Last year when I started writing this blog on a daily basis, I wrote a post on JustBlogIt, a tool I have used up until a month ago. For various reasons I replaced it after reading about Performancing.
Which is what this is now being written with. Performancing for Firefox is a WYSIWYG blogging extension (bit a simple click turns on the source code view (my preferred view). So lets start at the beginning, download and install it (a couple of clicks), enter your blog URL, your user name and your password. That’s it, like WordPress it’s a doddle to install. Now that it’s installed, just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the blog editor.
The editor fills up the bottom half of the browser window (you can shrink it down if you need), this allows you to keep using the web, best of all it knows about tabs. You can pull a link into the edit window It’s easy to drag and drop inks and images into the editor, and as icing on the cake it has a notes function, you can create notes that are stored locally and can be searched. (Hmm do I need to keep Google Notes now? We’ll see)
Downsides? A couple but nothing I would call a deal breaker. I keep a lot of drafts running in WordPress and I have had to figure a workaround to get to them and the images thing doesn’t work the way I would like, I still have to figure a workaround for that. Oh the spell checker. That’s a tricky little problem that one. It’s a tad flaky at the moment.
This has rapidly become one of my favourite tools for the blogs.
By the way, Performancing, also have a new web service called Performancing Metrics that provides “professional grade blog statistics” for bloggers.
Amongst it’s other tricks Performancing Metrics can handle multiple blogs and will aggregate data from all of your blogs, generates RSS feeds so you keep an eye on your stats easily (that’s clever that one), and shows AdSense data and search engine traffic. It’s currently in a free, open beta period; no word on whether the service will still be free once it’s out of beta.