. I’m using the British version as it is closer to an Australian setting.