Trying Out ScribeFire

July 22nd, 2008

I’ll see if this post will get to my blog. I’m using ScribeFire, which is a Firefox plugin for making blog entries. It has a lot of nice features, but seems a little short on documentation.

It mentioned on the homepage that you can drag and drop formatted text from the web. Nowhere (that I can see) where that is elaborated on. Guess I’ll just try it and see what happens:

Other Features

Additionally ScribeFire allows you to:

Categorize and tag your blog posts
Upload images
Set timestamps
Save works-in-progress as notes
Post an entry as a draft
Share your posts on social websites
Upload files via FTP

Okay, I just dragged-and-dropped the above bulleted list. That could be useful at times.

I could save this as a draft or publish it. I could also save a “note”. I tried clicking the “Save Note” button. Don’t know if it did anything or not. My question at this point is, if you save a note where does it go? And, more important, how do you get it back?

Aha! I found the answer to that question. In the right section of the ScribeFire window, there are a row of tabs at the top. The second tab, “Entries”, will give you a second row of tabs, “Posts”, “Notes”, and “Pages”. These will show you lists of — you guessed it! — posts, notes, and pages.

That right-hand panel is also where you configure the connection to your blog (or blogs — you can have a number of them). On the first shot of setting up my WordPress blog, it returned an error that XML-RPC services were disabled on the blog. To fix that, you need to log in to the blog’s admin area. Click “settings”, then “writing”. About halfway down the page, find a checkbox labeled “XML-RPC”. That needs to be checked.

Now I’ll try publishing this. I’ll edit in a few more comments … assuming it works … later.

(Next day)

Yes, it published. Now I’m wondering what will happen if a re-open the post in ScribeFire (by finding it in the right panel under “Entries” –> “Posts”), add some more text to it, and publishing again. Now I see two options below the text entry area: “Publish as Edit” and “Publish to Online Grandma”. I suppose that pretty well answers that question … I’m publishing this as an edit.

Here’s my next experiment. What if I do some editing right on my blog? By working in the WordPress editing page, my cool Zemanta plugin (another Firefox addition that I talked about previously) gets activated. Using its suggestions I can easily choose links, tags, pictures, and related articles to beef up my post.

OK. Did that. Now re-opening ScribeFire to see what it thinks of this development.

Far out! That didn’t bother ScribeFire a bit! When I open the entry just like I did before, there it is — complete with all the new additions, links, pictures, related articles and all. To see the categories and tags I added, I have to look in the right pane under the “Categories” tab — and all are present and accounted for. Obviously, this is where I would enter them when doing that from ScribeFire.

This has the makings of a very nice system. Here’s one obstacle I ran into, though. Zemanta didn’t find a link for a fairly crucial term to this article — “ScribeFire”. It would have been pretty easy to just put it in there the old-fashioned way. But, since I’m playing with tools, I used another of my standbys — Linkify. (I’ve written about that in this blog as well.)

Linkify is a little script-thingy that you keep in the bookmark toolbar of your browser. So, it won’t work in ScribeFire; you need to go to the editing screen on your blog. From there, you have to get into the HTML view. Then select the words you want for your link, click on the “linkify” bookmarklet, and a sidebar with search results will open. Choose the result you want and click “create link”. (I’ll admit this is a bit of overkill if you already know the URL, but it’s useful if you don’t.)

There’s another aspect of ScribeFire that sounds very intriguing. They have recently added an ad serving program, which is in closed Beta at the moment. I put my name on the waiting list to give it a look-see. When I find out more, I’ll make a post on that. But, I must say, indications are favorable. They have information on their website.

Online Grandma