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 As far as I can tell, there is no way to store unpublished content locally.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!)

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