I recently started using ScribeFire as my blogging client. Here are some initial thoughts on it.
- ScribeFire is not an offline editor. As far as I can tell, there is no way to store unpublished content locally. In terms of usefulness, this probably goes both ways. It's a pain when you aren't online. (No more edits on the airplane!) On the flip side, offline editors are a pain if you use multiple computers.
- ScribeFire is cross-platform. Scribefire works inside Firefox. At first, this is the most disconcerting thing imaginable. By default, the ScribeFire window takes up the bottom half of the Firefox application window. I found this completely unworkable as having half a web page above my application was just too distracting. Luckily, there is a drag bar that allows you to make the ScribeFire app as a big as necessary. In my case, ScribeFire fills up the entire window. If I need to look at a web page, I'll do that in another tab (or, heck, a whole new window, if necessary).
- Publish as draft by default. This is the first setting I had to change. By default, ScribeFire wants to publish everything like a normal post. My workflow makes that annoying, if not just plain embarrassing. I save so frequently, that you could almost watch my writing in real-time if you reloaded the page fast enough. Obviously, I need to save as a draft and only publish when actually finished. One of the settings is to save as a draft by default. Life saver.
- Does Firefox need more bloat? Well, no. But, let's face it, Firefox is going to go nuts on your memory anyway.
It will be a while before I'm completely sure that ScribeFire is the client for me. My first thought was that the lack of offline editing was going to be a major problem. What I've discovered is that I really don't do that much work offline, and when necessary, any editor will do. (Go Vim!)
Nice template...
Just wanted to point out that hitting F8 will toggle the ScribeFire window in Firefox.
Happy blogging...
Terry Ng's Akon is great. Nice and clean.